00:00Hooray for the fourth industrial revolution. Robots will do the boring work for us.
00:07Driverless cars will no longer be stuck in traffic jams, and the crime rate will decrease
00:11thanks to facial recognition technology.
00:14Or will things turn out a little differently? Where did techno-optimists even come from?
00:19Why do they argue so fiercely with techno-pessimists?
00:21Maybe the point isn't about technology at all?
00:25Let's try to figure out this complicated issue.
00:27So, hundreds of millions of jobs are disappearing from the economy.
00:32Usually, after this phrase, people start assuring us with a knowing look that, in return,
00:38hundreds of millions of new jobs will appear that will require different, specialized skills.
00:43In our new reality, this is really the case.
00:46A 40-year-old office worker can throw a couple dozen neural networks.
00:50He trained himself into the virtual ocean and catch an algorithm for trading on the stock exchange,
00:55which will be called the Golden Fish.
00:59Well, now let's get back to our Luddites.
01:02Let's take a look at how this movement developed, where they came from, and who they actually were.
01:08But why were people who feared losing their jobs because of new technologies called that?
01:13There was a mysterious character named King Ludd.
01:17Just a couple of centuries ago, the owners of stocking factories in Manchester started receiving threatening letters from him.
01:24He demanded that the entrepreneurs get rid of their mechanical looms or he would destroy their thriving business.
01:30According to another legend, Ned Ludd, in a fit of rage, smashed two weaving looms with a hammer.
01:36In 1810, his signature, although this has not been proven, appeared on a workers' manifesto calling for the removal of
01:42machines from factories.
01:44Inspired by the actions of the mythical Ned Ludd, workers engaged in sabotage, organized strikes, and sometimes even killed their
01:51employers.
01:52The centers of Luddite activity were the counties of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire.
01:58They attacked entrepreneurs and businesses at night.
02:01Every member of the movement took an oath of loyalty.
02:04Ned Ludd became the symbolic leader of the movement.
02:07According to legend, he resembled Robin Hood.
02:10The rebels hid in Nottinghamshire, the homeland of the famous noble bandit.
02:14And it was from there that they sent their threatening letters to wealthy factory owners.
02:19Later, all people who opposed the technological process began to be called Luddites.
02:24But the phenomenon itself appeared even earlier.
02:27Rapid industrialization devalued the work of yesterday's specialists and forced people to trade the fresh air of working in the
02:35fields for the endless noise of the factory.
02:38Now, even women and children could work.
02:40Anyone could be trained to work with machines, and the new workers could be paid less.
02:45Factories and plants were built quickly.
02:47Their owners became wealthy, and economic inequality grew.
02:51The first to feel the real threat from the mechanization of production were home-based textile workers.
02:57In 1768, they attacked the workshop of James Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning machine, and broke his machines.
03:06Later, in 1792, Manchester workers acted more radically,
03:10and burned down the first factory with wool-carting machines belonging to the inventor and entrepreneur Richard Arkwright.
03:16Such an attitude toward technology was not due to fear of the machines themselves,
03:21but rather radical resistance to the factory owners.
03:25Since the 15th century, weavers made up 50% of the country's industry,
03:29and the income from this sector increased annually by 7-8%,
03:33while the population grew by only 1%.
03:35So weaving at that time was not only prestigious, but also profitable.
03:40Weavers were protected by laws passed in 1563.
03:45The number of masters was strictly regulated to keep incomes high,
03:49and you could only start your own business after 7 years of apprenticeship with a master.
03:53A number of such apprentices was also regulated.
03:57With the advent of machines, there was no need to painstakingly study for 7 years to weave.
04:02Even children could now do this work for low wages, and this was immediately taken advantage of.
04:08The exploitation of child labor was considered a matter of course.
04:12A huge number of machine workers simply made licensed hand-weavers unnecessary.
04:18Hence the dissatisfaction with the latest technologies of that time, the weaving machines.
04:24So how did the government respond to the Laudites?
04:27To fight them, spies were hired who were supposed to infiltrate the organizations and sow confusion within them.
04:34To radically resolve the situation with the aggressive workers, government troops were deployed.
04:40At some point, the damage caused by the protesters was so great that more troops had to be sent to
04:46suppress them
04:46than were used to defend against Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.
04:50Between 1811 and 1813, the Laudites destroyed approximately a thousand machines.
04:58The British government passed a law to tighten measures against industrial sabotage.
05:03To start with, as a preventive measure, more than 50 people were hanged on the gallows.
05:09Those who were luckier got an all-expenses-paid 14-year stay in a labor colony in Australia.
05:14The end of the Luddite uprising is considered to be 1817 when about 300 workers armed with pitchforks and spears
05:23marched toward London.
05:25The movement was brutally suppressed and the protesters were punished.
05:29The harsh suppression of the Luddites sparked a cultural backlash and became one of the factors behind the rise of
05:35Romanticism.
05:36This new ideological movement placed humans and nature first.
05:41Romanticism was wary of technology.
05:44This was reflected, for example, in the famous novel Frankenstein.
05:48Many of the Romantic's prophecies came true.
05:50The mechanization of war, the devaluation of human life, the invention of weapons of mass destruction,
05:56and the growth of labor mechanization, which led to increasing unemployment.
06:00Here's a classic example from modern times.
06:04Driverless trucks will soon replace the popular American profession of truck driver,
06:08which allows a person without a college degree to earn a middle-class salary.
06:13Three and a half million drivers will be left without jobs.
06:16The needs of truck drivers, in turn, provide work for people in other roadside industries,
06:21motels, restaurants, gas stations, car washes.
06:24What should be done with all these millions of extra mouths to feed?
06:28Should the government pay a universal basic income?
06:31It's hard to believe in that for now, considering that experiments with such payments in different countries
06:37haven't exactly made headlines for their effectiveness.
06:40I wonder what the kind and caring Bill Gates suggests in this case.
06:45Here's his plan.
06:47Introduce a tax on robots, and use the money received for humanitarian aid to those affected by unemployment,
06:53who, thanks to a basic income, could become social workers and help the elderly and children.
06:58By the way, it was Bill Gates, together with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk,
07:03who became nominees for the Anti-Award Luddite of the Year, back in the now distant year 2015.
07:09But generally speaking, any reasonably intelligent person should understand
07:13that corporations are not really interested in protecting anyone.
07:16The development of technology in countries with so-called totalitarian regimes raises even more questions.
07:23The example of China with its official social credit system has already become a cliché.
07:28But in light of recent events, it seems like the whole planet has become China.
07:32What else can the famous techno-pessimist philosophers add to this?
07:36The development of technology gives the illusion of controlling reality,
07:40allowing a person to feel omnipotent.
07:42But in return, they impoverish the spectrum of human thought,
07:46reducing it to a dualistic one, to a machine-like understanding of things.
07:50Since technology solves pressing problems, it becomes a necessity,
07:55and everything ambiguous, elusive, and paradoxical in a person is sacrificed to it.
08:01The pursuit of rationality can lead to a person becoming just an object with a set of properties,
08:06which will bring humanity to another round of dehumanization.
08:10The ideas of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev are in many ways similar to these thoughts.
08:16In his work Man and Machine, he says that the advent of the machine,
08:19although it brought benefits in the form of a comfortable and carefree life,
08:23has turned man into an amorphous, spiritually empty idler.
08:27According to the philosopher, technology deals terrible blows to humanism,
08:31the humanistic worldview, and the humanistic ideal of man and culture.
08:36But Berdyaev does not blame technology directly, since it is neutral by nature.
08:40It was not the machine that deprived man of his soul.
08:42He himself became soulless, and machinism is only a consequence of this hardening of the soul.
08:47The machine-driven, rationalized world is not interested in upholding humanistic ideals,
08:54such as truth, beauty, and justice.
08:56Such a world is governed by the laws of efficiency,
08:59and can lead to the establishment of a banal digital totalitarianism.
09:03Lewis Mumford, a historian and philosopher of technology,
09:06argues in his book The Myth of the Machine,
09:08that at some point, humanity's desire to gain power over nature transformed into an inhuman mega-machine.
09:14This is a prototype of a totalitarian system,
09:17in which each person is just an insignificant, interchangeable, and easily replaceable part,
09:23in a complex mechanism with strict discipline and hierarchy,
09:27guarded by a bureaucratic apparatus.
09:29Imperable physical labor is one of humanity's main occupations,
09:32which is quite unnatural, because by nature humans strive for freedom and development.
09:37It would seem wonderful when machines replace this Sisyphean labor,
09:41but technological expansion destroys individuality,
09:44since thousands of similar people are working all around.
09:48Mumford believes that technology, although efficient,
09:50is an unnatural offspring of the industrial era.
09:53In such a world, a person loses their humanity, social, and cultural values.
09:58According to Mumford, it was technocratic expansion that gave rise to mass society,
10:04and perhaps thanks to technology,
10:06the transition from manual labor to machine labor
10:08established capitalism as the dominant economic model.
10:12In turn, he drove a few more nails into the coffin of humanistic ideals.
10:17Today, Neo-Luddism raises questions not only about social inequality
10:21and the economic hopelessness of workers,
10:23which people suffered from in the 19th century
10:26and still suffer from in the 21st century,
10:28but it also calls for discussions about creating new technologies more thoughtfully.
10:32Progress cannot be stopped, but we need to be prepared for it,
10:36perhaps even at the legislative level.
10:40After all, as long as ethical issues in technology
10:43do not take as important a place as the pursuit of profit,
10:46our world is in danger.
10:47What do you think about this?
10:49Let me know in the comments.
10:51I'd be interested to read them.
10:53See you in future Kramola episodes.
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