What Neo-Luddites Get Right (and Wrong) About Big Tech

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Say what you want by Lord Byron, he knew how to turn a sentence. Here he is, speaking in the House of Lords in 1812. His subject is the stupidity of Luddites who raid factories and break machines: “The rejected workers, in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in the arts so beneficial to humanity, they conceived of themselves as sacrificed for improvements in the mechanism.

The term “Luddite” is something of a slur nowadays, a label you’d give to a boomer who hasn’t figured out how podcasts work. But it would have been obvious to Byron’s contemporaries that his words dripped with sarcasm. Byron supported the Luddites. In fact, they had been sacrificed on the altar of productivity improvements. There was nothing ignorant about his violent resistance.

Alongside the “Luddite” label is “the Luddite fallacy,” which refers to the belief that technological progress causes mass unemployment. We call it a fallacy because two centuries of experience have contradicted it; there have always been new jobs, and over time and on average those new jobs have been more productive and better paid than the old ones.

But luddism, it seems, is back. An upcoming book blood on the machine, maintains that “the origins of the rebellion against Big Tech” lie in the Luddite uprising. And for at least a decade, experts have worried about the prospect of mass unemployment.

First there was the notorious “The Future of Jobs” study by Oxford academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013, with the headline finding that 47 per cent of jobs were amenable to automation. Then it was all the taxi drivers and truckers whose jobs would be gobbled up by autonomous vehicles. Now it’s “generative” artificial intelligence that has struck fear into the hearts of creatives everywhere: Dall-E and Midjourney will destroy the jobs of illustrators, ChatGPT and Bard will come for journalists and technical writers.

Will our jobs really be destroyed this time? Or should we sit back and wait for another couple of centuries of productivity-driven prosperity? I think that neither point of view is satisfactory.

Instead, what about the view that technology does not create mass unemployment, but is nonetheless quite capable of destroying livelihoods, creating unintended consequences, and concentrating power in the hands of a few? (I once suggested “neo-Luddite” as a label for this point of view, but sadly, true technophobes made that label their own long ago.)

Consider the ATM: It didn’t make bank tellers redundant. Instead, he freed them up to cross-sell subprime mortgages. Or the digital spreadsheet, which freed humble accounting clerks from the need to do rows and columns of arithmetic and allowed bookkeeping to become (ahem) a more creative profession. These technologies did not destroy jobs, they remade them. Some became more satisfying and enjoyable, others more bleak and exhausting.

In his new book Power and Progresseconomists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that while technological progress can produce broad-based prosperity, there is no guarantee that this will happen quickly, and in some cases, no guarantee that it will happen at all.

“The textile mills of the early British industrial revolution generated great wealth for a few, but did not increase the income of workers for almost a hundred years,” they write. Too late for textile workers who lost good jobs. There are clearer examples, such as the ocean-going ships that enabled the transatlantic slave trade. There are also more subtle ones. Barcoding gave us shorter checkout lines and lower prices, but it also changed the balance of power between retailers and suppliers, between corner stores and major retailers, and ultimately between brick-and-mortar retailers and their competitors. online.

Neo-Luddites can be inspired by John Booth, a 19-year-old apprentice who joined a Luddite attack on a textile mill in April 1812. He was wounded, arrested, and died after allegedly being tortured into revealing the identity of his fellow Luddites. . Booth’s last words became the stuff of legend: “Can you keep a secret?” he whispered to the local priest, who testified that he could. The dying Booth replied, “Me too.” But it was Booth’s first words that deserve our attention. The new machinery, he argued, “might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted.”

In other words, whether new technology helps ordinary citizens depends not only on the nature of the technology, but also on the nature of the society in which that technology is developed and implemented. Acemoglu and Johnson argue that the broad-based burgeoning is currently eluding us, just as it eluded the workers of the first industrial revolution.

What is needed? Better policies, of course: taxes and subsidies to favor the right kind of technology; smart regulations to protect workers’ rights; antitrust actions to dismantle monopolies; all of this, of course, done skilfully and with a minimum of bureaucracy and distortion. To state the task clearly is to see how difficult it is likely to be.

And as Acemoglu and Johnson explain, such policies will fall on rocky ground without countervailing sources of political power capable of dealing with monopolists and billionaires.

In the absence of such conditions, Luddism resorted to what one historian called “riot collective bargaining”, arson, and even murder. The state fought back and, in the words of another historian, “Luddishism ended up on the gallows.” It was a shameful business and a wasted opportunity to reform society and deliver “man’s chief blessing”, as Booth had hoped.

If the latest technologies are truly transformative, we will have that opportunity again. Will we do better this time?

Tim Harford’s Children’s Book, “The Truth Detective” (Wren & Rook), Is Now Available

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