Luddites and Luminaries - Part 1
Ludd
In the 19th century in Great Britain the industrial revolution brought mechanised production processes to industries that were formerly done purely by hand. This enabled mass production and required a less skilled labour force to operate the machines. Machines that were quicker to train people to use than to train the more skilled work force required before.
This of course is hugely threatening to the skilled workforce that was about to be raplidly being replaced by mechanisation. In response to this a a group that opposed the new machines emerged.
The movement adopted a name from a folk story of an English weaver called Ned Ludd. The story goes that Ludd, in a “fit of passion”, smashed two knitting frames after an an altercation involving either taunting or whipping. Whether this story is true or not we can’t know. But the 19th century groups that opposed mechanisation in some cases resorted to smashing equipment in protest. Hence adopted the name of the folk hero and called themselves the ‘Luddites’. Today, of course, the term Luddite is still used in a semi-derogatory way to refer to a person or persons who resists the march of technological change.
The Luddites of the 19th century rightly claimed that the machines could not replace skilled crafts people in terms of quality. But once the machines are in use and producing items of reasonable quality its game over for expensive and slow manual labour. The irrational response is to smash the machines in a “fit of passion”.
It’s a very un-human moment when a machine or technology takes away a livelihood. But once the technology threshold is crossed there is no going back. You don’t have to like it, but its inevitable and a somewhat of a waste of energy to fight progress. Adapt or become a relic.
Looming Large
The mechanisation of the textile industry was what caused much consternation and was at the heart of the Luddite movement. One amazing machine that was used in the textile industry during this time was the Jacquard Loom or the Jacquard attachment for the loom. Named for its inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard, the Jacquard process enabled by the loom attachment simplified and automated the task of creating complex patterns on a loom. The magic of the Jacquard process was that it enabled a loom to be “programmed” to repeatably produce intricate patterns without the needing an operator to do it manually. The programs that encoded the patterns were stored on and read by the machine from punched cards.
To traditional weavers, the Jacquard loom must have looked like magic. With simple mechanical power provided by the single operator, the loom would translate instructions punched into the cards into complex woven patterns that previously would require hours of effort and multiple skilled weavers. It must have been both awesome and terrifying. The realisation that your skill has been replaced by an machine with a mysterious knowledge stored in a brain in the form of punched cards.
An Echo
There is a thread (no pun intended!) that runs from the Jacquard Loom all the way to the digital computers of today. I’ll be following that thread in other parts of this series. For now though I want to acknowledge the curious echo today of the Jacquard Loom and it’s effect on the Luddites.
Replace the mysterious language of the Jacquard Looms punched cards with a mysterious collection of knowledge in the form of a Large Language Model (LLM) and we have machines once again producing what looks like magic. Once again doing things that might appear threatening to some of our livelihoods. A new threshold has been crossed and we can’t go back.
Are some of us to be LLMuddites? Or luminaries who seek to understand the new world we have entered? I think for now we need to hear less from the technological luminaries and more from the philosophical ones. To start get to grips with this new revolution. So lets follow the thread and philosophise in part two.
Shameless
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