The Luddite movement wasn’t opposed to progress or technology. They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
I agree that the original Luddite movement has been mischaracterized, but you're also leaning toward mischaracterizing them in too friendly of a light.
The Luddites were also guilty of violent acts and they were afraid to threaten or use violence to protect their interests. It wasn't a simple disagreement of evil capitalists versus saintly laborers. They cared more about protectionism for their personal businesses.
They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history. We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.
OP: They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc. [...] Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
You: They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history.We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.
HN sophistry of the highest level. It's shit like this that made the sophists deeply hated back in the days (today too, i would add)
You completely ignored the point of my post, the factual inaccuracies in the post I was responding to, and used the cheap trick of attacking words I didn’t say (literally the strawman fallacy)
Ironic that you’re waxing philosophically about the quality of comments on HN while doing all of this.
I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?
Most uses of the word "Luddite" - and I'd venture to guess this one included - don't refer to the original aims of Luddites but the modern connotation of maximally pejorative "anti-technologists" in the broadest sense.
My definition of Luddite doesn’t matter, the person I responded to clearly used it in a pejorative way to describe people who are resistant to new technologies (likely irrational)
> Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite?
The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.