EP 421: AI, Automation, and the Case for Luddism
I am on board when it comes to technological progress. I look forward to updating my devices (although I don’t do it as frequently as I used to). New apps and features excite me. I’m pretty quick to adapt to change.
I am not a Luddite. Or so I thought.
“The word Luddite still means an old-fashioned type who is anti-progress,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her book 12 Bytes. “But the Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation.” Reading these lines was the first time what the Luddite movement actually stood for really sank in. Where I had once seen atavism and fear, I now saw labor politics I could get behind.
When I picked up Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, I did so to learn more about the radical roots of Luddism and how the movement could inform my own thinking on the future of work. I also picked it up amidst the current fervor over AI and debates about whether the robots were finally coming for writers’ jobs.
In this episode, I share my favorite ideas from Mueller's book and apply them to commonplace tools like project management apps (ClickUp, Asana, etc.) and social media scheduling apps. I think you'll have a different perspective on tech once you've listened!
Footnotes:
- Breaking Things At Work by Gavin Mueller
- 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson
- Gavin Mueller on the Chris Voss show (YouTube)
- "AI and Automation are destroying jobs, not work" via Quartz (YouTube)
- "Dear YouTube, creators keep burning out. Here's the fix." via Channel Makers (YouTube)
- "Creator burnout is real. 6 ways to recover" via Sidewalker Daily (YouTube)
- My 2021 TEDx talk on remarkable work
- "Kids at Work, Games as Labor, Content as Product, and Surplus Elite" by me on Substack
- "The Game is Rigged: Rethinking the Creator Economy" by me on Substack
- "Intelligence Superabundance" by Packy McCormick on Not Boring
- "Moss introduces Jen to the internet" from The IT Crowd (YouTube)
- "You have to start talking" via GaryVee Video Experience (YouTube)
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