Yells at Cloud

 Found on LinkedIn today:

"We're not Luddites screaming at the sky that time is moving too fast."

The Luddites wouldn't have seen themselves that way, either. Technological advance produces winners and losers. The Luddites were on the losing end, and history, as they say, is written by the winners; which is why "Luddite" is such a pejorative that even people who are basically making the same argument the historical Luddites were run away from the label.

I wonder if the problem that opponents of today's technological advances have is that the evolution of "Luddite" into a pejorative has resulted in a loss of historical memory. The Luddites have come to be seen not as people who fought to maintain standards of worker pay and quality of output, but as technophobic simpletons, seeking to hold back a tide that would lead to better lives for literally everyone. Much like many people who object to the use of generative automation are today. To be sure, there is a certain amount of self-interest on the line here, on either side.

The American public, broadly speaking, has a habit of expecting sacrifices for the good of the collective. The rub tends to be that the people calling for the sacrifices aren't in the position to make them themselves. The person looking to generative automation to lower prices for them isn't expecting their job to be one that goes away, any more than the person looking to end fossil fuel usage thinks that they're the one who will be looking for a new line of work.

The understanding that these people are somehow backwards tends to paper over the very real crises that they're facing; one that they understand is likely to be ignored if it comes to pass.