- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
The Luddites were right.
You think we should all be hand-weaving textiles because power looms took jobs away? 🤔
No, I think technology should serve the people, not the rich people who own the means of production. I suggest you actually read the article I linked.
Oh, I have read it.
Luddites were strongly motivated by loss of jobs. The article refers to this, and you can find plenty of examples of pamphlets and letters about this:
http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/SpinningWeb/week8d.html (“We know that it have been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by them that have Factorys how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand as they used to do.”)
You can characterise this as “technology should serve the common man, not the rich people” through a modern lens of class struggle, but the clear motivation at the time was simply loss of employment and the problems that brought. If they had a more complex understanding like I think you’re voicing, I think you would see their ire directed elsewhere rather than destroying the machines.
The vilification of the Luddites as cantankerous tech haters is a really good example of how malicious falsehoods can succeed, I think. I’d guess that most English speakers who know the word would define Luddite as “someone who hates technology”, and I think it resonates on some level because we all hate technology some of the time. The fact that Luddites didn’t indiscriminately hate technology, they just destroyed the means by which their oppressors oppressed them, is handily swept aside. And I never even questioned that narrative on Luddites until I happened to read up on them.
It’s sneaky, because before then “Luddite” didn’t feel like an important or politically charged term at all. It was simply a slang word for people who grump about technology. Calling people haters just short-circuits any examination of the so-called haters’ reasons. It’s exactly what people say about terrorists, except instead of technology its freedom. They just hate freedom. I wonder how many people have “terrorist = freedom hater” embedded so deeply they don’t even think about it.
One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter
they were absolutely not right… the modern world of plentiful clothing simply wouldn’t be possible without industrial clothing machinery (and i’m not talking about fast fashion and waste - though industrial clothing also makes those things possible, i think that’s an outcome of the plenty rather than an inevitable outcome of industrialised clothing)
artisans don’t magically make better clothing… in fact, modern machinery can and does produce much higher quality, complex clothing than a human alone would, and in much higher volumes
they had a moment when they had a point, when the machinery just wasn’t very good (and of course the child labour concerns)
clothing quality on the modern era comes down to choices far far more than the skill of the person making the clothing… artisans are still able to make cost cutting decisions
the point we should take away from the luddites is more about retraining than about their core point… this applies to coal miners and the green transition, and will at some point in the future apply to the logistics industry when driverless trucks become reliable: we can’t just toss an entire industry out of work and expect them to be okay with it (or for that matter expect the economy to absorb them)… but it’s a much better world when fewer people are required to achieve the same output
It was not really about the machinery, or the quality of the work. It was about the rights of the common person, their livelihood, and their very lives. The reason the Luddites are viewed disparagingly is purely because they lost, and history always favours the victors.
You have to remember that this all took place in a time where workers like you and I had no real rights of our own. There was no universal suffrage, only those with capital had a say in matters of government. So when machines were brought in to your workplace, and the powers that be proclaimed that a large bunch of us would be redundant, we despaired. This was the way we scraped by, it’s how we fed ourselves and our families.
So what did they end up doing? They protested. They sabotaged the machines to buy us more time, in some cases they smashed them, in other cases they removed and hid some parts; each day a machine wasn’t operational was another day that they got paid their wages, another day they’d survive.
The Luddites specifically targeted the machines, because their goal wasn’t to hurt people, but rather to have their voices heard. This was really the only avenue they had any power to make a difference.
The powers that be obviously weren’t happy about this, they’d spent money on expensive machinery, and now the common rabble was sabotaging and destroying their property. So they drafted laws, like the destruction of stocking frames etc. act of 1812 which classed meddling with the machinery, or the produced goods a felony punishable by death. You can read the act here.
And people were killed for this. From an archived page on Bolton Council’s website.
This is ultimately what ended the Luddite movement. The unfeeling machinery of capitalism churned ever onward, the ruling class sent out the military to quell the riots, and eventually when enough workers (including children) had died for the cause without making any marked difference, they gave up the fight.
The Luddites were absolutely right in terms of rights of the individual workers, and that’s a lesson we still haven’t learned today. It’s not unreasonable for an industry to undergo large operative shifts, but the people affected negatively by this should still be cared for. It’s not reasonable to throw a person to the wayside and watch them die just because a machine replaced them.
I agree with you in so far as the luddites were not enlightened ideological opponents to technology.
While it’s true that it would be foolish to disregard history i don’t think the loom is analogous to generative AI, and the luddites aren’t really illuminating here.
The evidence thus far is that the current generation of AI is an incremental improvement in productivity in the vast majority of industries.
the mechanical loom isn’t analogous to LLMs exactly, but the current generation of AI also includes things like self driving vehicles, which (whilst not ready) is, imo, set to make a huge portion of the logistics industry redundant in the next 20-30 years if not sooner, and the logistics industry is enormous
Maybe, but maybe not.
All we know for sure is that we can’t do it reliably yet, and that it’s extraordinarily difficult.
What do you think luddites believed and did?..
the luddites were taylors and the like fighting against being replaced by machines for various reasons, including child labour, low wages for machine operators, and low quality product
imo child labour laws are the way to solve the first problem: that’s, imo, unrelated to industrialisation/mechanisation
lower wages are a product of lowering the barrier to entry: when anyone can do the same job, that is not a bad thing… it’s sad that an industry of people are pushed out of their profession, but we’d never say the same of coal: coal miners should realise that their industry is not going to exist any more, and retrain,… i have empathy for them, which is why we need to provide social programs to cover industries that get made redundant for any reason, but that’s not a reason to deny the rest of humanity the plenty that inevitably comes from industrialisation
and low quality product is only really an issue at the very start of industrialisation… i guarantee these days we can make higher quality clothing in 100x the quantity than we can with artisans and hand stitching… machines always get better, but only if there’s effort put into using them
It’s not unrelated, industrialization has a clear tendency to concentrate the means of production in the hands of the rich; a weaver/taylor can own a 16th century weaving apparatus, they can’t own a 19th century weaving plant unless we get into cooperatives, which are pretty hard to organize compared to buying a loom for yourself.
Ok, so luddism was a grassroots movement so there obviously were different aspects and reasons for their actions, however for most luddites what they were protesting were not “being replaced by machines” (they themselves were mostly skilled laborers operating machines already) but the awful conditions for labor that were exacerbated when new types of machinery became available. They used strikes and capital destruction as two inter-reinforcing methods to strengthen their negotiation position with owners, not because they thought that destroying those machines would somehow save their old jobs and way of life.
The luddites you are disagreeing with probably existed but they were a minority and they were not who made the movement notable and dangerous to the bourgeois.
You could have saved a lot of time and just said you’re unfamiliar with their argument.
It’s like you didn’t read the article.
the “article” that doesn’t mention luddites at all until a comment at the end that kinda agrees with what i’m saying or the wikipedia article that points out the luddites issues being about labour and generally being replaced by machines? i know very well the nuance of the luddite movement and their main good points, as i said, were about labour issues (mostly solved with labour laws on modern society) and the takeaway isn’t about technology but about how to deal with technology replacing people’s jobs
replacing artisans with machines that do a good enough or better job is a good thing, as painful as it is… it means more people get more of the thing… artisans instead of machines is a waste… humans are the most inefficient general machine we have… having a human make clothing is a cost on society
The point is that the Luddites (most of them anyway) weren’t against mechanization at all, it was all about the specific conditions under which it happened, i.e. rich people owned the means of production and until maybe late 19th century, living conditions for the working class were absolutely appalling and a clear downgrade over what they had before. 16 hour shifts at poverty wages are not necessary for industrialization, yet that’s usually how it happened.