By Clive Thompson
Originally published in Smithsonian magazine, January 2017
Originally published in Smithsonian magazine, January 2017
What a 19th-century rebellion
against automation can teach us about the coming war in the job market
Is a robot coming for your job?
The odds are high, according to
recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be
automated “in a decade or two,” as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and
Michael Osborne have predicted. That’s because artificial intelligence and
robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be
automated.
Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon’s huge
shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and
writing sports stories for newspapers.
They’re even replacing cabdrivers.
Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its
fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the
wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber’s “Otto” program is installing AI in 16-wheeler
trucks—a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers,
an enormous employment category. Those jobless truckers will be joined by
millions more telemarketers, insurance underwriters, tax preparers and library technicians—all
jobs that Frey and Osborne predicted have a 99 percent chance of vanishing in a
decade or two.
What happens then? If this vision
is even halfway correct, it’ll be a vertiginous pace of change, upending work
as we know it. As the last election amply illustrated, a big chunk of Americans
already hotly blame foreigners and immigrants for taking their jobs. How will
Americans react to robots and computers taking even more?
One clue might lie in the early
19th century. That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of
being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. But rather than accept
it, they fought back—calling themselves the “Luddites,” and staging an
audacious attack against the machines.
**********
At the turn of 1800, the textile
industry in the United Kingdom was an economic juggernaut that employed the
vast majority of workers in the North. Working from home, weavers produced
stockings using frames, while cotton-spinners created yarn. “Croppers” would
take large sheets of woven wool fabric and trim the rough surface off, making
it smooth to the touch.
These workers had great control
over when and how they worked—and plenty of leisure. “The year was chequered
with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labor,” as the
stocking-maker William Gardiner noted gaily at the time. Indeed, some “seldom
worked more than three days a week.” Not only was the weekend a holiday, but
they took Monday off too, celebrating it as a drunken “St. Monday.”
Croppers in particular were a force
to be reckoned with. They were well-off—their pay was three times that of
stocking-makers—and their work required them to pass heavy cropping tools
across the wool, making them muscular, brawny men who were fiercely
independent. In the textile world, the croppers were, as one observer noted at
the time, “notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed.”
But in the first decade of the
1800s, the textile economy went into a tailspin. A decade of war with Napoleon
had halted trade and driven up the cost of food and everyday goods.
Fashions
changed, too: Men began wearing “trowsers,” so the demand for stockings
plummeted. The merchant class—the overlords who paid hosiers and croppers and
weavers for the work—began looking for ways to shrink their costs.
That meant reducing wages—and
bringing in more technology to improve efficiency. A new form of shearer and
“gig mill” let one person crop wool much more quickly. An innovative, “wide”
stocking frame allowed weavers to produce stockings six times faster than
before: Instead of weaving the entire stocking around, they’d produce a big
sheet of hosiery and cut it up into several stockings. “Cut-ups” were shoddy
and fell apart quickly, and could be made by untrained workers who hadn’t done
apprenticeships, but the merchants didn’t care. They also began to build huge
factories where coal-burning engines would propel dozens of automated
cotton-weaving machines.
“They were obsessed with keeping
their factories going, so they were introducing machines wherever they might
help,” says Jenny Uglow, a historian and author of In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars,
1793-1815.
The workers were livid. Factory
work was miserable, with brutal 14-hour days that left workers—as one doctor
noted—“stunted, enfeebled, and depraved.” Stocking-weavers were particularly
incensed at the move toward cut-ups. It produced stockings of such low quality
that they were “pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction,” as one hosier
put it: Pretty soon people wouldn’t buy any stockings if they were this shoddy.
Poverty rose as wages plummeted.
The workers tried bargaining. They
weren’t opposed to machinery, they said, if the profits from increased
productivity were shared. The croppers suggested taxing cloth to make a fund
for those unemployed by machines. Others argued that industrialists should
introduce machinery more gradually, to allow workers more time to adapt to new
trades.
The plight of the unemployed
workers even attracted the attention of Charlotte Brontë, who wrote them into
her novel Shirley.
“The throes of a sort of moral earthquake,” she noted, “were felt heaving under
the hills of the northern counties.”
**********
In mid-November 1811, that
earthquake began to rumble. That evening, according to a report at the time,
half a dozen men—with faces blackened to obscure their identities, and carrying
“swords, firelocks, and other offensive weapons”—marched into the house of
master-weaver Edward Hollingsworth, in the village of Bulwell. They destroyed
six of his frames for making cut-ups. A week later, more men came back and this
time they burned Hollingsworth’s house to the ground. Within weeks, attacks
spread to other towns. When panicked industrialists tried moving their frames
to a new location to hide them, the attackers would find the carts and destroy
them en route.
A modus operandi emerged: The
machine-breakers would usually disguise their identities and attack the
machines with massive metal sledgehammers. The hammers were made by Enoch
Taylor, a local blacksmith; since Taylor himself was also famous for making the
cropping and weaving machines, the breakers noted the poetic irony with a
chant: “Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them!”
Most notably, the attackers gave
themselves a name: the Luddites.
Before an attack, they’d send a
letter to manufacturers, warning them to stop using their “obnoxious frames” or
face destruction. The letters were signed by “General Ludd,” “King Ludd” or perhaps
by someone writing “from Ludd Hall”—an acerbic joke, pretending the Luddites
had an actual organization.
Despite their violence, “they had a
sense of humor” about their own image, notes Steven Jones, author of Against
Technology and a professor of English and digital
humanities at the University of South Florida. An actual person Ludd did not
exist; probably the name was inspired by the mythic tale of “Ned Ludd,” an
apprentice who was beaten by his master and retaliated by destroying his frame.
Ludd was, in essence, a useful
meme—one the Luddites carefully cultivated, like modern activists posting
images to Twitter and Tumblr. They wrote songs about Ludd, styling him as a
Robin Hood-like figure: “No General But Ludd / Means the Poor Any Good,” as one
rhyme went. In one attack, two men dressed as women, calling themselves
“General Ludd’s wives.” “They were engaged in a kind of semiotics,” Jones
notes. “They took a lot of time with the costumes, with the songs.”
And “Ludd” itself! “It’s a catchy
name,” says Kevin Binfield, author of Writings of
the Luddites. “The phonic register, the phonic impact.”
As a form of economic protest,
machine-breaking wasn’t new. There were probably 35 examples of it in the
previous 100 years, as the author Kirkpatrick Sale found in his seminal
history Rebels Against
the Future. But the Luddites, well-organized and tactical,
brought a ruthless efficiency to the technique: Barely a few days went by
without another attack, and they were soon breaking at least 175 machines per
month. Within months they had destroyed probably 800, worth £25,000—the
equivalent of $1.97 million, today.
“It seemed to many people in the
South like the whole of the North was sort of going up in flames,” Uglow notes.
“In terms of industrial history, it was a small industrial civil war.”
Factory owners began to fight back.
In April 1812, 120 Luddites descended upon Rawfolds Mill just after midnight,
smashing down the doors “with a fearful crash” that was “like the felling of
great trees.” But the mill owner was prepared: His men threw huge stones off
the roof, and shot and killed four Luddites. The government tried to infiltrate
Luddite groups to figure out the identities of these mysterious men, but to
little avail. Much as in today’s fractured political climate, the poor despised
the elites—and favored the Luddites. “Almost every creature of the lower order
both in town & country are on their side,” as one local official noted
morosely.
An 1812 handbill sought information about the armed men who
destroyed five machines.
(The National Archives, UK)
(The National Archives, UK)
**********
At heart, the fight was not really
about technology. The Luddites were happy to use machinery—indeed, weavers had
used smaller frames for decades. What galled them was the new logic of
industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from new technology
enriched only the machines’ owners and weren’t shared with the workers.
The Luddites were often careful to
spare employers who they felt dealt fairly. During one attack, Luddites broke
into a house and destroyed four frames—but left two intact after determining
that their owner hadn’t lowered wages for his weavers. (Some masters began
posting signs on their machines, hoping to avoid destruction: “This Frame Is
Making Full Fashioned Work, at the Full Price.”)
For the Luddites, “there was the
concept of a ‘fair profit,’” says Adrian Randall, the author of Before the
Luddites. In the past, the master would take a fair profit, but
now he adds, “the industrial capitalist is someone who is seeking more and more
of their share of the profit that they’re making.” Workers thought wages should
be protected with minimum-wage laws. Industrialists didn’t: They’d been reading
up on laissez-faire economic theory in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations, published a few decades earlier.
“The writings of Dr. Adam Smith
have altered the opinion, of the polished part of society,” as the author of a
minimum wage proposal at the time noted. Now, the wealthy believed that
attempting to regulate wages “would be as absurd as an attempt to regulate the
winds.”
Six months after it began, though,
Luddism became increasingly violent. In broad daylight, Luddites assassinated
William Horsfall, a factory owner, and attempted to assassinate another. They
also began to raid the houses of everyday citizens, taking every weapon they
could find.
Parliament was now fully awakened,
and began a ferocious crackdown. In March 1812, politicians passed a law that
handed out the death penalty for anyone “destroying or injuring any Stocking or
Lace Frames, or other Machines or Engines used in the Framework knitted
Manufactory.” Meanwhile, London flooded the Luddite counties with 14,000
soldiers.
By winter of 1812, the government
was winning. Informants and sleuthing finally tracked down the identities of a
few dozen Luddites. Over a span of 15 months, 24 Luddites were hanged publicly,
often after hasty trials, including a 16-year-old who cried out to his mother
on the gallows, “thinking that she had the power to save him.” Another two
dozen were sent to prison and 51 were sentenced to be shipped off to Australia.
“They were show trials,” says
Katrina Navickas, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire. “They
were put on to show that [the government] took it seriously.” The hangings had
the intended effect: Luddite activity more or less died out immediately.
It was a defeat not just of the
Luddite movement, but in a grander sense, of the idea of “fair profit”—that the
productivity gains from machinery should be shared widely. “By the 1830s,
people had largely accepted that the free-market economy was here to stay,”
Navickas notes.
A few years later, the once-mighty
croppers were broken. Their trade destroyed, most eked out a living by carrying
water, scavenging, or selling bits of lace or cakes on the streets.
“This was a sad end,” one observer
noted, “to an honourable craft.”
**********
These days, Adrian Randall thinks
technology is making cab-driving worse. Cabdrivers in London used to train for
years to amass “the Knowledge,” a mental map of the city’s twisty streets. Now
GPS has made it so that anyone can drive an Uber—so the job has become deskilled.
Worse, he argues, the GPS doesn’t plot out the fiendishly clever routes that
drivers used to. “It doesn’t know what the shortcuts are,” he complains. We are
living, he says, through a shift in labor that’s precisely like that of the
Luddites.
Economists are divided as to how
profound the disemployment will be. In his recent book Average Is
Over, Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University,
argued that automation could produce profound inequality. A majority of people
will find their jobs taken by robots and will be forced into low-paying service
work; only a minority—those highly skilled, creative and lucky—will have
lucrative jobs, which will be wildly better paid than the rest. Adaptation is
possible, though, Cowen says, if society creates cheaper ways of living—“denser
cities, more trailer parks.”
Erik Brynjolfsson is less
pessimistic. An MIT economist who co-authored The Second
Machine Age, he thinks automation won’t necessarily be so bad.
The Luddites thought machines destroyed jobs, but they were only half right:
They can also, eventually, create new ones. “A lot of skilled artisans did lose
their jobs,” Brynjolfsson says, but several decades later demand for labor rose
as new job categories emerged, like office work. “Average wages have been
increasing for the past 200 years,” he notes. “The machines were creating
wealth!”
The problem is that transition is
rocky. In the short run, automation can destroy jobs more rapidly than it
creates them—sure, things might be fine in a few decades, but that’s cold
comfort to someone in, say, their 30s. Brynjolfsson thinks politicians should
be adopting policies that ease the transition—much as in the past, when public
education and progressive taxation and antitrust law helped prevent the 1
percent from hogging all the profits. “There’s a long list of ways we’ve
tinkered with the economy to try and ensure shared prosperity,” he notes.
Will there be another Luddite
uprising? Few of the historians thought that was likely. Still, they thought
one could spy glimpses of Luddite-style analysis—questioning of whether the
economy is fair—in the Occupy Wall Street protests, or even in the environmental
movement. Others point to online activism, where hackers protest a company by
hitting it with “denial of service” attacks by flooding it with so much traffic
that it gets knocked offline.
Perhaps one day, when Uber starts
rolling out its robot fleet in earnest, angry out-of-work cabdrivers will go
online—and try to jam up Uber’s services in the digital world.
“As work becomes more automated, I
think that’s the obvious direction,” as Uglow notes. “In the West, there’s no
point in trying to shut down a factory.”
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