Large Language Muddle | Issue 51 | n+1 | The Editors Highlight

All who deny the AI machine will themselves face a very uncool label: the L-word. In a technophilic culture, few figures look lonelier or more quixotic than the latter-day Luddite. Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work, Luddism — born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital — was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society . . . of which machines were the chief weapon.” Witness, next to the hair-pulling indecision and defeated passivity of typical AI-and-I writing, the clarion force of the Luddite lesson: in Mueller’s summary, “that technology was political, and that it could and, in many cases, should be opposed.”