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Geeksylvania t1_jeh2arh wrote

Reply to comment by imnos in The Luddites by scarlettforever

From Wikipedia:

"Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry. Many Luddites were owners of workshops that had closed because factories could sell similar products for less. But when workshop owners set out to find a job at a factory, it was very hard to find one because producing things in factories required fewer workers than producing those same things in a workshop. This left many people unemployed and angry."

They weren't trying to create economic reform or socialized control of industry. They were attaching the competition because people sewing by hand obviously can't compete with machines. They were shortsighted, just like the people now are shortsighted.

Maybe you should consider how industrial textile mills ended clothing scarcity by making clothing incredibly cheap. If the Luddites had it their way, poor people would be walking around in barrels.

Maybe you should consider all the lives that will be saved by AI-based medical innovations. And that's just the beginning.

Technology is a tool. If you are forward-thinking, you will focus on making sure that tool is in the hands of many, not the few. But pretending that you can stop technological progress is absurd.

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imnos t1_jeh4iig wrote

Nobody, including me, is trying to stop technological progress. The point is that common people will not be benefiting from advances as much as they should be, as long as we live in this unregulated capitalist society where the capitalist class reaps all the rewards.

If working people had been rewarded for the massive increases in productivity over the last 50 years, we'd all be on a 3 day week by now, or would at least have pay that kept up with inflation. But that didn't happen, did it?

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