For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book.
A take from one historian on the Luddite movement:
If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new
Can’t help but think of AI.
I don’t worry about AI becoming AGI and subjugating humanity.
I worry that it’s put to use consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a few at the expense of many.
The Luddites smashed things:
to destroy, specifically, ‘machinery hurtful to commonality’ — machinery that tore at the social fabric, unduly benefitting a singly party at the expense of the rest of the community.
Those who deploy automation can use it to erode the leverage and earning power of others, to capture for themselves the former earnings of a worker.
It’s no wonder CEOs are all about their employees using AI: it gives them the leverage.
Respect for the natural rights of humans has been displaced in favor of the unnatural rights of property.
Richard Arkwright was an entrepreneur in England.
His “innovation” wasn’t the technology for spinning yarn he invented (“pieced together from the inventions of others” would be a better wording), but rather the system of modern factory work he created for putting his machines to work.
Arkwright’s “main difficulty”, according to early business theorist Andrew Ure, did not “lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in […] training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.” This was his legacy […] for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation.
Not much has changed (which is kind of the point of the book).
The model for success is:
- Look at the technologies of the day
- Recognize what works and could turn a profit
- Steal the ideas and put them into action with unmatched aggression and shamelessness
As the author says:
[Impose discipline and rigidity on workers, and adapt] them to the rhythms of the machine and the dictates of capital — not the other way around.