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lkey • today at 2:18 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

This is true, but the nature of declining cognition is to not even notice what used to be possible.

Taking clothing for example, there's more available now than ever. It's disposable at great cost to the environment and the workers that produce it, but very little to you.

Yet, I bet you cannot evaluate garments, construction, or fabric quality. You may not know how to wash woolens and linens. You may have only worn smelly plastic workout clothing and plastic suits for formal events.

You may never have worn a piece of clothing that actually fit your body.

You may not realize that you can alter any clothing, that most clothing was intended to be altered once upon a time. Or that older garments were both more expensive and higher quality, because the expectation was the most important items would need to last for a decade.

The Luddite's central objections about automation was about declining working conditions (objecting to child labour, for instance), bad pay, and declining quality. They used the 'obnoxious' machines they broke. They saw what was being lost and demanded better (without demanding no machines at all).

Later, the rise of unionization brought about many of the changes they'd asked for decades before.

I hope this current technologic movement doesn't end where fast fashion has, with influencers buying a new outfit [repo] every day for a year. A vortex of undifferentiated slop for its own sake.


Replies

goosefriend • today at 8:07 PM

The fast fashion parallel is an apt one. Cheap slop (both clothes and code) only can exist because our system does not value the environment or human rights as much as it values profit. It makes me somewhat pessimistic about the future of the AI movement, because we haven't managed to curtail these kinds of abuses in already existing industries. :~/

nbaksalyar • today at 2:51 PM

> The Luddite's central objections about automation was about declining working conditions

I can also recommend the book "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant [0][1] which is precisely about this.

[0] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...

[1] https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/about