21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job security and working conditions, rather than being opposed to progress or technology itself.

"The 21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job loss and replacement by automation, as well as uncertainty about the future of work, highlighting the need to understand the historical context of technological change and its impact on professions."

21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job security, loss of traditional skills, and issues of power and control, as well as the potential for exploitation by those in control of the technology.

21st century Luddites resist new technology due to concerns over job loss and the potential creation of a class of unskilled, unemployed individuals.

21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job loss and disruption, as automation may not always create new jobs and the majority of new jobs are not in high-tech areas.

Andrew Luck prefers flip phones over smartphones, implying he may be opposed to the complexity or distractions of smartphones.

Andrew Luck prefers a flip phone due to its comfort and his desire to not be connected 24/7, highlighting the importance of setting boundaries with technology.

Resistance to new technologies can be attributed to concerns about job security, lack of understanding about the benefits of new technologies, and inertia in adapting to change, as seen in the historical context of the Luddite movement.

A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the perceived threat to their jobs and livelihoods, rather than a fundamental opposition to progress or technology itself.

"A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the fear of job loss and replacement by automation, as technological change has historically led to the disappearance of certain professions and the creation of new ones."

Luddite opposition to new technology stems from the fear of job displacement and the potential negative impact on their livelihood, as technological advancements may lead to the displacement of human labor.

A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the fear of job loss and disruption of traditional ways of life, as seen in the historical context of the invention of the mechanical loom, which increased labor productivity but also led to job losses.

Luddite opposition to new technology is often driven by concerns about job security, autonomy, and the potential for exploitation by those in power.

"People who may be opposed to new technologies in the 21st century could be those who prioritize environmental integrity, social justice, and human rights, as well as those who are concerned about job security."

A common reason for opposing new technology is the recognition that it may be used against workers, threatening their jobs or working conditions.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear that it will replace human workers or transfer wealth from workers to employers, as was the case during the Industrial Revolution.

The opposition to new technology in the 21st century, akin to the Luddites of the past, stems from concerns about job security and the impact of automation on employment.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job replacement due to automation, a concern that has been present since ancient times and continues to be relevant today.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job loss and the difficulty of adapting to a new way of life, as workers may struggle to acquire new skills and adjust to significant changes in the workforce.

The Luddite revolt was primarily a labor struggle focused on job security and workers' rights, rather than opposition to technological progress.

The Luddite revolt was a labor movement fighting for workers' rights and against poverty, rather than opposing technology and progress. This historical context can inform our understanding of modern-day resistance to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a workers' struggle against the introduction of new machines that threatened their jobs and transferred wealth from workers to employers. This historical context can help us understand why someone in the 21st century might be opposed to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a historical movement that fought against technological change and job displacement, and this context can be used to understand modern-day resistance to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a resistance movement against the replacement of human labor with machines during the First Industrial Revolution, driven by fears of job loss and disruption to traditional ways of working.

"Famous figures like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have been labeled as Luddites for warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, indicating that concerns about AI's impact on society and human well-being are a key reason for resistance to new technologies in the 21st century."

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working because they believe it will negatively impact their jobs or working conditions, similar to the historical Luddites who opposed certain technologies that threatened their livelihood.

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working in the 21st century due to concerns about job security, disruption of their industry, or unease about the impact of technology on society, similar to the historical Luddites' fears about automation displacing human workers.

"Some individuals may oppose new technologies or ways of working due to concerns about job security and the potential disruption to their profession, as automation and cybernization replace certain tasks and jobs."

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working due to concerns about job loss, lack of communication from management, and the perception of being expendable. This resistance can be seen in the historical context of the Luddite movement, where workers destroyed machinery in response to the replacement of manual labor with machines.

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working due to fear of job loss, inability to compete with new methods, and negative perceptions of change, as seen in the historical Luddite movement and still relevant in the 21st century.

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in the Western world, particularly in America, due to increasing uncertainty and instability caused by various global events and trends.

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in Europe and beyond, driven by the political right's opposition to climate change policies.

The United States is experiencing a decline in confidence in the future, with a shift away from a culture of progress, which could be related to resistance to new technologies.

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in many Western countries, where the political center has lost its dominant position, which may be related to a decline in optimism about progress.

"Some individuals may be resistant to new technologies due to concerns about their negative impact on the environment, the working class, and the concentration of wealth and control, as well as the failure of new technologies to deliver on their promised benefits."

"People may be resistant to new technologies due to anxiety about the impact on society, uncertainty about the benefits, and difficulty adapting to changes. This resistance is a natural response to the uncertainty and disruption caused by technological change."

"Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of generative artificial intelligence, a modern technology."

"Some people in the 21st century may be labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of modern technologies such as automation, cybernization, unmanned vehicles, chatbots, and neural networks, due to concerns about job loss or replacement."

Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) due to concerns about its potential dangers, and this includes prominent figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.

Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of modern technology, particularly AI, due to its potential impact on jobs and society.

"Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which has advanced rapidly in the 21st century and is resulting in a new wave of industrial revolution."

The underlying concerns driving opposition to new technologies may be related to job security, labor rights, and the impact of technological change on workers, rather than a inherent resistance to progress or technology itself.

The opposition to new technologies may be driven by concerns about the potential negative impact on workers' rights, job security, and working conditions, rather than a general resistance to technological progress.

The opposition to new technologies can be driven by concerns about job loss and the perception that technology threatens one's livelihood, as seen in the historical example of the Luddites.

People may be opposed to new technologies due to concerns about job security and the potential for unemployment, as automation and artificial intelligence replace human workers.

"People may be opposed to new technologies due to concerns about job security, the potential for automation to replace human labor, and a desire to maintain traditional ways of working, as seen in the historical context of the Luddites and the modern-day concerns about automation threatening professions."

21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job security and working conditions, rather than being opposed to progress or technology itself.

Title:

Content: Brian Merchant, author: “Luddites are more dangerous to the rich than Robin Hood”

The Luddites have been a great historical resource. Any showy enemy of anything that looked like technological progress has been called a Luddite. Today with generative artificial intelligence and its critics, the word has been revived. The author and journalist Brian Merchant (Iowa City, USA, 1983) saw it coming and has written a book that reviews the Luddite revolt in England at the beginning of the 19th century and its similarities with current technologies: Blood in the Machine (Blood in the Machine, currently without a planned edition in Spanish) thus explores the origins of the current revolt against big technology.

Although the book has appeared in the midst of the AI hype, Merchant began his research a decade ago: “Uber was growing and it was beginning to be seen that it was having a hard impact on taxi drivers, I heard the term Luddite from the pro-Uber sector and wrote an article titled You don't understand anything about Luddites”. Now in his book he remembers that the Luddite revolt was a labor struggle, not anti-technology, at a time when unions were prohibited. In a conversation with EL PAÍS from his residence in Los Angeles, Merchant clarifies the historical impact of the Luddites and the possible similar struggles that are being played today in Silicon Valley.

1. The Luddites were not against progress

The labor revolt over the loss of rights was more important than the destruction of textile machines: “The biggest mistake about the Luddites is to say that they were against technology and progress,” says Merchant. “They were against certain technologies because they recognized the way in which they were going to be used in their context against them as workers. It was a labor movement, against poverty, not anti-technology. The British Government began to mold them in this way almost immediately, it was keen to mock the Luddites and present the argument that they were against progress. It is very similar to how today people in positions of power in technology companies accuse those who complain about poor working conditions. It's the same story for 200 years.”

The book quotes a phrase from historian Eric Hobsbawm that explains this stage: “It was collective bargaining through riots.” According to Merchant, this tactic in a workers' struggle was very powerful for two reasons: “First, it was symbolic because everyone understood that what they were destroying was not just a machine. It was also the specific machine used to transfer wealth from the workers to the employer. Second, it was useful because they destroyed the equipment that businessmen needed.”

2. Why Robin Hood is better accepted than Ned Ludd

Ned Ludd was a legendary character. No one knows for sure if he existed. It was the legend of a teenager who would have broken the first machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1811, rebellious workers used his legendary name to sign letters and further scare: “Ludd probably never existed. But the incarnation of it would become a mascot, an organizational tool, a wink: a powerful 19th-century meme,” Merchant writes.

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Ludd lived near Nottingham (United Kingdom), like another legendary figure who has been better treated by history. There must be a reason, says Merchant: “The Luddites organized a popular and powerful rebellion. People wrote popular songs about them. They were like Robin Hood. But it is interesting that Robin Hood has endured as a positive light, while the Luddites have not. He suggests that the myth of Ned Ludd is in some ways more dangerous to the elites and the wealthy than that of Robin Hood, which is a little more nebulous and open. The Luddites say: go ahead and break the machines of your oppression. Robin Hood says: steal from the rich and give to the poor. “I think that’s a little more tolerable.”

3. How are they similar to today's problems?

The background of the book is that the history of the Luddites is similar to what happens today in Silicon Valley, where a small group of corporations dominate new technologies. “The way technologies are developed has basically not changed. You have a handful of people with access to enough capital or political influence to be able to build a factory and use automation technologies. “Back then, the most aggressive owners didn’t ask anyone how to find a way to make this a win-win.”

Merchant has received criticism for equating the great businessmen of 19th century England with 21st century America. But there are details that he does not see that far away: “The technology development process is in some ways even more undemocratic today than then. There is this immense pool of capital available to Silicon Valley innovators through venture capital. Uber wasn't profitable for 10 years, but they had access to that capital. Did anyone really like that? Did it work for workers and delivery people? Nothing mattered, they just had more money and moved on.”

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"The 21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job loss and replacement by automation, as well as uncertainty about the future of work, highlighting the need to understand the historical context of technological change and its impact on professions."

Title:

Content: You will not miss us!
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Why robots will take your job, and what to do - panic or rejoice
Why robots will take away your profession.
Increasingly, you can hear about the challenges posed by automation and cybernization to existing professions today.
And we are talking not only about unmanned vehicles and chatbots replacing call center operators, but also about programs that can calculate bank loans and insurance rates, depriving analysts and, moreover, neural networks that claim to compete with highly qualified and creative employees.
Exemption from routine or danger of unemployment?
A cause for concern or long-awaited freedom?
History of the problem
Mechanisms of ancient times.
Competition has always existed – professions disappeared and arose, people fought for jobs with each other and with technology, philosophers and economists built forecasts and tried to predict the prospects and are still doing it.
For example, you can assess how much automation threatens your profession and how quickly robots will replace you by using Will Robots Take My Job.
Aristotle was the first to think about the possibility of transferring “work ” to machines.
In the first book of his Politics, he suggested that they could evolve to such an extent that the need for human labor would disappear.
For him, quite in line with the views of work at the time, as something distracting from participation in public life and personal development, this was an extremely optimistic forecast.
“Work ” in ancient Greece was considered to be the lot of the lower classes, and the mechanisms would only liberate slaves, considered nothing but“ machines of flesh and blood. ”
The reorientation of the economy to the export of wool led to the introduction of a policy of “enclosures ”.
The real competition of a sufficiently large mass of people technology for the first time was only more than a millennium and a half later in England.
At first, the reorientation of the economy to wool exports led to the introduction of a policy of “fencing ”, in which landlords expelled farmers from the fields in order to free the territory for sheep grazing, which led to the first massive surge of“ unemployment ” – albeit not in the current sense.
The then arising vagrancy and poverty contemporary of these events, the Chancellor of England and philosopher Thomas More described the famous "sheep ate people."
However, after a few decades it became clear that no – not eaten.
The former peasants were absorbed by the growing cities, where they found a new job in textile manufactures, processing the same wool obtained from shearing sheep.
This was the first example of how, by taking away one thing, “technology ” is able to offer something different.
But we must admit: the process of urbanization was painful, the work that replaced the cultivation of land turned out to be hard and dirty, the gap with the traditional way of life was very traumatic, and the population of England as a result of hunger and the fight against vagrancy, which was conducted, including the use of gallows, decreased, according to some estimates by 30% (to understand the scale - the Soviet Union during the Second World War lost "only" 15% of the population).
Workers in a textile factory, late 18th century.
The next episode of the confrontation between people and technology occurred a century later in the same field of light industry - the invention in 1785 by Edmund Cartwright of a mechanical loom increased labor productivity forty times.
Jobs that had just been lost were once again lost.
But again temporarily – after spinning machines, others appeared and all of them demanded new resources, and their extraction – new types of labor.
Manufactures were replaced by factories, and muscle strength by the power of steam obtained from coal.
Machine Destroyers
The Luddite movement.
This time, the changes that occurred were met with bayonets - there was a movement of Luddites.
Sabotage of work and direct action: attacks on factories and the destruction of machines caused a harsh reaction of the state, which sent troops to suppress the “army of Ned Ludd ”.
It is characteristic that no one at the top bothered to convey to the workers the idea that there will still be work for them, even if not the one to which they had time to get used.
The fact is that the “top ” themselves at that time did not think too much about how all this was arranged, and people were perceived as expendable material, while the inertia of consciousness of ordinary workers who had just recovered from the transition from the agrarian to the urban way of life was also very high.
The First Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the 18th century.
The theoretical basis for the interaction of technological innovations and the masses of labor began to be summed up only by economists and philosophers of the middle of the XIX century.
They were the first to suggest that the disappearance of certain types of work in the process of technological development entails the emergence of new ones, and “work ” as a whole is not something final, which may be“ not enough ”.
The First Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the optimism of its apologists only grew stronger over time.
By the end of the century, it seemed that progress would eliminate not only social problems and contradictions, but could also rid humanity of wars.
However, while some spoke of the "Luddite delusion", others spoke of the "enslavement of the masses" and the need to hand over to the "factory workers", predicting that as long as the instruments of production are in the hands of the big proprietors, their employees will remain disenfranchised, and the lack of social security will cause explosions of unemployment at any moment.
Second wave
The Second Industrial Revolution.
The word “unemployment ” came into being at that time.
The fact is that a peasant working in the fields or a craftsman who provides for the needs of himself and the small surrounding community could not face something like this - he himself formed his employment.
When the scheme of selling labor on a strict schedule became mass within the framework of fulfilling a strictly regulated set of duties, the challenge arose to lose such an opportunity.
The Second Industrial Revolution was on the way.
The basics of streaming production were laid at the end of the 19th century, and by the beginning of the 20th century, the combination of Ford ’ s marketing strategy (he invented that the car was not an attribute of the elites, but a mass need) and the conveyor he introduced led to new changes that went beyond factories and factories.
On January 18, 1886, the first car invented by Karl Benz was released.
It was the emergence of technology on the streets of cities that brought a new wave of competition.
Look at the photos of the streets of the beginning of the last century: here they are dammed with carts, among which a lonely clumsy car is trying to maneuver, but ten years later, the only horse frightened by the roar of engines and sobbing of klaxons is clutching to the sidewalks.
Here it will be important to note how unpredictable this jump became: “At the beginning of the 20th century, the French Academy warned about an environmental disaster, which inevitably should lead to the accumulation of horse manure associated with the development of horse-drawn transport in Paris, ” recalls, reasoning about the prediction of the future Stanislav Lem.
However, note: in those regions where human labor is cheaper, technology can not replace it, as we are shown, for example, rickshaws, until recently used their own muscle power and only with a sharp drop in the cost of small vehicles motorized.
A more modern example is “computer rickshaws ” – hundreds of thousands of low-skilled Chinese, hacked captchas all day, because their work costs less than the introduction of scripts.
Technological unemployment
The line of the American unemployed during the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, Maynard Keynes, who gave the world the theory of the “social state ”, from the attempts of which many economies have not recovered so far, introduced the term“ technological unemployment ” into mass circulation.
Since then, the debate about whether the introduction of new technological solutions and opportunities can create a long-term job crisis or whether everything is limited to repurposing, when obsolete professions are replaced by new ones, and it is enough for people to change or improve their skills.
Until the end of the last decade, most experts were inclined to believe that “technological unemployment ” is always a temporary phenomenon, leading to the renewal and improvement of the professionalism of workers.
Mechanical labor was replaced by physical labor, the operator - a profession more status and highly paid than the worker, the reduction of costs leads to the release of time - these are the main theses sounded then.
Pessimistic views remained largely the domain of marginals, such as Theodore Kaczynski, famous for his terrorist struggle against progress under the name of Unabomber and primitive philosophers.
Pessimism
The first full-fledged computer in the USSR BESM-1.
Cautious voices expressing doubts about the correctness of this approach sounded even then.
And if in one of his speeches in 1962, President Kennedy said that “if people are able to invent new machines that take away their jobs, even more so are able to invent new jobs, ” then two years later, a letter from scientists and activists concerned with the problem of technological unemployment, sent to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, stated that“ a revolution in cybernetics will create a separate nation of poor, unskilled unemployed. ”.
Theorists disputed the impossibility of long-term unemployment, as did Martin Ford in the book “Light in the Tunnel: Automation, Acceleration of Technology and the Economy of the Future ” or Marshall Brains in“ Robotic Nation ”.
Gasne-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, in their Global Trap, describe a society in which the labor of twenty percent of the population is enough for the world economy to continue to develop.
There are those who see it as a threat and a danger, like Paul Krugmann in his article “Sympathy for the Luddites ” or Frey and Osborne in“ The Future of Work. ”
In addition, in practice, it turned out that technology is not so freeing up time – for example, representatives of professions requiring high qualifications, at least in the United States today work more than 30 years ago, and technologies that provide remote access to working tools allow them not to break away from professional tasks and in their “free time ”.
It is also important that new jobs, as it was noticed at the beginning of the XXI century, are created not so much by technology as by the change in the way of life that they entail.
So in the mid-2010s, nine out of ten working people are employed in professions that did not exist a century earlier, but only 5% of the jobs that appeared from 1993 to 2013 are in high-tech areas, such as IT or telecom.
However, the question is whether this does not mean that indirectly they still arise due to technologies that provide an opportunity for development for the service sector.
Is it bad?
A shot from the film "I, Robot" (2004).
Harvard economics professor Lawrence Summers, who previously served as U.S. Treasury Secretary, said in 2014 that he no longer believes that automation will always create new jobs and that it is not some hypothetical possibility in the future; it is something that is emerging now.
In his opinion, the changes will be very global and will lead to mass unemployment not only among low-skilled employees, but also for “blue ” and“ white ” collar workers, because “there are many reasons to think that the software revolution will be even more significant than the agrarian one. ”
The robot prepares food.
However, this is what allows us to look to the future with optimism.
Summers ’ s thought of the meaning of the digital revolution echoes the position of futurologist Alvin Toffler.
As early as 1970, in his book Future Shock, he wrote that by comparing the Digital Revolution with the Industrial Revolution, we downplay its significance and it would be more correct to draw a parallel with the exit of mankind from caves and the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding.
Potentially, this means that humanity is on the verge of an unprecedented, unknown written history civilizational leap of colossal proportions.
And, due to the fact that the speed of changes in the world has increased many times and now, the fact that in the case of the end of the Stone Age, took millennia, is being carried out in front of one, a maximum of a couple or three generations, this breakthrough, of course, will be painful.
However, having reviewed the usual way of life, the attitude to it and their values, will not humanity be able to break through to the conditions of life, previously even unimaginable.
"Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991).
We are easily accustomed to such changes in “work ” as freelancing and remote work, quite calmly came to a repeated change of professions, instead of a continuous, decades-long“ career ” and even were able to include them in your life, saying that this is the way to find yourself.
So is it not time to begin to accustom ourselves to the idea that, as economic historian Robert Skidelsky said, “Sooner or later we will run out of work ”?
After all, freelancing and remote employment are about freedom, about leaving the “office slavery ” and searching for the way of life that is convenient for us.
Yes, to get used to the idea that the traditional “work ” is over and now we will have to independently invent what to occupy ourselves will not be easy.
It will require responsibility, but it is freedom.
Isn ’ t it time for us, joyfully exclaiming “Glory to the robots! ”, to go in search of our place in the new world?
Why robots will take away your profession.
The fact that it is not only about robots, but also about the “work ” itself and the possibility of life without it, about the risks associated with negative scenarios of confrontation between people and machines and the possibilities of overcoming them, we will talk in the next parts of the cycle.
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21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job security, loss of traditional skills, and issues of power and control, as well as the potential for exploitation by those in control of the technology.

21st century Luddites resist new technology due to concerns over job loss and the potential creation of a class of unskilled, unemployed individuals.

21st century Luddites may resist new technology due to concerns about job loss and disruption, as automation may not always create new jobs and the majority of new jobs are not in high-tech areas.

Andrew Luck prefers flip phones over smartphones, implying he may be opposed to the complexity or distractions of smartphones.

Title:

Content: Andrew Luck Finally Upgrades His Flip Phone … To Another Flip Phone

Intro: Andrew Luck has made it clear that he’s not interested in joining the world of smartphones. He’s just fine with his flip phone, and he finally got an upgrade this week.

INDIANAPOLIS — Has Andrew Luck finally turned in his ancient flip phone for a smartphone?

No. No he has not.

But, he did get a new flip phone this week.

The Indianapolis Colts quarterback on Thursday shared on his Facebook account that his mobile carrier had hooked him up with a new phone.

In June, Luck became the recipient of the most lucrative contract in NFL history, and many wondered if the fifth-year Stanford product was going to splurge on the newest smartphone for himself.

"One, I like it. It's a comfort thing," Luck said of not giving up the flip phone lifestyle. "I think anybody can appreciate that, if you're used to that. … Two, I don't think I want to be connected 24/7, and this phone is maybe sort of a reminder that you don't have to be connected. And it's nice to get away. It's nice to turn your phone off."

Luck's phone at that time — and his new one, we assume — can send and receive text messages, and for all the newest crazes in apps and technology, he says he has an iPad.

"What else do you need?" Luck asked. "I'm not a Luddite."

Luddite | Ludd·ite | Noun: "One of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly :  one who is opposed to especially technological change." Thank you, Merriam Webster.

Nice word choice, Andrew. Looks like his "Andrew Luck Book Club" is paying huge dividends.

While many of us (including the author of this article) remain glued to their smartphones, Luck is obviously content with what's gotten him to this point in life.

Smartphone or flip phone — or rotary phone — he's back on the field and healthy for the Indianapolis Colts, and that's all that should matter to his fans and his organization.

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Andrew Luck prefers a flip phone due to its comfort and his desire to not be connected 24/7, highlighting the importance of setting boundaries with technology.

Resistance to new technologies can be attributed to concerns about job security, lack of understanding about the benefits of new technologies, and inertia in adapting to change, as seen in the historical context of the Luddite movement.

A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the perceived threat to their jobs and livelihoods, rather than a fundamental opposition to progress or technology itself.

"A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the fear of job loss and replacement by automation, as technological change has historically led to the disappearance of certain professions and the creation of new ones."

Luddite opposition to new technology stems from the fear of job displacement and the potential negative impact on their livelihood, as technological advancements may lead to the displacement of human labor.

A common reason for Luddite opposition to new technology is the fear of job loss and disruption of traditional ways of life, as seen in the historical context of the invention of the mechanical loom, which increased labor productivity but also led to job losses.

Luddite opposition to new technology is often driven by concerns about job security, autonomy, and the potential for exploitation by those in power.

"People who may be opposed to new technologies in the 21st century could be those who prioritize environmental integrity, social justice, and human rights, as well as those who are concerned about job security."

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Journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week at the age of 81, pictured on July 27, 2006 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Barbara Ehrenreich and the Real Work of Labor Day

Every walkout, every outstretched hand, every word written or spoken in defense of workers' rights, is a victory—whether it results in immediate and obvious success or not.

Richard Eskow

Only a week of two before Barbara Ehrenreich’s death I was in a used bookstore, where I found and bought an out-of-print pamphlet she co-wrote in 1988 with journalist and author Annette Fuentes. It’s called "Women in the Global Factory."

That year, as Reaganism was reprogramming both political parties, Ehrenreich and Fuentes were engaged in the honorable and never-ending work of documenting corporate exploitation. Their work shows us how, even before Bill Clinton brought us the WTO agreement with China, multinational corporations were exploiting impoverished workers and specifically oppressing women—and that the U.S. government was enabling it. The trade deals later promoted by both parties would make the situation far worse in the decades to come.

The pamphlet also reminds us that Ehrenreich was doing the work that needed to be done well before her best-known book, "Nickel and Dimed," made her famous in 2001. It musters facts and figures, as well as sexist pitches like the investment brochure from the Malaysian government which boasts that "the manual dexterity of the Oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works with care… Who, therefore, could be more qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly line than the Oriental girl?"

There is uplift in the pamphlet, too, when the authors list a series of woman-led labor actions in the developing world. These actions often required great personal sacrifice. They include the following descriptions:

Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 1973: Two thousand workers at Transitron Electronics walked out in solidarity with a small number of workers who had been fired unjustly. Two days later, 8,000 striking workers met and elected a more militant union leadership.

Bangkok, Thailand, 1976: Seventy young women locked out their Japanese bosses and took control of their garment factory. They continued to produce jeans and floppy hats for export, paying themselves 150 percent more than their bosses had.

South Korea, 1979: Two hundred young women employees of the YH textile and wig factory staged a peaceful vigil and fast to protest the company's threatened closing of the plant. On August 11, the fifth day of the vigil, more than 1,000 riot police armed with clubs and steel shields broke into the building where the women were staying and forcibly dragged them out. Twenty-one year old Ria Kong Suk was killed during the melee. It was her death that touched off the widespread rioting throughout the country that many believe led to the overthrow of the dictator Park Chung Hee.

The Bangkok action reminds us that workers are capable of self-management through a program of workplace democracy. And the fall of Park Chung Hee reminds us that the labor struggle involves more than just the improvement of workers' wages, benefits, and working conditions. Important as those things are, they cannot be permanently achieved unless they also lead to a fundamental realignment of political and economic power.

That's the real work before us. Consider this sentence from Geoff Mann's recent examination of the de-growth movement in The London Review of Books: "Everything (in modern economics) is premised on the assumption that Capital decides, and Labour does what it's told."

That assumption is exactly what the Brisbane, Australia building trades unions challenged in the 1970s when they struck, not only for themselves, but for the rights of others, and for the environmental integrity of the entire city. This effort is documented in a (now out of print) book called "Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation." (Used copies can be found online.) As authors Meredith and Verity Bergmann show, Brisbane's building workers used their power to preserve green spaces (refusing to work on buildings that destroyed them), and defended the rights of women, LGBTQ, and Indigenous people. Their work was eventually suppressed, but not before preserving some green parts of Brisbane forever (at least, so far).

The labor-driven solidarity demonstrated by the "red unions" upends the premise Mann describes and points the way to a more democratic and habitable future. As for the pamphlet: Not all of the actions listed in it resulted in visible progress. But every woman who took part in them helped advance labor rights, by being present, conscious, and brave. Our speech and actions resonate in ways we may never come to understand. Our duty, and our privilege, is to do the work whatever the outcome. Barbara Ehrenreich did that work. So did the women whose actions she and Fuentes recorded.

Every walkout, every outstretched hand, every word written or spoken in defense of workers' rights, is a victory—whether it results in immediate and obvious success or not. The only failure is not to have tried.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Richard Eskow

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a freelance writer. Much of his work can be found on eskow.substack.com. His weekly program, The Zero Hour, can be found on cable television, radio, Spotify, and podcast media. He is a senior advisor with Social Security Works.

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A common reason for opposing new technology is the recognition that it may be used against workers, threatening their jobs or working conditions.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear that it will replace human workers or transfer wealth from workers to employers, as was the case during the Industrial Revolution.

The opposition to new technology in the 21st century, akin to the Luddites of the past, stems from concerns about job security and the impact of automation on employment.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job replacement due to automation, a concern that has been present since ancient times and continues to be relevant today.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job loss and the difficulty of adapting to a new way of life, as workers may struggle to acquire new skills and adjust to significant changes in the workforce.

The Luddite revolt was primarily a labor struggle focused on job security and workers' rights, rather than opposition to technological progress.

The Luddite revolt was a labor movement fighting for workers' rights and against poverty, rather than opposing technology and progress. This historical context can inform our understanding of modern-day resistance to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a workers' struggle against the introduction of new machines that threatened their jobs and transferred wealth from workers to employers. This historical context can help us understand why someone in the 21st century might be opposed to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a historical movement that fought against technological change and job displacement, and this context can be used to understand modern-day resistance to new technologies.

The Luddite revolt was a resistance movement against the replacement of human labor with machines during the First Industrial Revolution, driven by fears of job loss and disruption to traditional ways of working.

"Famous figures like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have been labeled as Luddites for warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, indicating that concerns about AI's impact on society and human well-being are a key reason for resistance to new technologies in the 21st century."

Title:

Content: The new is the old well forgotten.
Where in the Network there was a fashionable insult to the opponents of AI
In the Internet discourse, deep in the study of sarcastic comments of anonymous persons, you can find the term "Luddite".
This label is often referred to as people who dare to express the slightest inclination to inhibit the constant development of artificial intelligence (AI).
Related video
Interestingly, such prominent figures as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have been awarded the Luddite Award, which is recognition of their cautionary position regarding the potential dangers associated with artificial intelligence.
During the ceremony, Robert D. Atkinson, the organizer of the award, noted: “Unfortunately, luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have contributed to the feverish refraction of hands about the impending apocalypse of artificial intelligence, ” writes IFLScience.
In Focus.Technology appeared its own Telegram-channel.
Subscribe not to miss the latest and exciting news from the world of science!
Atkinson also explained: "Do we consider any of them personally Luddites?
No, of course not.
They are pioneers of science and technology.
But they and others have done a disservice to the public — and undoubtedly have helped and comforted the increasingly common neo-Luddist impulse in modern society — by demonizing AI in the popular imagination.
But how did the term come about?
Its roots can be traced back to the early 1800s in England.
Before the industrial revolution, skilled craftsmen who knew a lot about textile production made clothes using their own machines and specialized tools.
However, a situation arose when new technologies and methods of mass production appeared, as a result of which artisans were unable to compete.
The result was a movement whose purpose was the destruction of the textile industry and the destruction of new machines.
Although there is some truth to this story, it does not reflect the whole essence of the Luddite movement.
Their actions were not driven solely by a reaction to new technologies; rather, they were a response to the profound transformations taking place in their professional activities.
While it is true that they often attacked a knitting machine known as a stocking frame, as well as other mechanized fixtures, their main concern was the labor practices associated with these machines.
Kevin Binfield, editor of the Luddite and Compassionate Works, explained their motives: "They simply wanted machines to produce high-quality goods, and that these machines employed workers who had been trained and received fair wages.
It was their only concern. ”
The nickname "Luddites" comes from the nickname "Ned Ludd", an apocryphal figure who allegedly sabotaged a textile factory in 1779, although historical evidence suggests that this man was most likely a fictional one.
In a 2007 paper, researcher David Linton explained: “Some say that a young man, possibly with cognitive impairment, named Ned Ludd once misunderstood an order and accidentally broke his frame machine.
Others argue that this was done deliberately, in a fit of anger.
Whatever the motive, it seems to have become a joke phrase that whenever the machine breaks, for whatever reason, you can say something like, "Ludd must have been here."
From this construction, it is a short step to the ironic application of the name Ludd to vandalism for political purposes. "
Between 1811 and 1816, the Luddite movement held sporadic and somewhat unorganized protests, characterized by the destruction of cars and the burning of factories.
In response, the mill owners resorted to extreme measures, using deadly force against the Luddites.
In April 1812, there was a grim turning point in Huddersfield, where at least four people died at the hands of the mill owners.
In retaliation, the Luddites killed the owner of the mill, William Horsfall, who boldly declared his intention to "smear himself with Luddite blood to the saddles."
Horsfall was shot while sitting on his horse.
Faced with these uprisings, the government immediately sent thousands of soldiers to quell the protests.
Moreover, they adopted a law according to which the breakdown of cars was subject to the death penalty or sending to colonies.
Subsequently, the movement dissipated, but the stable expression "Luddite" could not accurately convey the ideals and goals of the Luddites.
Previously, Focus wrote about the first IPSO in the history of mankind.
It turns out that it was invented in Babylon and it concerns the Flood.

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working because they believe it will negatively impact their jobs or working conditions, similar to the historical Luddites who opposed certain technologies that threatened their livelihood.

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working in the 21st century due to concerns about job security, disruption of their industry, or unease about the impact of technology on society, similar to the historical Luddites' fears about automation displacing human workers.

"Some individuals may oppose new technologies or ways of working due to concerns about job security and the potential disruption to their profession, as automation and cybernization replace certain tasks and jobs."

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working due to concerns about job loss, lack of communication from management, and the perception of being expendable. This resistance can be seen in the historical context of the Luddite movement, where workers destroyed machinery in response to the replacement of manual labor with machines.

Someone might oppose new technologies or ways of working due to fear of job loss, inability to compete with new methods, and negative perceptions of change, as seen in the historical Luddite movement and still relevant in the 21st century.

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in the Western world, particularly in America, due to increasing uncertainty and instability caused by various global events and trends.

Title:

Content: Archive | Countries | Persons | Catalog | News | Discussions | Jokes | Contacts | PDA
| Central Asia | Afghanistan | Kazakhstan | Kyrgyzstan | Tajikistan | Turkmenistan | Uzbekistan |
News & Events
|
Monday, 29.01.2024
19: 12 Against the protesting French farmers brought armored vehicles
The United States was in the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse, - Jackson Diannie
19: 03 What role in the fate of Kazakhstan give Napoleon lovers of alternative history
18: 58 Texas destroys US to save its economy, - S. Savchuk
How much does Almaty cost, and whether Kazakhstan will be able to restore the city after a devastating earthquake
18: 12 Is it demolished or stored?
What monuments Tajikistan has lost in recent years
17: 49 22 kazakhstan airports want to be transferred to the management of European "investors".
Smells like a wild scam
17: 35 The new Prime Minister of Georgia will be Irakli Kobakhidze.
Instead of Irakli Garibashvili
17: 31 Russia takes away another "gold" of the Beijing Olympics - team skaters
16: 18 Putin refused to participate in the election debate.
There are no words...
14: 52 Underwater tankers will carry oil and gas in the Arctic
14: 50 Critical mass: the United States worried about Russian uranium
Chinese archaeologists have found in Xinjiang Parking man 50 thousand years ago
Fox News: the US army recognized as incapable of protecting national interests
14: 04 What do British emissaries do in Central Asia
14: 00 "Children were thin, with thin necks" - how Kyrgyzstanis helped besieged Leningrad
1: 58 in the forehead.
Avdiivka ’ s assault continues
13: 33 Emomali Rahmon again urged to stock up on food.
Because of climate change
13: 29 Dancing by the fire: How Tajiks celebrate their ancient festival of the Garden
13: 21 How will the presidential election in Russia affect Kazakhstan?
13: 13 "The Republic of Texas."
Will this state become the leader of the new confederation of the United States - E. Murzina
13: 09 The Last of the Mohicans
Congress of Mongush tribe held in Bishkek
13: 06 "This war is completely unusual..." - Dmitry Rogozin
1: 02 is green.
For the birthday of the "visionary", - Rostislav Ishchenko
12: 59 Three trump cards of Russia in the war in the Middle East, - Hoda al-Husseini
11: 24 Why Kazakh officials force domestic food producers to transfer production to Uzbekistan
11: 19 Angry French besieged Paris
11: 04 Matlubakhon Sattorien - the new ministress of Tajik culture
10: 50 Kazakh-language resource raised the issue of claims to Orenburg and Astrakhan - "Vzglyad"
08: 44 The Houthis hit the US Navy ’ s Lewis B. Puller with a missile.
06: 39 Moldova will be left without money from Russia, - S. Gamova
The star of captivating Texas: the split in the United States is aggravated, - Gennady Simakov
US abandons its previous strategy towards Iran, - Igor Subbotin
China does not want to quarrel with Iran, - Vladimir Skosyrev
00: 19 Apocalypse today: the freaks have taken over the world, - Platon Besedin
00: 10 West prepares Moldova for seizure of Transnistria, - G.Mirzayan
00: 07 Vandalism, pogroms and enemy neighbors.
The project of "Great India" is gaining momentum, - L. Savin
Sunday, 28.01.2024
23: 47 The national team of Tajikistan sensationally reached the quarterfinals of the Asian Cup
23: 15 What is written on the flag of Hezbollah, - P. Gusterin
20: 55 An unknown drone struck an American soldier in Jordan: 3 "cargo 200" and 25 - "cargo 300"
20: 28 How the economic crisis in Germany turns into a political one - Oleg Nikiforov
18: 46 Death Knot in Latin America.
Crime as a Child of Neoliberalism - S.Kozhemyakin
18: 45 Trump predicted the collapse of the United States because of the crisis at the border
18: 42 Prime Minister of Mongolia announced the delay in negotiations on the "Power of Siberia - 2"
16: 56 British media accuse Russian drone of trying to disrupt the coronation of Charles III
16: 07 Russian Dmitry Medvedev is offended by the final of the tennis Australian Open
16: 03 The Russian Air Force finally began to bomb the Kremenchug refinery, from which the bander-army is refueled and Tatneft is fed.
15: 59 Mingnidkult.
Filmmaker Lokshin, who poured mud on Russia, received huge money from the Russian budget
15: 18 The last commander of the regiment of the Second World War, Major-General Alexander Khomenko, died
11: 32 In Tajikistan, 550 industrial enterprises do not work
10: 41 Rahmon replaces the head of the APC and heads of districts of GBAO
Archive
© CentrAsiaTop
CenterAsia |
The United States was in the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse, - Jackson Diannie
19: 04 29.01.2024
Salon
USA
Did America become like the Soviet Union in 1990?
Sometimes it seems that it is.
Salon: the US was in the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse
In the United States, the era of confidence in the future has passed, the system is falling apart, but no one can offer a viable alternative, writes Salon.
Decline begins to be perceived as the norm – America is sliding to the state of the late USSR on the eve of its collapse.
The symptoms of decline are everywhere in America – and history shows us what can happen if we don ’ t change course.
Question: Who owns parking lots in Chicago?
Answer: Conglomerate Morgan Stanley and the city of Abu Dhabi.
In 2008, to alleviate the budget crisis, the city council leased the parking meter system to Morgan Stanley ’ s Chicago Parking Meters and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Parking prices have quadrupled in most areas.
In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that Nestlé could use child slaves in the chocolate production process in Africa.
Six people from Mali said they were sold as children to Ivory Coast, where they were supposed to harvest cocoa beans, and that Nestlé promoted child slave labor.
However, in its decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Nestlé could not be legally held accountable.
In 2022, Human Rights Watch ranked the insulin crisis in the United States as the fifth largest "human rights crisis" in the world - one line above the deaths of migrants between Morocco and Spain.
* * *
The era of confidence in tomorrow has passed.
The current era is determined by the growth of instability and unexplained events in the world.
Britain's decision to leave the European Union.
The election (and possible re-election) of Donald Trump.
Attempts at coups d'état in the United States, Russia and Germany: The first global pandemic in a century.
In the face of all this, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that our current system has ceased to be functional.In America and other Western countries, people are massively gripped by uncertainty about the future, spurred by a number of disturbing trends.
Currently, the United States is the only country in the developed world where life expectancy is declining.
This is partly due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact this trend originated a few years before it.From 2014 to 2017, life expectancy declined for three years in a row - in the United States, this has not happened since 1918, and this is practically not the case in modern societies not facing wars or epidemics. is now at its lowest level since 1996.
The COVID pandemic nullified two full decades of rising life expectancy in America, while in other developed countries, life expectancy declined only marginally, to around 2018 levels.
Why is this happening in the richest country in the world?
The reasons are not such a mystery.
In large part, this is due to the growing number of so-called “deaths from despair ” (mostly suicides and deaths related to alcohol or drugs), which have become increasingly common among middle-class white Americans and workers.
The term was coined by Princeton scientists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who suggest that this phenomenon is associated with economic inequality and inadequate health care.
In 2017, there were 150,000 “deaths from despair ” in the United States.
The country now appears to be experiencing the worst drug addiction epidemic in its history.
Drug overdoses are now on the list of leading causes of death, along with car crashes and firearms crimes, and in 2022 the number of suicides reached a record level.
Last year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a newsletter on the rise of loneliness in America, declaring it a public health crisis.
According to Murty, the impact of social disunity on mortality in the country is similar to the impact of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day.
In 2018, the British government created the unofficial position of “Minister of Solitude ”.
Japan did the same in 2021 — largely in response to the hikikomori phenomenon, which is a severe form of social isolation in which young people stay in their rooms for six months or more.
According to some estimates, more than half a million Japanese men have become hikikomori by now.
Although the Biden administration has increased infrastructure spending, the American Society of Civil Engineers still puts U.S. infrastructure at "C-minus," which is practically the lowest estimate.
America has a higher level of wealth inequality than almost all other developed countries, and it is the only major developed country that does not guarantee health care to all its citizens.
The listed symptoms of decline did not arise from an empty place.
We have been following this course for decades.
Today, according to a number of international indices, America is already considered a “developing country ” .Our state is not fatal, but we are still moving in the wrong direction.
The general health of our people is deteriorating, and it is quite possible that we are already approaching a major upheaval on the scale of the collapse of communism in the 1990s.
No one can predict the future with certainty.
But what is most striking at the moment is that the most serious threat to America ’ s current public order is not some more effective alternative model promoted by our adversaries.
In the 1970s, power gradually began to shift from the production sector to the hands of financial institutions, resulting in a new economic reality that was no longer organized around the means of production and distribution.
At about the same time, we witnessed a sharp decline in the number of trade union members and collective bargaining.
Financial regulation is a thing of the past.
Wages stopped rising.
After the collapse of Franklin D. Roosevelt ’ s Democratic Coalition and his New Deal, politicians from both parties failed to envision or implement anything that looked like sweeping economic reforms — even after the 2008 crash, which turned out to be the worst shock since the Great Depression.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans took advantage of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act by putting forward their "southern strategy," which allowed them to lure white Democratic voters from the southern states.
They also mobilized evangelical Christians in support of the abortion ban.
This has directly led to today's split, which focuses on "cultural warfare" issues such as race, gender and gender.
Republicans lost seven of the last eight presidential elections, but they managed to hold power almost half of the time - a kind of sabotage of the minority.
Today, the ideal of national unity seems increasingly shaky.
Mitch McConnell: “We cannot continue to divide into two separate tribes with different sets of facts and different realities, which have nothing in common except our hostility to each other and distrust of the few national institutions we still have. ”
The days when the public could discuss common realities are over.
In America today, the media is becoming increasingly fragmented, and this is not much different from the situation in countries torn by civil war, where information has to be collected in pieces from conflicting reports coming from sources loyal to the opposing oligarchies.
Previously, there was a kind of monoculture in the American media, in which people reacted equally to the same set of basic facts.
Of course, this state of affairs had its drawbacks, but today there is no consensus reality at all.
The Internet allowed to "democratize" information, but sharply reduced its quality.Opposing worldviews were isolated inside bubbles, where other points of view and doubts can not penetrate.
America is actually splitting into two societies that disagree on almost nothing with each other, except in an attempt to blame everything on the opposite side.
This has helped perpetuate a culture of social fragmentation: people from all demographic groups feel more lonely than ever before, and public trust in government has been at an all-time low for many years.
Recently, we have seen the rise of far-right movements around the world, and far-right leaders are coming to power – at least temporarily – in the United States, Britain, Brazil, Italy, Hungary, Argentina, the Philippines and elsewhere. Corbyn in the British Labour Party ended in defeat.
However, in many Western countries, the political center that once confidently dominated has almost completely lost its position, although Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak may serve as evidence that he has not yet completely outlived his age.
The trend goes far beyond the political arena, and this can be seen as a symptom of a “death drive. ”
Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been placing hands on the doomsday clock, demonstrating with this symbol how close the world is to nuclear annihilation.
Midnight is the theoretical point of total annihilation.
Last year, due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, scientists set the hands of the clock at 90 seconds to midnight - this is the closest time to Armageddon in the history of the clock.
In March last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its annual synthesis report, which states that uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions will lead to “widespread negative impacts on food and water security, human health, the economy and society, as well as the associated loss and damage. ”
In June last year, smoke from wildfires in Canada spread hundreds of kilometers all the way to the east coast of the United States, painting the sky over New York in orange.
July was the hottest month on record.
We should recall what Sigmund Freud called “the fatal question for the whole human race ” in his book Discontent with Culture:
“Fatal for the human race seems to me the question: will it be possible – and to what extent – to curb in the way of culture the attraction to aggression and self-destruction, leading to the destruction of human coexistence.
Now men have come so far in their domination over the forces of nature that with their help they can easily destroy each other down to the last man.
They know this, hence a great deal of their present anxiety, their unhappiness, their anxiety.
It is to be hoped that another of the heavenly powers, the eternal Eros, will exert its strength in order to defend its rights in the fight against an equally immortal enemy. "
In an era when there are more disasters in the world, one is more terrible than the other, it is quite difficult to resist the idea that our society has fallen into a disastrous maelstrom.
We are living through a period of what Alexei Yurchak, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, called “hypernormalization, ” a term he coined to describe life in the Soviet Union during the last years of the communist regime.
He describes the moment when everyone already knows that the system is falling apart, but no one can offer a viable alternative, so the state of decline begins to be perceived as the norm.
Are we in the same position?
In fact, there are alternatives, and opinion polls show that many Americans really want to take them.
Most are in favor of raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes for the rich, creating a national health insurance system, adopting a New Green Deal, and rebuilding public infrastructure.
In this and in many other respects, the gap between what Americans want and what those who ostensibly represent them are willing or able to do is huge - it is simply shocking.
History clearly shows that positive change almost always starts with grassroots movements – think of civil rights movements, women ’ s rights, protests against the Vietnam War, anti-apartheid movements, LGBTQ activists * and so on.
For a variety of reasons, the 21st-century protest movements — from anti-war protests in Iraq to Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the climate justice movement — have not brought about large-scale social and economic change, although to some extent they have contributed to shifts in public consciousness.
I think that in the future we will need to achieve a certain level of sustained street activism, combined with a rigid stance of trade unions and democracy in the workplace – that is, what was observed in America in the 1930s.
We can now see hints of this in the resurgence of trade union influence, although they still represent only a small percentage of American workers.
Such a united movement could gain power outside the government by taking control of key sectors of the economy, with the aim of raising living standards, increasing wages and ensuring equal access to health services.
In the long run, such a movement may even encourage greater participation in public life.
People engaged in common efforts for mutual benefit feel less lonely – because they are not alone – they have a purpose in life and feel stable.
There are two roads ahead of us.
One leads to a future based on citizen engagement and shared vision.
The other is to the Soviet Union in 1991, to a superpower whose collapse no one could have imagined until it happened.
Author: JacksonDiianni
* an extremist organization whose activities are prohibited in Russia
Source - Foreign Media
Permanent address of the article - https: / / centrasia.org / newsA.php? st = 1706544240
News of Kazakhstan
- Speaker of the Senate: Our task is to bring interaction with maslikhats to a new level
- Majilis will consider a bill strengthening control over the withdrawal of capital from the country
- 180 new projects of the manufacturing industry for 1.5 trillion tenge are planned to be launched in Kazakhstan in 2024
- Senate Speaker meets with Vice Chairman of Standing Committee of National People 's Congress
- About Almaty development and ethics
- Alikhan Smailov held a meeting of the Commission on the return of illegally acquired assets
- Meetings of the working sections of the National Kurultai were held
- Transition of Kazakhstan ’ s automotive industry to a new level: Alikhan Smailov visited machine-building enterprises of Kostanay region
Alikhan Smailov discussed prospects of launching a number of new projects in Kazakhstan with foreign investors
- Strengthening cooperation between Kazakhstan and China was discussed by Roman Sklyar and Hao Mingjin
Go to the version with frames
© CentrAsiaTop

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in Europe and beyond, driven by the political right's opposition to climate change policies.

Title:

Content: Climate change backlash exploited by right-wing deniers shows need to win popular support for green policies – Joyce McMillan

Governments need to be much more serious about the profound political and social transformations required to bring about a low-carbon economy

They call it DARVO, and it works a treat. It’s a term originally used in criminal psychology to describe the behaviour of some wrongdoers when accused. They first deny (D) that they did any such thing, then begin to attack (A) those accusing them; and finally start a process of reversing victim and offender (RVO), in which the perpetrators of crime somehow become victims, and those accusing them are framed as powerful oppressors, backed by dark elite forces.

And if all of that sounds familiar, in the age of Donald Trump, then it’s hardly surprising; because DARVO is not only the continuing leitmotif of Trump’s narcissistic personality, but also, increasingly. the chosen modus operandi of the global political right, which has had an iron grip on global economic policy for more than a generation, and is now – as Liz Truss’s bizarre speech at the recent CPAC conference in Maryland vividly demonstrated – in profound and aggressive denial about the human, environmental and economic damage those policies have inflicted.

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As I write, there are three arenas where this right-wing hegemony and the attitudes it spawns are being challenged, or exposed for what they are. There is Ukraine, where the armed forces are trying to defend some kind of European liberal democracy against the brutal aggression of an oil-fuelled Russian Federation. There is Gaza, and the horrific slaughter and destruction now being wrought there by a far-right Israeli government.

And there are the city streets, in the West and beyond, where people of all races and creeds have turned out in millions to march for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza/Israel conflict; and where mainly young climate activists try to find ways of expressing their horror at the “business as usual” complacency that is destroying the natural world on which we all depend, sometimes even halting the sacred motor car in its tracks.

Not, though, for much longer, if governments like the current Westminster administration have their way; because now, political DARVO is in full swing on all of these issues, with assorted politicians – including, sadly, Britain’s Prime Minister – conspiring to smear millions who have marched peacefully for a ceasefire in Gaza as in some way linked to political violence, and to dangerous threats against politicians. In an inflammatory and frankly ridiculous speech on Wednesday, Mr Sunak even claimed – without a shred of evidence, and despite a sceptical response from senior police officers – that there was now a “growing consensus” that Britain is “descending into mob rule”; a development which would, of course, necessitate further repressive measures against all kinds of protest.

Russian propaganda

The effects of DARVO are now becoming particularly heartbreaking and terrifying, though, for those who care about the future of the planet on which our lives depend. Across Europe and beyond, policies designed to meet the challenge of climate change – and those who support them – have now become one of the main “culture war” targets of the political right, ranging from the “Net Zero Research” group within the parliamentary Tory party to the Russian bots using online propaganda to persuade Polish farmers angered by falling global prices that their real enemies are the Ukrainian people, and EU environmental policies.

In the age of the internet, it would be naive to imagine that the farmers who have come out to protest in other European capitals recently are not also seeing the same online ideas and memes, all suggesting a top-down green conspiracy by governments against farmers and food production. This week the PM – abruptly losing his aversion to disruptive street protests, when they serve this side of the argument – even turned out in Cardiff to back Welsh farmers protesting against Welsh government green policy proposals which they say will break them; although perhaps, as it turns out, not quite as much as Westminster policies will break farmers in England.

In the case of climate change policy – and the vital issue of food security – these political movements should act as a double wake-up call to administrations seeking to deal with 21st-century realities. First, those governments should never underestimate the sheer financial and political might of the forces still trying to defend existing food and energy systems, and how adept some of their political allies have become in using online propaganda and organisation to obstruct change.

Democratic renewal

Then secondly, those governments need to become much more serious about the profound political and social transformations needed to support a transition to a low-carbon economy. To put it bluntly, no such transition will be achieved unless communities at the grass roots feel a strong sense of ownership of the policies involved, and are motivated to implement them in full; and that is as true in Scotland as anywhere, where numerous well-intentioned and necessary green measures have been applied in such a top-down manner, with so little buy-in from key stakeholders, that they have become nothing more than political footballs, and in some cases ramps for the worst kinds of anti-green propaganda and outright climate change denial.

The resistance to climate-related policies, in other words, represents not only a massive political opportunity for those who oppose all progressive change, but also a profound challenge to Western and other governments who imagine that change on this scale can be achieved through 1990s-style methods of top-down management, imposed on an apathetic or hostile public. The economic transformation we need to see will go hand in hand with democratic renewal, and with the re-empowerment of local communities, or it will not happen. And far more than the future of any one nation may therefore depend on the skill and wisdom of politicians committed to that viable future, in re-engineering their politics to meet the challenges of the times, and enabling and supporting the new age of citizen empowerment that will be necessary to deliver a liveable future, for us all.

The United States is experiencing a decline in confidence in the future, with a shift away from a culture of progress, which could be related to resistance to new technologies.

There has been a shift away from a culture of progress in many Western countries, where the political center has lost its dominant position, which may be related to a decline in optimism about progress.

"Some individuals may be resistant to new technologies due to concerns about their negative impact on the environment, the working class, and the concentration of wealth and control, as well as the failure of new technologies to deliver on their promised benefits."

Title:

Content: Artificial Intelligence and the Curse of the Machine Gods

Image by Gertrūda Valasevičiūtė.

Sometime back in 2008 I was having a conversation with an FBI agent. This is not something I would normally care to do, but in this case it was a family member—my half-brother, who is fourteen years older than me. We didn’t grow up together and have never particularly liked each other, and his wife and I share an intense mutual loathing, but at the time I was making an effort to be more present in the lives of their two young daughters, my nieces.

We were sitting in the living room of their home in Simi Valley, where cops move so they don’t have to live in L.A. with real people. The tedious babble of a televised football game was droning in the background. Following a thread of conversation I’ve long since forgotten, we somehow got onto to the topic of theft and morality. My brother said to me—and this is an exact quote—Are you one of those people who thinks it’s wrong to steal from a mom & pop store, but it’s okay to steal from Wal-Mart because it’s a big corporation?

Sensing my time to shine, I replied as follows: in order for me to believe that it would be “stealing” to take something from Wal-Mart without paying for it, I would first have to believe that Wal-Mart is capable of owning something. I don’t.

He was immediately confused. I continued.

In my view, you must have consciousness and will in order to own something. Wal-Mart has neither of those things; it is a construct. It may have stores and employees, managers and board members, but essentially it’s a legal fiction—a synthetic entity. Wal-Mart really only exists on paper, and it’s only because of consensus social agreement—and fear of law enforcement—that it can be said to have any claim at all to its warehouses of tacky furniture and sweatshop clothing.

The “synthetic entity” part really got him; he froze like an old computer. I could almost hear the cogs of his mind grinding as he tried to process an idea that was completely alien to his worldview.

Thanks to certain rulings of the good ol’ Supreme Court, these synthetic entities have all of the “rights” of individual citizens, yet none of the liabilities… like mortality. There is not a single human servitor of Wal-Mart who is not replaceable, from the CEO to the door greeters. Like all employees of giant corporations, they’re basically wetware, serving the needs of a more or less immortal construct.

You may have figured out where I’m going with this: corporations are a form of artificial intelligence. I hate to be the one to break it to y’all, but our society was conquered by A.I. generations ago.

I call them machine gods; “gods,” because they’re fundamentally disembodied—they are primarily conceptual, like, say, Hermes. “Machines,” because they don’t have any actual will or consciousness—what they have is programming; they take objects and convert them into money, which is essentially the same thing as saying they convert objects into power. The objects themselves are created by transforming the living—trees, livestock, landscapes, sweatshop workers—into the dead.

A fun, old-fashioned occult word for such an entity is egregore.

Taking things from a mom & pop store would directly harm the livelihood of actual human beings, who have will and consciousness. That is simply not the case with Wal-Mart, or Target, or Dollar General. These companies make billions of dollars in profit, most of which goes into the pockets of a handful of corporate executives who are already wealthy. If I could do so with impunity, I would take absolutely everything I ever wanted or needed from Wal-Mart—or any other chain store—without paying for any of it.

You know, sort of like European invaders did to Turtle Island.

That I refrain from shoplifting is not a moral stance at all, but a practical one based on fear of legal punishment. Also, my finances are solid enough that I don’t need to take stuff from the machine gods without paying; unlike many people in this country, I can afford the basics of life. There’s no good reason for me to risk a larceny case. But if my situation were to change, I certainly wouldn’t feel any pangs of fucking guilt for helping myself to the shit at Wal-Mart.

And so, my brother’s attempt to trap me with his simplistic, pseudo-Christian moral conundrum failed utterly. After wearing out his cop-mind for a few minutes trying to find an angle from whence to undermine my argument, he finally landed on this: Well, where does the transition happen between a mom & pop store and Wal-Mart?

He really thought he got me with that one, but it’s clearly absurd; once it’s possible to purchase shares of a company on the stock market, we’re pretty well into machine god territory. Although technically they are both corporations, a tremendous gulf separates my local corner store from Wal-Mart. It’s like comparing a marble to Jupiter.

***

I would argue that the state, with its penchant not only for reproducing itself, but also for manufacturing humans who require a state, is also a form of artificial intelligence.

***

Since the industrial revolution, or at least since the advent of advertising and P.R. firms, every time some fancy new technology comes around there are always True Believers—the people who can’t wait to tell you How Much Better Life Will Be Now. This fable is still popular after two centuries of revealing itself as a lie—the most significant accomplishments of most new technology are: killing more of the planet, impoverishing the working class, and consolidating wealth & control.

If you were connected to the last smoldering remnants of the counterculture in the mid ‘90s, then you might remember how everyone was convinced that the internet was going to Liberate Democracy or whatever. Anyone who’d studied Marx for two seconds should have easily predicted that the ability to buy everything online was just going to put a lot of moms & pops out of business. But could they have predicted QAnon? Hmm…

A few of the early dick-riders of cybertech, like Douglas Rushkoff, have repented of their foolish technophilia… now that it’s too late. Who knows what world we might now live in if liberals and leftists would have immediately recognized the internet as a force of evil? Actually, nevermind; they probably couldn’t have stopped it. By that point the beast was coming whether we wanted it or not.

However, I do not believe that our techno-dystopia was historically inevitable.

Back in May, author Thomas Knapp made a statement in a piece for Counterpunch that I feel is worth quoting at length before I carve it up with the Wu Tang sword:

We’ve been hurtling toward the “singularity” for at least 3.3 million years, ever since one of our ancestor hominins (probably Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus) started using tools to make their work easier.

Over those millions of years, we’ve continuously improved our tools … and our tools have continuously improved us. We’re not really the same animal we were before the automobile, let alone before the wheel. We can do things our grandparents, and those hominins, never dreamed of.

Once we started developing tools that could crack nuts better than us, speak across greater distances than us, travel faster than us, etc., it was inevitable that we’d eventually develop tools which could think better than us.”

With as much respect as is due to anyone who has just insulted their entire species, I have to say this is a gold-medal contender for the stupidest shit I’ve heard all year. I have an appreciation for healthy cynicism, but damn; this kind of Original Sin nonsense chafes my chonies.

First of all, the industrial foundation that made computer tech possible is only a couple of centuries old; go ahead and take a second to boot up your calculator, then divide 200 by 3.3 million and see what kind of ratio you get. I’d hardly describe the speed of that species-journey as “hurtling.” It looks more to me like being healthy for a hundred years, then getting total-body cancer for a fraction of a second before dropping dead.

Second, there was never anything “inevitable” about A.I., the internet, computers, industry, or even civilization. Civilization has only been around for about 5,000 years (divide that by 3.3 million; you’ll get a bigger number but not by much), and as James C. Scott examined in Against the Grain, the earliest hierarchical states were extremely fragile for any number of reasons. There was no guarantee that this way of organizing society would last as long as it has… and it probably won’t last much longer.

The industrial revolution was not the inevitable result of humans being “tool users”—a lot of other species make and use tools—it was the specific product of a specific culture in a specific region under specific circumstances. If the cosmic criminal Christopher Columbus had met a righteous end by drowning at sea before reaching Turtle Island—or, as in the short story I’m currently writing, been murdered by a coalition of time-traveling queers—it’s likely that the industrial revolution would never have happened. That means no capitalism, no planet-devouring corporations, and no motherfucking A.I.

Third, Knapp’s passage is really just a re-framing of the European “Enlightenment” myth of Progress™. The idea that factories and Skynet are part of the “natural evolution” of the human species is not only ridiculous, but it’s also a clandestine form of diet white supremacism—if the industrial revolution was a natural part of “our” evolution, and Europeans did it first, then clearly they must be more “advanced” than other people. Ergo, manifest some destiny, etc.

To commit what’s actually an enormous fuck-up and then claim it’s “natural” to the species is a phenomenal level of hubris… hubris that is basic to the social construction of whiteness. I’ve endured this crypto-racist horseshit in some form or another for my entire life, and I’m tired of it. I feel the same way about the “progress” myth that I feel about the Bering Strait Theory and White Jesus—I keep hoping it’ll retire to Debunked Land, but it never does. Since we can’t get rid of it, my only option for spiritual well-being is to mercilessly clown it.

These last few months, there have been a lot of people gnashing their teeth about the Dangers of A.I. Most of these folks have been enthusiastically feeding all of their personal data to tech companies for the last twenty years, and don’t see the relationship between the two things, but nevermind that.

I don’t see that there is any new danger from A.I. that isn’t already inherent in our cybernetic dystopia. Banal and soulless popular culture? Already got that. People relying on computers to do their thinking for them? Been common for years. Machines taking people’s jobs, or murdering them? Check. Planetary extinction? Well on our way. The “singularity” is just a secular repackaging of Judgment Day. It’s all hype.

That said, is resistance even possible?

I believe resistance is always possible… but only if you understand the threat. Over the years I’ve studied many social movements, particularly the more radical ones—labor rights, religious rebellions, anarchist insurrections, Black Power, Indigenous sovereignty, etc. One of the things all these movements have in common is that they grew from a world in which there was still such a thing as communities.

Many of the Black Panthers were organizing with neighbors whose families they’d known for two or three generations, sometimes longer. When was the last time you were in a neighborhood where everyone had known each other for that long? Gentrification is a helluva drug.

The gospels of Marxism and anarchism were spread in cafes. Nowadays, I’m ready to shed tears when I see strangers so much as strike up a conversation with each other at a cafe. Most people prefer interacting with a screen.

Our current state of hyper-alienation and total cybernetic mediation has effectively destroyed our communal relationships. Nobody like Malcolm X or Fred Hampton could ever have emerged from the world of smartphones and zuckerbook. Tech is the problem, and has been for a long time… yet people act like uncensored access to Twitter is the key to a functioning democracy.

What is to be done?

I don’t know. But I have an extra sledgehammer if you wanna play Luddite with me.

Malik Diamond is a hip hop artist, cartoonist, author, educator, and martial arts instructor. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is the descendant of kidnapped Africans, conquered Natives, and rural laborers of the Scots-Irish, Swiss, and German varieties. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with two brown humans and a white cat. E-mail: malikdiamond (at) hotmail (dot) com

"People may be resistant to new technologies due to anxiety about the impact on society, uncertainty about the benefits, and difficulty adapting to changes. This resistance is a natural response to the uncertainty and disruption caused by technological change."

Title:

Content: Treading the AI path sensibly

… while learning from past tech revolutions

Ajit Balakrishnan

5 min read Last Updated : Nov 5 2023 | 9:24 PM IST

Every two decades or so, we, humans, are forced to deal with a technological wave that tests the limits of our intelligence and survival skills, and the current wave of artificial intelligence is one such testing time. These tech waves all have some things in common. When one such tech wave first emerges, an infinitesimally small minority of us is busy shouting out its praises, while the rest of us keep wondering what these lunatics are wasting their time and ours for. Then, as the tech wave gathers force, a sense of anxiety grips the thinkers among us. Once the wave gathers force, we look around and see the price the tech wave is extracting from our society with no real benefits in sight. And finally, by the time the benefits to society start appearing, we struggle to make the changes demanded of us as humans so that we can benefit from the wave.

The artificial intelligence tech wave (ChatGPT is an early example from this wave) is right now at the second stage as described above, where the thinkers and policymakers among us are anxiety-struck and are busy issuing policy diktats and forming expert committees — the latest one is by US President Joe Biden, who, a few days ago, issued such a diktat which, since it has come from the United States, a country normally in the forefront of embracing tech waves, is getting a lot of attention. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also called a group of countries to discuss the possibility of similar diktats. The American and British anxieties have some common themes: AI should not be weaponised by terrorists and cyber criminals, methods should be devised to spot fake news and fake images, and, most of all, their countries should not fall behind in the race to win the AI battle. But there is little mention about what we can learn from similar tech waves of the past and what opportunities and what threats to watch out for. So, let me do that for you.

The first such tech wave was the industrial revolution, which first emerged in the 1750s in Manchester, England, and worked its way through society and the world during the next 100 years. What it achieved was constructing machines that did the spinning and weaving of cotton fibre and cloth at many times the speed of human spinners and weavers, and powered not by humans or animals but by a new gadget called the steam engine. Of course, the entrepreneurs who put all this together sang its praise as a “revolution” but other some observers, like the two German visitors to Manchester, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, thought it was the worst thing that mankind had encountered and organised a world movement against it, communism, which is still with us today. Very few people at that time applauded what the industrial revolution truly did: It made cotton clothes affordable not just for the landed wealthy but also for the common man throughout the world. And, of course, enterprising political entrepreneurs like Mohandas Gandhi used the widespread anxiety about the power and “magic” (something we have not seen before) of spinning and weaving machines to organise the Indian independence movement and evict the British from India.

The chemical industrial revolution, which followed, made it possible with synthetic indigo blue, for example, to have cloth dyed in attractive colours and then went on to use that chemistry knowledge to create synthetic chemical fibres like nylon and polyester, which allowed cheap clothing. But all this came at a price. One such example is that of the more than 80 cotton textile mills, which had made Bombay the industrial centre of India in the 1950s, found by the 1980s that they could no longer sell the cotton cloth they manufactured and consequently found it difficult to pay wages to their 150,000 workers, who then went on strike, ending with the closure of practically all these mills. Of course, practically all analysts (surprisingly even today) blame the mills’ closure on “labour unions trouble” and even today ignore the true cause: The chemical revolution, which created the insanely popular synthetic polyester and nylon fabric for saris, dhotis, shirts, trousers, bedsheets, etc, making their cotton equivalents defunct.

There have been other such tech waves as well with similar benefits and costs but, for the moment, let’s skip them and see what lies ahead for us in the age of the artificial-intelligence revolution. Let’s learn from the examples of the industrial and chemical revolutions and locate what features to look for and what pains to minimise in this one. What products or services will the artificial-intelligence revolution make cheaper and more affordable and what jobs will they make redundant?

Is it likely that the first group of services to be made cheaper are those supplied by “professions” like doctors, lawyers, bankers, writers, filmmakers, and school and college teachers (the list is not complete)? Will all these services be done by ChatBots and the like in the next few years at a price that is a small fraction of what they cost users today? Will this mean that such services will become affordable to all of India’s citizens and not just for the well-to-do as it is at present? If so, is there a strong possibility that these professions will shrink dramatically in their earnings and numbers, just as the spinners and weavers did? Are these professions not the backbone of what we treasure as the Indian middle class, and can we allow that to be threatened by the  artificial-intelligence revolution?

And, most worrisome, will these disruptions be met with strong resistance and even revolts as past tech revolutions have done? Or can sensible policies allow us to reap the productivity gains from artificial intelligence while making this transition peaceful?

The writer (ajitb@rediffmail.com) is an internet entrepreneur
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

Topics :BS Opinionartifical intelligenceTechieTechnology

First Published: Nov 5 2023 | 9:24 PM IST

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"Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of generative artificial intelligence, a modern technology."

"Some people in the 21st century may be labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of modern technologies such as automation, cybernization, unmanned vehicles, chatbots, and neural networks, due to concerns about job loss or replacement."

Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) due to concerns about its potential dangers, and this includes prominent figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.

Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of modern technology, particularly AI, due to its potential impact on jobs and society.

"Some people are labeled as Luddites for being skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which has advanced rapidly in the 21st century and is resulting in a new wave of industrial revolution."

Title:

Content: Science, Technology and Humanities Joint Lecture / Who will be Marx in the AI era?
A few years ago, I went to the Red Square in Moscow and saw the monument of Karl Marx ’ s bust at the southern end of the square. As I drew, I thought of Marx ’ s Capital in 1867, which pointed out that the development of machines led to the exploitation and destruction of the ecology of capitalism, affecting the working people ’ s labor and changing the mode of production, creating a vast proletariat.
"The steam engine itself did not cause the industrial revolution", but "the creation of the machine tool is the real reason for the steam engine revolution".
After the widespread use and continuous improvement of the "machine tool", the division of labor process resulting in "machine cooperation" enabled the industrial revolution, which began in the 1760s, to use large amounts of labor and machinery for rapid production.
But at the same time, the machine is also crowded to the workers, forming a competitive relationship.
The labor force of the machine appeared and immediately became a competitor of the workers.
Capitalists use machines to proliferate automatically, in direct proportion to the number of workers whose survival conditions are destroyed by machines.
The whole capitalist system of production is based on the fact that the workers sell their labour power as a commodity.
The division of labor makes this workforce one-sided, so that workers have only the skills to operate local tools.
Once a tool is manipulated by a machine, the exchange value of labor disappears along with its use value.
The workers will be immediately unemployed.
In order to combat the unreasonable exploitation of employers, many large-scale labor movements rose up, such as the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England in 1819, the workers ’ uprising in Lyon, France in the 1830s, and the first general strike in Britain in 1842.
The revolt of the German Silesian textile workers in 1844, which caused great casualties, became the benchmark event of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation. As the mode of production advanced, the existing social organization became inefficient and conflicted with economic activity, which in turn developed into a class struggle.
More than two hundred years later, human creativity in the 21st century has taken another giant leap, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology has advanced rapidly, resulting in a new wave of industrial revolution.
More than the steam engine of the 18th century, people found that in addition to carrying out a variety of heavy and complex tasks, AI can also reason, abstract thinking, quickly learn and understand complex ideas, with more efficient productivity, and modern law is difficult to restrain.
"AI itself did not cause an industrial revolution", but "the creation of AI machine tools makes the AI revolution necessary."
As the world repeats Marx's "Capital Theory" narrative, with the rapid development of the AI industry, many people's job opportunities are gradually reduced, many jobs are eliminated, and countless families are forced to face unemployment.
As a result, the 1842 general strike struck Hollywood ’ s largest strike in 2023 for similar reasons, with writers and actors protesting against the replacement of their creations and performances by AI, undermining the profit sharing mechanism on which they depend. History is repeating itself, and it will be lawyers, mathematicians, accountants, or professors who will rise next?
When the actor strikes, the male protagonist of "Destiny Poisoner" cries out loudly: "We will not allow you to take away our dignity!" And who will be the 21st century Marx, writing "AI Capital Theory", stirring up a revolution, subverting the evil capitalist who uses AI to exploit the white collar?
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The underlying concerns driving opposition to new technologies may be related to job security, labor rights, and the impact of technological change on workers, rather than a inherent resistance to progress or technology itself.

The opposition to new technologies may be driven by concerns about the potential negative impact on workers' rights, job security, and working conditions, rather than a general resistance to technological progress.

The opposition to new technologies can be driven by concerns about job loss and the perception that technology threatens one's livelihood, as seen in the historical example of the Luddites.

People may be opposed to new technologies due to concerns about job security and the potential for unemployment, as automation and artificial intelligence replace human workers.

"People may be opposed to new technologies due to concerns about job security, the potential for automation to replace human labor, and a desire to maintain traditional ways of working, as seen in the historical context of the Luddites and the modern-day concerns about automation threatening professions."