The term **Luddite** in the 21st century refers to individuals who resist new technologies, not out of blanket opposition to innovation, but due to concerns about how technology is used and its broader social and economic impacts, echoing the original Luddites’ labor struggles against machinery that threatened their livelihoods rather than technology itself .

A primary reason for modern resistance is **fear of job displacement**; many worry that automation and artificial intelligence will lead to significant job losses, especially in sectors vulnerable to technological replacement, mirroring historical anxieties about machinery replacing workers in textile mills .

The rapid pace of technological change can leave workers feeling unprepared and insecure about their future employment prospects .

**Insecurity in navigating digital spaces** is another factor, particularly among older generations who find digital systems overwhelming and prefer familiar, non-digital interactions, leading to resistance against adopting new technologies .

**Cultural and social isolation** also contributes, as technology enables more solitary activities and can foster nostalgia for past collective experiences, fueling opposition to the pervasive role of technology in daily life .

**Distrust of technology** is significant, with concerns about privacy, security, and online scams—especially among the elderly—creating skepticism about the safety and reliability of digital tools .

A **nostalgia for simplicity** leads some to feel that modern technology complicates life and detracts from the directness and control of traditional methods .

Concerns about **technological dependence** are common, with arguments that increasing reliance on technology diminishes essential skills and human connections, potentially reducing personal agency and the quality of relationships .

The term **Luddite** in the 21st century refers to individuals who resist new technologies, not out of blanket opposition to innovation, but due to concerns about how technology is used and its broader social and economic impacts, echoing the original Luddites’ labor struggles against machinery that threatened their livelihoods rather than technology itself .

Title:

Content: artificial intelligence

AI can exacerbate not only disinformation, but also surveillance – expert

Christa Escudero

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

‘Surveillance is the economic engine of the tech industry…. I think we have to read AI as almost a surveillance derivative,’ says Meredith Whittaker, president of messaging app nonprofit Signal

Much has been said about artificial intelligence (AI) having the power to spread disinformation at scale. Can AI also scale the surveillance business model through which internet tools are built?

Tech experts discussed this possibility in The AI Series, a special edition of media outlet Al Jazeera’s Studio B: Unscripted with Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.

“Surveillance is the economic engine of the tech industry…. I think we have to read AI as almost a surveillance derivative,” said Meredith Whittaker, president of secure messaging app nonprofit Signal, as she cited a 2012 study that recognized how user data collected by social media platforms can also be used to train AI.

“It pulls from this surveillance business model. It requires this surveillance data and the infrastructures that are constructed to process and store this data. And it produces more data as it heightens the surveillance ecosystem that we all live in.”

At the Nobel Prize Summit in May 2023, Ressa similarly slammed the business model of social media platforms, in which users are tracked and targeted to maximize engagement online and influence behavior offline. This model, which she dubbed “surveillance for profit,” has caused the spread of disinformation, hate, and violence online.

Camille Francois, co-leader of the Innovation Lab on AI and Democracy at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics, also flagged the speed of which AI technologies are being deployed without safety checks.

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Safety evaluations, ethical standards for digital products are non-existent – Chris Wylie

“Back when it was very much still research projects or conversations among practitioners, we kind of had the luxury to ask ourselves: what does it mean – for instance, for disinformation – that now everybody can produce synthetic text? Or what does it mean when we know that there are biases and stereotypes that are embedded in these machines? How would we go about thinking about [their] impact on society?” she elaborated.

“And I think that changes scale in terms of the urgency of those questions when, suddenly, everybody has access to these technologies and they’re suddenly being deployed really quickly in society.”

In an earlier episode of The AI Series, experts Mike Wooldridge and Urvashi Aneja, together with Ressa, underscored how AI tools like ChatGPT can spread disinformation and hate speech at scale because of how they’re trained on internet data, which is also filled with disinformation and hate speech.

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What happens when AI reaps what it sows?

“Those decisions were not made because they were reviewing the scholarship…or recognizing other social consequences,” Whittaker asserted.

“Those decisions were made because every quarter, they need to report to their board positive predictions or results around profit and growth. So we have these powerful technologies being ultimately controlled by a handful of companies that will always put [profit and growth] first.”

On government regulation

Should the use of AI be regulated by the government? Not quite, said Whittaker.

“The solution space, in my view, seems to not go far enough,” she commented, adding that recently-passed laws on tech regulation have not attacked the surveillance business model that runs digital platforms.

“The solutions often look a lot like extending surveillance and control to government, expanding the surveillance apparatus of large tech companies to…government actors who will then have a hand in determining what is acceptable speech, what is acceptable content.”

Whittaker pointed out the rise of authoritarian rule all over the world. In the United States, she cited, issues of reproductive health care being criminalized or books being banned prevail. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, advocates are attacked online and offline for criticizing the government.

Francois suggested a diversity of platforms that are not tied to surveillance capitalism business models and instead operate based on public interest, security, and safety – like Whittaker’s Signal, for instance.

A November 2023 article on the Signal website explained that, by 2025, the platform will need at least $50 million (around P2.8 billion) for it to run, adding that the amount “is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.”

In 2023, Meta earned $134.90 billion in revenue while incurring $88.15 billion in costs and expenses.

Whittaker also suggested the “classic answer” of “workers banding together to use their collective leverage to push their employers.”

As an example, she cited the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike in 2023, during which film and television show writers stopped working for several months as they sought, among others, for AI use to be regulated in scriptwriting.

“[W]e should and we are able to invent alternative futures, alternative models, and then to say, indeed, this is not how we want to live with technology,” said Francois.

“It’s not being a Luddite to say these are not models that should continue. Let’s invent alternative futures that are more rights-preserving, that are better for society.”

The AI Series takes a deep dive into the promises and the dangers of AI, and what the public can do about them. Watch it on Al Jazeera’s Studio B: Unscripted here. – Rappler.com

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author

Christa Escudero

Christa Escudero is a digital communications specialist for Rappler.

A primary reason for modern resistance is **fear of job displacement**; many worry that automation and artificial intelligence will lead to significant job losses, especially in sectors vulnerable to technological replacement, mirroring historical anxieties about machinery replacing workers in textile mills .

Title:

Content: Relatively Luddite court increasingly faces questions about technology in modern life

April 3, 2023 - Early spring is often uneventful for Court watchers: Oral arguments are winding down, the Court has yet to issue most of its decisions, and the docket for the next Term is still taking shape. This spring at the Court is especially quiet. The Justices have been issuing decisions at a record-slow pace, and the Term's already-small docket actually has shrunk a bit.

Shortly after hearing oral argument in January, the Court dismissed as improvidently granted In re Grand Jury, a case about the scope of the attorney-client privilege for multipurpose communications containing a mix of legal and business advice. And in February, the Court removed from its argument calendar an immigration case in which Republicans sought to keep in place Title 42, a COVID-era policy introduced by the Trump administration that allowed immigration officials to expel thousands of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Biden administration told the Court in February that the case would become moot because Title 42 will expire when the COVID public health emergency ends on May 11.

Meanwhile, as this article goes to press, the Court is grappling with whether it has the power to reach a decision in one of the Term's blockbuster cases. Moore v. Harper, which involves state legislatures' power to regulate federal elections, was argued in December, but the North Carolina Supreme Court recently agreed to rehear the case. The parties disagree about whether that rehearing order divests the U.S. Supreme Court of jurisdiction, so it's possible that this Term's docket will shrink even more before the Term ends.

Of course things are not quiet for the Justices, who still have outstanding opinions in an unprecedented percentage of their merits docket (about 85%). Those forthcoming decisions include highly anticipated questions about affirmative action in college admissions, the scope of the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial gerrymandering, and the intersection of free speech and anti-discrimination laws.

While the nation awaits these and other decisions from the 2022 Term, a number of important questions affecting businesses are making their way up to the Court. Several of them share a common theme, and for Justices who — as Justice Elena Kagan recently quipped — are not exactly "the nine greatest experts on the internet," that theme might be surprising: technology in modern life. Indeed, the Court has long been known for its almost Luddite tendencies: Chambers still circulate important communications via hard copy, and it took a global pandemic for the Court to livestream oral argument audio.

Two cases on the Court's current docket highlighted the Justices' awareness of their relative lack of tech savvy. Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh are both about the extent to which social media companies can be held liable for content posted on their platforms. Gonzalez represents the first time that the Court will consider the scope of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally immunizes website hosts from liability arising from third-party content.

The question in that case is whether section 230's immunity applies when a site uses an algorithm to recommend content posted by others. And Twitter tests a novel theory that would hold social media platforms liable under the Antiterrorism Act for "aiding and abetting terrorism" because they allegedly could have taken more aggressive steps to detect and prevent terrorists from using their widely available platforms.

During the lengthy February oral arguments in these cases — which collectively spanned over five hours — the Justices wrestled with where and how to draw appropriate lines in this area. The Court's decisions in these closely watched cases could have major consequences for website hosts and users.

In the meantime, another significant question impacting the internet may soon be before the Court. A trio of pending petitions involves First Amendment challenges to Texas and Florida laws that restrict major social media companies' ability to moderate speech on their platforms (NetChoice v. Paxton, NetChoice v. Moody, and Florida v. NetChoice).

The Texas law generally prohibits large social media companies from censoring speech based on a speaker's viewpoint. Florida's law bars large social media companies from banning political candidates or "journalistic enterprises" and imposes various disclosure and notice requirements on the companies' content-moderating policies. For example, social media companies must publish their standards for censoring content and speakers, must notify users before implementing any changes to their policies, and must provide a "thorough rationale" for any content-moderation decisions they make.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Florida's content-moderating restrictions but upheld most of the law's notice provisions, while the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas' law in its entirety.

Last May, the Court granted an emergency application to stay the Texas law from going into effect, and given the split of authority and importance of the issue, many Court watchers expected a cert grant earlier this year. Instead, on Jan. 23, the Court invited the Solicitor General to express the views of the United States.

That may have been a move by the Court to postpone consideration of these laws until it has decided Gonzalez and Twitter. After all, whether social media companies can be held liable for third-party content — the question at the heart of Gonzalez and Twitter — may impact the Court's view of whether a state can constitutionally restrict social media companies from censoring that content.

There is no formal deadline for the invited briefs, and we'd typically expect the Solicitor General to chime in before the 2022 Term comes to a close this spring. But given the potential interplay between NetChoice and Gonzalez and Twitter, along with the likelihood of late-June decisions in the latter cases, the NetChoice petitions may remain pending until the Court's 2023 Term opens in October.

Other questions arising from the use of technology in modern life are also on the horizon. Two recently filed petitions ask the Court to consider whether and how a defendant's virtual presence in a state via a website or app affects the "minimum contacts" analysis for assessing personal jurisdiction (Daimler Trucks North America v. Superior Court of Los Angeles County and VNG Corp. v. Lang Van, Inc.).

That's an issue the Court left open in recent cases — including Walden v. Fiore (2014) and Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court (2021) — and its significance is only increasing. While plaintiffs argue that a defendant's online presence is sufficient for personal jurisdiction, many defendants worry that the mere maintenance of a website could expose even a small business to suit in all 50 states. Time will tell whether the Court will provide clarity in this important area.

With recent news buzzing about the implications of Chat GPT for practicing lawyers, it's no surprise that questions about artificial intelligence are also making their way to the Justices. On March 17, an AI developer filed a cert petition asking the Court to consider whether an AI system can be listed as an inventor on a patent application (Thaler v. Vidal).

In the decision below, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the Patent Act's definition of "inventor" includes only natural persons and accordingly rejected the patent applications that listed only AI inventors. Urging the Court to grant cert, the petitioner argues that depriving AI-generated inventions of patent protection will "discourage technological advancement and needlessly squander the United States' opportunity to be the global leader at the forefront of AI and the law."

The Court is scheduled to consider this petition before the end of the Term, but it's possible that we won't know until the fall whether the Court will take it up, depending on when the Patent Office files its response. Whether or not the Court grants this petition, questions about intellectual property and AI are likely to recur. In February, for example, the Copyright Office indicated in a letter ruling that only images that are the product of human authorship can be copyrighted.

Finally, the Justices will soon decide whether to address an issue of interest to the tech industry and smartphone users alike: whether Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines on reporting cellphone radiation impliedly preempt state health and safety laws on the theory that those state laws would effectively require emissions levels lower than what the FCC has allowed.

A group of iPhone users has urged the Court to resolve this question, claiming that it has not only split the courts of appeals three ways but also implicates more fundamental questions about how to approach intent in the context of implied agency preemption (Cohen v. Apple Inc.). The Court called for a response to these arguments, and Apple's brief in opposition to cert is due on April 14, meaning that we should know by late May whether the Justices will resolve the case.

All of these questions have the potential to impact businesses, but whether or not the Court decides to take on these issues remains to be seen. If it does, the Justices will be on their way to becoming a little more tech savvy.

Shay Dvoretzky and Emily Kennedy are regular, joint contributing columnists on the U.S. Supreme Court for Reuters Legal News and Westlaw Today.

Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias. Westlaw Today is owned by Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.

Shay Dvoretzky, a partner in Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom’s Washington, D.C., office, is the head of the firm’s Supreme Court and appellate litigation group. He represents clients in appellate matters in the U.S. Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals and state appellate courts. He can be reached at shay.dvoretzky@skadden.com.

Emily Kennedy is firm counsel in the Supreme Court and appellate litigation group in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. She can be reached at emily.kennedy@skadden.com.

The rapid pace of technological change can leave workers feeling unprepared and insecure about their future employment prospects .

**Insecurity in navigating digital spaces** is another factor, particularly among older generations who find digital systems overwhelming and prefer familiar, non-digital interactions, leading to resistance against adopting new technologies .

Title:

Content: Blog post

We cannot buy tomorrow — using stories to understand technology change

By Mark P. McDonald | December 03, 2021 | 0 Comments

tech NO logyPersonal ObservationHuman AbilityFuture of High TechDigital Society

The dynamic and accelerating rate of change, disruption, societal concerns, etc can make it difficult to see what it all means, the direction we are heading in.  Speculative fiction is one of the ways that people try to make sense out of what can appear to be senseless.  Gartner instituted a special project called “Stories from Planet B“.  The goal was to use stories and other artifacts to help stakeholders envision preferred and plausible futures in a way that is transformative, inspiring and disrupting.

Here is my story, you can find the others at “Stories from Planet B” on Gartner.com

Enjoy

Mark

YOU CANNOT BUY TOMORROW

Tara sat down, rubbing her leg to work out a cramp she had picked up on the walk from her house. She had delayed this to the last minute. “Can’t turn ten ‘till you talk to the old men,” her brother reminded her.

Tara cleared her throat. “Question: What was it like at the start?“

Response: Project 2207, Darius Senna, aged 105, recalling the founding of Pantos.

The front of the room darkened. “Tara. The name means star,” came a man’s voice from the darkness.

“Dad says it’s also a lubricant that has gone bad, ‘Tar — ahh!’”  The room got even darker.

“We call ourselves Pantos. The fifth wave of Planet B colonists, B5, like the vitamin,” the man’s voice continued.

Darius Senna walked out of the darkness. He was wearing a blue collarless shirt rolled up at the sleeves, dark pants and brown boots. Tara noticed his rough hands, and his face, lined from UV rays. A bench appeared. He sat down.

“We were not the first. The first were the explorers. They discovered Planet B, determined it could support life, and summoned us to our new home. Then came ships, filled with those who could afford to leave Earth behind.”

Senna leaned back. Tara noticed the old style comms implant on his wrist. “Six centuries ago, the English sent ships carrying goldsmiths, jewelers, governors and soldiers to Jamestown. They sought to civilize their ‘new world.’ Likewise, the first ships to Planet B carried engineers bankers, officials — the cream of a curdled civilization.”

Looking out the window, Darius continued: “Those first ships were technological marvels. Gossamer solar sails, filled with technology and terraforming equipment. They landed in the northern hemisphere of Planet B. When their technology failed, they starved, just like the colonists at Jamestown.”

He paused and looked at Tara. “After three more waves, some of them are still around, eating from waste regenerators, asking their tech why it doesn’t work. We don’t see them much. We think about them even less.” Darius leaned forward, clasping his hands, just like Tara’s father did when making a point. “We Pantos understand — the physical world feeds the digital world. When the physical does not work, the digital does not matter.”

“Old Earth technology changed in the early 21st century. It turned inward. It became obsessed with experience, entertainment and consumption.” His face hardened. “Before then, technology had made people’s lives better. Then society went digital, and consumption mattered more.”

Darius unclasped his hands. “Data replaced reason. People focused on themselves. Technology meant looking down at a screen, not up at the world around them. People thought it was wonderful. Screens made them feel better.”

He leaned back. Tara noticed the scar down the inside of his left arm. No one had scars anymore, not since the invention of Dermaplast. Darius saw her staring and, almost under his breath, said: “With their narrow datasets, myopic algorithms and self-centered beliefs, they couldn’t see what was really coming. And they never did.”

“I had just turned twenty-seven,” Darius said. He paused, lost in a memory.

He resumed, “We Pantos are not Luddites. We are some of the finest innovators and engineers humanity has ever known. Old Earth technologies were advanced, but consumptive. They were great for solving little problems. Distributing products instantaneously, keeping their users’ attention, showing each other how successful they were.”

“But when the big problems came, technology could not handle it. The heat, the drought, the pandemics, the inequalities, the authoritarian states. This was the world as it really was, not how it appeared online. Their technologies spent what resources they had, but could not create more. When their inherited wealth dried up, it all fell apart.”

“You know why we Pantos tell each other, ‘You can’t buy …”

“… Tomorrow,” Tara finished. She heard that at least ten times a month.

“Right,” Darius replied. “We say that when it’s time to get to work.”

“The ‘northerners’ brought Earth’s ethos of control and exploitation. Digital entertainment, not physical engagement. They binged on culture as they starved and froze to death. If you go up north you can see the graves of trillionaires, and screens looping videos demonstrating their importance.” Darius went silent.

Tara waited, unsure of what to do next. “If we are not the first, then when did we get here?”

Darius looked Tara directly in the face. “We came in the last wave. We came on outdated ships driven by ions. The ships were cannibalized once we landed on the southern hemisphere, far from the first four failures.”

He smiled, “The first waves came to Planet B in space limos. Pantos came in space beaters.”

“Pantos went to work. Our technology fits our hands, not our eyes. We built our homes, rather than having them printed. Building them ourselves proved we were here to stay. Doing things yourself teaches you the true costs and benefits of your actions.”

He paused for a moment, and said: “Tara, remember to feed the Briax when you get home.”

She knew. Doing builds ownership and responsibility; consuming builds nothing but your waistline.

Darius resumed: “Technology is part of our agency. Planet B sustains life, but we are building a world to ensure our minds stay broad; we think before we act. We make mistakes, like we did at Junction.”

He rubbed the inside of his left arm.

“Failure is acceptable when we learn from it. Unacceptable when it is a cost of doing business, or called an externality.”

“We stay strong, acknowledging challenges and celebrating progress. Technology encourages contribution, not consumption. Contribution brings meaning. Meaning motivates innovation and improvement. If it does not work for all of us, then it does not work well enough for any of us. We have much work to do. You know…”

“You can’t buy tomorrow,” Tara repeated, reflexively.

The room brightened. Senna was gone, as was the bench. A woman’s voice spoke up. “Congratulations, Tara. Welcome to your next decade.”

Tara stood up. As she was leaving, she thought she heard the woman say: “Another turning ten. A blessing.”

“Yes,” came Senna’s reply. “Old enough to understand, and young enough to care.”

**Cultural and social isolation** also contributes, as technology enables more solitary activities and can foster nostalgia for past collective experiences, fueling opposition to the pervasive role of technology in daily life .

Title:

Content: Sunak risked looking like a doofus – but his killer robots summit was a success

The national mood has turned against the prime minister, but he should be praised when he gets things right

John Rentoul
Saturday 04 November 2023 15:07
Comments
Sunak 'delighted' Elon Musk attended AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park

We should proclaim the unsung success of Rishi Sunak’s artificial intelligence summit. It is easy to mock the prime minister’s fanboy interview with Elon Musk, and we can certainly have fun at Sunak’s naivety in saying that the British ought to be ready to give up “the security of a regular paycheck ... and be comfortable with failure”. But the summit itself showed that Britain still matters, despite Brexit.

It showed that Sunak was prepared, for the sake of the national interest, to take the personal risk of looking like a doofus. It was in the national interest to organise a global conference on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), even though it was widely predicted that it would fail. No one will come, it was said. They won’t be able to agree anything useful, everyone agreed.

But they did come, and enough of them at a senior enough level, including Kamala Harris, vice president of the US, and Wu Zhaohui, a vice-minister of science and technology in the Chinese government, to make it count. All the independent specialist observers I could find said – often to their surprise – that the agreement, the Bletchley Declaration, was worthwhile.

Sunak said to Musk, in their conversation at the end of the summit, that one of the questions he wanted to ask was: “How do you transpose that culture from places like Silicon Valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular pay cheque to go and start something and be comfortable with failure?”

He was talking about himself, a transposition from California, confident enough to risk failure in organising the summit, and indeed to take the risk of engaging not just with China but with Musk.

The same argument applied to both. We may not like them, but China and Musk are both powers on the world stage, and if Britain wants to be a leader in tech it needs to engage with them.

Leaving the cringier parts of their discussion to one side, Musk repaid Sunak’s investment in him handsomely. San Francisco and Greater London are the “two leading locations on earth” for AI, he said, adding that Britain is “doing very well.” He said: “Thanks for this summit. I think it will go down in history as quite important.”

And he praised Sunak for inviting China. “Having them here, I think [is] essential really. If they’re not participants, it’s pointless.” Take that, Liz Truss, China “hawk”.

Musk was there for the whole two-day event at Bletchley Park, the HQ of the Allied code breaking operation during World War II, along with Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, and the representatives of 28 countries and the EU.

Personally, Musk’s musings about us having to find something meaningful to do with our lives when AI has abolished work seem to be a form of neo-Luddism. Clever people have been predicting that technology would mean the end of employment for centuries now. John Maynard Keynes in 1930 predicted that we would be working 15 hours a week by 2030.

Similarly, I am on the sceptical end of the “killer robots will kill us all” spectrum. I haven’t seen ChatGPT do anything more useful than write good-quality pastiches. But as Musk said, although he thinks that “on balance, AI will be a force for good”, “the probability of it going bad is not zero per cent”. So it makes sense for governments to try to keep up with it to “safeguard the interest of the public”.

In which case, in normal times, you might expect the British media to say that the prime minister had a good week. You might expect commentators to contrast Sunak’s successful summit with the shambolism on display in the Covid inquiry hearings. You might expect long blog posts about how we British undervalue quiet competence, and berating us for having been taken in by a prime minister who could do jokes. Well, we get a lot of second, but not so much of the first.

You might even expect the contrast to be drawn between Sunak – who set an ambitious objective in the national interest, which showed that Britain isn’t some neutralist backwater yet, and delivered it – and Keir Starmer. The Labour leader, who can’t hold his own party together over his first foreign-policy challenge, and who set out on Friday in his alternative King’s speech a programme of such vacuity that it would have embarrassed the official opposition on a parish council.

But we have entered a phase in British politics where the government can do no right, and no one expects the opposition to offer an alternative beyond being Not the Conservative Party. Every now and then democracies decide that the party in power has had long enough, and that if the main party out of power is not actually in the hands of malevolent fools, then it is the other lot’s turn. We seem to be approaching such a moment now.

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**Distrust of technology** is significant, with concerns about privacy, security, and online scams—especially among the elderly—creating skepticism about the safety and reliability of digital tools .

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.”

See also  Just the mystery

A **nostalgia for simplicity** leads some to feel that modern technology complicates life and detracts from the directness and control of traditional methods .

Concerns about **technological dependence** are common, with arguments that increasing reliance on technology diminishes essential skills and human connections, potentially reducing personal agency and the quality of relationships .

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I happened to watch Pitch Perfect (2012) the other night with my wife. Now, that’s a funny movie. And Adam Devine is a comedy treasure.

Jokes aside, there’s a part of the film when aspiring musician Beca (Anna Kendrick) volunteers at the campus radio station. There she works alongside Jesse (Skylar Astin), another student with big musical aspirations. They mostly hang out amongst stacks of LPs, serving as college DJs.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a dramatized version of a school radio station. “Saved By the Bell” offered a similar storyline when Zack Morris and the gang took over Bayside High School’s Tiger Beat.

Why are we talking about this?

For one simple reason. Late at night, laughing along to Pitch Perfect’s one-liners (“Look, just so you know, I’m not a total nerd. I also happen to be super-into close-up magic.”) I had an epiphany: Tech doesn’t just disrupt whole sectors, making “indispensable” products obsolete. (Most phones now come with cameras and calculators once sold as stand-alone items.) No, tech changes how we relate to one another. Specifically, tech transforms activities we once did collectively (DJing together in a sound booth) and makes them solitary endeavors.

Here’s another example: I grew up loving The Doors. I must have seen Oliver Stones’ 1991 eponymous biopic a hundred times. Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison is just that good. He even sings all The Lizard King’s songs.

Here’s the point: Several iconic scenes from The Doors feature the band, the engineers, session players, and groupies hanging in the studio as they produce iconic tracks such as “The Soft Parade.” Likewise, there are many scenes of groups of people collectively making music in other recent biopics, like Love & Mercy and Elvis.

In a word, these scenes make the creative act seem fun.

Now along comes AI and all that is going out the window. You don’t need a bunch of people to create music anymore. You can do it all by yourself.

All you need is a computer.

With a computer, one human can leverage AI to appropriate the musical stylings of Drake and The Weeknd to produce “Heart on My Sleeve,” the pop song “created” by Ghostwriter and submitted for Grammy consideration. One person armed with a computer can also use AI to mash up Hank Williams singing N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton”—producing what’s being called “Hanksta Rap.”

More than that, one person using AI can sound musically gifted.

How? According to BBC News, through the 2018 app Boomy, “You choose from a number of genres, click on ‘create song’, and the AI will compose one for you in less than 30 seconds. It swiftly picks the track’s key, chords, and melody. And from there you can then finesse your song. You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals.”

Admittedly, the article makes it clear the output quality can be subpar. It often sounds “computer generated.” But remember: We are talking about software that’s five years old—pre ChatGPT. Heck, we might as well be talking about the “Mad Men” era—it feels that long ago, in tech years.

The point is that Boomy, and many other AI music-generating apps like Splice, Trymusicflow, and Jamahook, now put regular people in the creative driver’s seat. They give us unprecedented abilities. (Just imagine telling Jim Morrison back in 1966 at the Whiskey a Go Go that there will come a day when, through tech, anyone can sound like him singing any song they choose.)

To even start to grok the powers we now possess we would do well to consult Marshall McLuhan. Like us, McLuhan lived through a time of tremendous technological upheaval. Back in the mid-20th century, the Canadian philosopher struggled to comprehend the rise of global mass media transmitted electronically via emerging TV sets, phones, and video cameras.

Frankly, he often felt overwhelmed by such tech.

There seemed to be no precedent to enable people to meet the moment. Then he recalled a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” The tale features three fishermen suddenly sucked into a whirlpool while at sea. This vortex nearly defies words it’s so terrifying. And though the narrator is a competent seaman, he finds himself at a loss to save himself.

This situation, thought McLuhan, was analogous to the world he found himself in. All around him were people unable to process so much change so quickly. It upended everything that had come before, demolishing reality.

Yet McLuhan did find a way to meet his moment. He suggested we could take something from the narrator’s survival approach. After watching his companions perish, the seaman decides to learn from their mistakes.

In “Footprints in the Sands of Crime” (1946), McLuhan writes: “The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a scientific interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.”

McLuhan elaborates further in “The Mechanical Bride” (1951): “Poe’s sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. The present book likewise makes few attempts to attack the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress and in which everybody is involved.”

Interpreting McLuhan’s observations written almost 75 years ago allows us a fighting chance to face our own unparalleled moment. Like the mass media sage, we find ourselves adrift at sea contemplating deep fakes, generative AI, virtual influencers, AI companions, chatbots, and so many extant cultural artifacts that would have been mere gibberish back when our biggest fear was a Y2K meltdown.

But as another 1960s vocal impresario once sang, “the beat goes on.” Post-COVID, here we are in 2023 ensconced in our home offices surrounded by our endless screens and so many newfangled gizmos and applications. Whether we’re building a website or taking a new product to market, we can do what it once took entire organizations—alone.

But what if we still need the human touch to thrive?

In that case, we may still turn to tech—but with a twist. Consider how Ashley Schaer empowers her clients. A “fractional COO,” she gives small businesses an edge inaccessible only a few years ago—before collaborative software enabled solopreneurs to go it alone.

“The C-suite arrangement exists in part, so the CEO needn’t be an expert on every topic,” says Schaer. “They hold responsibility for the entire organization, yet rely on a COO and other top execs to handle areas where they are weak. Today’s solopreneurs can achieve the same results without massive offices or a cadre of highly paid executives. It all comes down to finding one expert partner.”

COOs are notoriously left-brained thinkers—number crunchers, practical, detail oriented—and Schaer is no exception. “Think of me as Roy Disney to his brother Walt Disney DIS ,” says Schaer. “Or Jack Antonoff to Taylor Swift. I complement my clients’ right-brain creativity, turning their business dreams into practical, profitable realities.”

Zooming out, the inner luddite in so many of us is sometimes tempted to throw up our hands in disgust at our brave new world in which teens spend hour after hour on TikTok—or at the very idea of OnlyFans, a porn subscription site that often feels like little more than a mashup of 20th century sex hotlines, mixed in with a video component and a sprinkling of social media interactivity.

But like with so many things—even lethal maelstroms—there’s a silver lining to be found. Sans our technological tools I wouldn’t be banging out this article on my laptop in a Seattle airport before my flight boards. Neither could I upload it for you, dear reader, to enjoy the content wherever you happen to be.

Despite such net positives, I find myself coming back to this idea of how tech breeds loneliness. Coworking conduits such as WeWork were meant to assuage these concerns. Ditto for networking mixers at which the laptop class can get out from behind its keyboards for some good old fashioned face time.

But is it enough?

That remains to be seen. For now, I won’t stop rewatching old films recalling how we used to come together with wonder. Time’s arrow is forever set in one direction. We cannot change that. Nor can we halt tech’s inexorable march. Still, my hope is that in the midst of enjoying our newfound powers and productivity we may remember what makes it all worthwhile: each other.

You and me.

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