The few people who are familiar with the term "luddite" think that a luddite is an unfortunate but stupid person who fights against advancements that make things better, while clinging bitterly to their crappy, low-end jobs. "Luddites" in this common view, are uneducated, progress-preventing people who need to be moved to the side so that society can be improved.
The reality is that, in most cases, luddites were highly skilled craftsmen performing difficult and challenging jobs. It's not that much different today. Luddites are often highly educated professionals and managers who are convinced they bring value to their complex jobs every day The reality is that there are luddites everywhere. Who wants to have their job disrupted? Who wants to be told that their expertise is no longer needed, and that a machine or software system can do a better job?
Stepping back
This notion of what software was REALLY about struck me quite early in my career. The thought was simple: the ultimate purpose of most of the software I wrote was to replace humans. The thought made me uncomfortable. But after a while, I connected the thought with all the rest of the mechanization and industrialization in society for hundreds of years. A new machine (or program) is valuable only to the extent that it somehow reduces the total amount of human labor to reach a given result, everything taken into account!
The replacement of humans by machines was extremely clear to the luddites, the secret society of workers whose jobs were being eliminated or reduced to unskilled labor by the increased use of Jacquard Looms. The movement was named after one of the first people to smash a loom, Ned Ludd:
The core of the movement was actions to destroy the job-killing looms that automated and de-skilled the worker's jobs:
This is particularly interesting and relevant to computers eliminating human labor. No one thinks of what could be the modern equivalent of workers smashing the looms that threaten their jobs. An ironic twist is that the revolutionary Jacquard looms were mechanical computers -- they executed a "program" that was encoded physically, enabling them to execute flawlessly elaborate patterns in the woven cloth.
Luddites today
Yes, there are luddites today. Lots of them. But they're not so crass as to pick up big sledge hammers and smash the looms that threaten their livelihoods. They're more subtle, and far more supported by elite society than the original luddites ever were. They're not even seen as resisting change -- they're seen as highly trained professionals that we're so grateful to have. Very much the way that the skilled craftsmen displaced by machines were seen by themselves and most of their contemporaries!
So who exactly are these modern luddites? They include many of the elite, highly-paid professions that ambitious young people strive for.
- Lawyers. A growing fraction of lawyers are under attack by automation. The pain is shown by declines in law school graduate hiring, the growth of firms such as Legalzoom, and growing outsourcing to low-wage locations. The trend has been growing for at least 20 years. I have personally seen the resistance of lawyers to automation efforts.
- Doctors. The ready-to-be-luddite feelings are strong here, though automation is still in its early stages. Doctors increasingly feel like they work in a non-stop assembly line, with patients questioning their statements because of Doctor Google. With insurance companies increasingly questioning and challenging their actions and clinical decision-tree software chomping at the bit, doctors can feel like targets. While hiring remains strong, automation efforts continue to gain strength.
- Software engineers. It seems only fair that the people who drive automation should have their jobs automated. This isn't in the news, but in fact there have been many waves of software job elimination -- masked by strong growth in newly emerging technologies. I have run into many programmers over the years who jobs were eliminated; some of them have left the field, and others slide into management positions, managing people doing jobs they barely understand. For example, during the 1970's there was an explosion of jobs building operating systems for minicomputers. Minicomputers are long gone, along with the diverse operating systems needing to be built. A long trend is skills degrading -- today you can build a functioning web site without programming, while years ago building software with a sophisticated user interface required serious software effort.
- Actors and musicians. We have more visual and musical entertainment available than at any time in human history. But the vast, vast majority of it is recorded and replayed! The vast majority of musicians, for example, were employed making adequate, best-available performances at local places. The number of such jobs is a tiny fraction of what it once was because of recordings. All the supporting jobs are greatly reduced as well. Even jobs in movie theaters have cratered, since people watch on personal and home devices.
What will become of all those people and jobs? The answer has been the same for hundreds of years: there will be great pain for the individuals involved, but overall, the wealth of the population will grow. A clear example is agriculture. At the time of the American revolution, over 90% of the population was involved in agriculture. One step at a time, those jobs were automated, so that in 2019, only about 1% of the US population was employed in agriculture. Yet there's food enough for everyone, and jobs that didn't exist back then.
Conclusion
As a person who has been directly involved in automation for over 50 years, I have seen the jobs I've had and the skills I've acquired become obsolete over and over again. I've also seen or been part of eliminating through automation many jobs, a surprising number of them highly skilled jobs. An early one was the capable engineers who ran the oil refinery in Venezuela in the late 1960's whose jobs were eliminated by the software I worked on at the time -- the software just did a better job than the engineers could possible do! I describe this here.
Luddites can and often do postpone their replacement by automation. But they lose in the end. I don't see an end to this process any time soon.
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