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The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time.

Damaging machinery was made a capital offense and they had dozens of executions, hundreds of deportations.

At every stage, the steady progress of civilization is fragile and in danger of being suffocated. Its opponents cloak themselves in moral righteousness, call themselves luddites, the green party, or AI safety rationalists. Its all the same corrosive thing underneath.

2 comments

This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.

> The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time

Source of this claim?

E.P. Thompson, „The Making of the English Working Class“.

It is admittedly a specific cherry picked point in time at which this was true, but useful to illustrate the issue.

I had a look out of curiosity. The book has:

>“In the summer of 1812 there were no fewer than 12,000 troops in the disturbed counties, a greater force than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula.”

But for that year Wikipedia has

>Wellington's 48,500-man army... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamanca

If I remember correctly it was true for a short time when it was compared to a small expeditionary force, that quickly grew. That is why its cherry picked.

The point being made by use of colorful anecdote is however that industrialisation led to internal unrest which required considerable force to manage, and whose ultimate outcome (unprecedented rise in living standards) is much preferable to it being stopped in its tracks. A story that repeats itself again and again, check the American longshoremen union for an especially crass recent example of it.