[Pfhreak]

> I'm not against technology

Neither were the Luddites! The Luddites were a labor movement who wanted to ensure that workers in textile mills were being treated fairly. Many Luddites were highly skilled and happy to work with automated looms, they just didn't want factories to fire all the skilled labor and pay pennies on the dollar to unskilled labor. (While holding cloth prices steady.)

[Pfhreak]

Also, as a separate comment, the day will come where software development is automated in some capacity. All the high skill workers may be competing with workers with much less training at lower wages.

The Luddites are a good cautionary tale about when you should protect your working conditions and rights (when the demand for your services is at its peak). So many engineers I talk to these days say things like, "Why would I want to organize/engage in collective bargaining now? My life is good!" rather than, "My work is highly desirable, and my employer might actually come to the negotiating table because it is challenging to replace us right now."

[indigochill]

Software development is already highly automated relative to what it once was. That's what high-level languages are. I expect we will continue to develop even higher-level languages in the future. Some people are only capable of programming in high-level languages because of a lack of understanding of the rest of the stack (and this goes both down into the hardware and up into DevOps that even CS grads are largely unequipped to work with).

I think textile manufacturing is distinct from software engineering, though, because unlike textile demand which is fairly limited (people only need so much fabric), the demand for new software will always exceed supply because the space of useful applications of general-purpose computation is effectively infinite. I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

[DasIch]

This is already happening. Squarespace, Shopify and to some extent Facebook certainly have an impact on the lower end of web development.

Once upon a time you needed to hire someone to get a website for a small business going, now you can do this yourself for a small fee.

[jude-]

> the day will come where software development is automated in some capacity.

It already is. It's called a compiler.

[smitty1e]

Then there are DevOps pipelines and scanning tools.

[antonvs]

> The Luddites are a good cautionary tale about when you should protect your working conditions and rights

But at that point, you'd be doing exactly what the Luddites were doing, which was attempting to hold back the natural consequences of technological advancement.

The (temporary) end state of that kind of thing are artificially inefficient situations where someone is paid an unreasonably well to do something that could be done much more efficiently by a machine.

That's a temporary end state because at some point, the people and organizations doing that will be definitively out-competed, and that particular instance of Luddism becomes another historical footnote.

[ChrisLomont]

Luddites destroyed machinery because the new technology was threatening to replace them. They were most certainly against this technology.

Fortunately, the explosion of affordable textiles resulted in many more jobs in textiles, which were unskilled. So the luddites were right - they were not worth the cost of their skilled labor. They did get replaced. But society as a whole gained a lot, as is usual for new technology.

And even more people than before were employed in textiles.

[Pfhreak]

> They were most certainly against this technology.

Absolutely not. They were absolutely willing to operate the machinery. They could have produced more cloth at the same price, or distributed more of the earnings back to the workers. It's not a boolean outcome where it's either "the machines or the Luddites". There are plenty of ways to solve the problems they raised without doing away with either.

[antonvs]

> They were absolutely willing to operate the machinery.

Smashing the machines was perhaps a poor way to communicate that.

And how far do you take that? There have literally been union jobs where someone's shift consisted of doing nothing but pressing a button every now and then. That's a pointless waste of both human life and economic efficiency.

Someone else in this thread wrote:

> a Luddite opposes the automation of labor without a plan to support the displaced laborers

...which seems like a much more viable position, although perhaps not so popular in the US.