"Luddite" is shorthand for a technophobe, somebody who fears and hates technology. However, the original Luddites smashed machinery for tactical reasons, rather than out of innate technophobia. They were 18th century British textile workers who feared being rendered redundant at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. They smashed power looms, stocking frames, spinning frames, etc., in order to induce mill-owners to negotiate favourable terms of employment.
The industrial revolution swept across Europe and was exported to the rest of the world, in what now seems like slow motion. It took the entire 19th century before the colonial powers took technology to other continents.
The 20th century saw the pace of innovation accelerate, as people indulged a deep and abiding interest in killing each other in large quantities. A communications revolution occurred at the end of the 20th century, with the internet and mobile telephony altering perceptions of distance.
The Luddites did not get their way back in the 1790s. But they weren't rendered redundant. The new textile mills generated more employment than the handloom industry. Other manufacturing industries generated yet more employment. The railways and the steamboats transported goods, people and epidemic diseases everywhere.
The personal vehicle made the horse-breeding industry surplus to requirements. But it created even more employment because it had a longer value chain. Cars generated demand for oil miners, electronics engineers, financial experts, insurers, and advertising mavens.
The industrial revolution continues; the latest manifestations include drones, driverless cars, do-it-yourself 3D printers and smart solar grids. Every phase of the revolution has triggered some disruption. Some industry, or some processes, have been replaced and new industries created. Labour has been churned and shifted around.
The last two centuries have been marked by fears of redundancy, caused by those disruptions. Thus far, those fears have proved unjustified. Yes, specialists in outmoded technologies (horse-breeding, sword-making) have lost jobs. But new technology has created more new employment avenues in aggregate.
Yet, those fears of redundancy have never ebbed. There is a chance that those fears could finally be proved true, after 200 years of crying wolf. Machines can now replace most high-tech white-collar professionals. They have already replaced humans in most manufacturing processes.
Manufacturing processes involve doing repetitive physical tasks to precise tolerances. Machines started doing such things better than human beings back in the 1970s. A whole range of clerical tasks started being done by computers in the 1980s and the internet made that even easier.
Technology, machine intelligence and machine learning systems have now hit a point where workers in all but a very few white-collar professions are likely to become replaceable. High-level academic research is still inviolate. But even complex tasks like medical diagnoses can now be performed reliably by machines. IBM's Watson super-computer is a better oncologist than any living oncologist. Legal "robots" can search databases of case law and collate relevant cases, quicker and better than any human paralegal.
Drones and self-driving vehicles (trains and ships as well as cars) are all close to reliably autonomous, or able to work under extremely light supervision. This means that transport industries (shipping, aviation, railways and trucking) will soon see a decrease in labour needs.
One key difference is that machines are now capable of self-learning. Vast chunks of data can be thrown at a computer, which then works out the "rules" governing that data by looking for underlying patterns. It could be a language, or the rules of a game, or big data generated by a retail store, or a stock exchange. This is rather close (at least on the surface) to the way children learn. Computers can even compose decent music, and handle spoken natural language, using such learning techniques.
Technologists refer to the "singularity" - a hypothetical point of time when hyper-intelligent machines abruptly trigger unforeseeable change. The singularity is closer now. Every human generation has learnt, gracefully or otherwise, to teach its children and then hand the baton of civilisation over. The difference now is, some of this generations' children are not made of flesh and blood.
Twitter: @devangshudatta
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