The Neo Luddites

in Rant, Complain, Talk6 days ago

folding laundry
cooking dinner
drawing the curtains
stacking boxes
minding the children

soft, silicon hands —
perfectly polite.

that’s how they’ll infiltrate:
women’s jobs, wives’ jobs
the work of maids.

the old men will be filling potholes a while longer,
jackhammering, using nail guns,
driving trucks, concreting
bringing home the bacon
to the wives
who no longer fold it into sandwiches.

who can complain
when the baby always sleeps?

then comes the tipping point —
the mechanised will get so good
you won’t be able to tell.

filling potholes,
driving trucks

then the old labourers will stir

they’re coming for our jobs!
they’re taking over the country!

they’ll firebomb the buildings
where the artificials
are practising being absolutely real.

the neo luddites will gather in the square,
faces burning in the light of an unmade world

waving flags —
which one,
they won’t be sure.

all of them, perhaps.

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Image at my own prompting via Chat GPT

This poem came into being as the marches against immigration appeared in capital cities from London to Sydney. There were flags raised in town, as if to say this land is ours, in resistance to a threat, forgetting they too were colonisers who had violently displaced others once. Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics showed the progress of their artificial humans - less so clunking things who trip as they run with boxes and more elegant and capable. On screen, they stacked boxes, benignly folded laundry. Automation is inevitably creeping into domestic lives and into our workplaces and no one is rioting against that. They like a face to blame, and a brown one is easier. Less sleek. More understandably the enemy. It also struck me how these mock humans were shown doing simple chores, as if we could accept them if they made our lives less busy. Make sandwiches, mind the children, vacuum, fold the laundry. But what if they come for our jobs? Our purpose and meaning? Our identity? What then? What flags do we wave?

With Love,

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Really well written! Personally, I'm not a fan of this excessive obsession with streamlining life. I can't be bothered to do my laundry, clean my house, do my shopping, even do my work, or indeed look after my kids when they come. I can also automate or soon will AI to carry on correspondence for me. It can summarize books and films so I save time. Does beg the question...what the fuck are people doing with all this time?

Immigration, I think, is also an issue of safety in Europe. To an extent, at least, as there has been a good deal of hushed-up violence (particularly against women) by immigrants. The job thing, though, sure, they'll still "take our jobs" because it's shit pay and shit conditions. For a year. Two at best. Then all the stuff immigrants are "stealing" s gonna be AI, together with all the fancier jobs people think are too important and high-brow to be replaced. Everything else is.

 6 days ago  

Immigration in Europe is different to there. If course we have some of the same problems but DV is committed across all groups of people in this country. I suspect it's the same there and 'hushed up' is also across the board - DV is notoriously underreported as it's a domestic matter and there's shame involved as well as further threats of violence. It's tricky data I guess as well since any crimes committed by immigrants will likely be over ported as well as it confirms and validates fear of immigrants.

It's also interesting to contemplate the stresses on immigrant men that lead to DV. Post war Australians, for example, were prone to alcoholism and violence because they sure as hell didn't have access to mental health plans. And then there's the way men are raised in any culture - swallow that shit, keep it down, be the man, don't cry, provide.

Oh sorry you mentioned DV so have me going.... Oops. I'll stop.

Here too. The immigrants do a lot of the shit jobs. They're willing to put up with shit conditions and shit demands. Someone was telling us the other day that there's mainly Chinese doing plastering in Melbourne - they do a shit job not because they're Chinese but because they have mad deadlines to get it done.

Most immigrants here are so bloody grateful to be here they work hard and keep their heads down. It's not like Europe with your very porous borders. For us it's more about how it's managed by the government that perhaps isn't considering demand for housing and infrastructure which is pushing up prices for housing etc. Still migrants are not the only cause of that and migration is trending downwards if you look at the data. So many issues are perceived rather than actual. Yet we have definitely jumped on the bandwagon of far right angst going on with the rest of the world. Id hate to be an immigrant anywhere right now.

Glad you liked the poem.

were prone to alcoholism and violence because they sure as hell didn't have access to mental health plans. And then there's the way men are raised in any culture - swallow that shit, keep it down, be the man, don't cry, provide.

Huge issues. And I get it, I could talk about this for days! I was thinking more along the lines of sexual assault outside the home, of which there has also been a strong wave (as well as thieving, battery, etc.) perpetrated heavily by immigrants - things locals in cities (esp. Westerners) know, but which seldom make it to the news, perhaps to not cause strife with the respective country's very pro-immigration views, I don't really know.

Most immigrants here are so bloody grateful to be here they work hard and keep their heads down.

It's so important not to forget that is also the case for many.

Yet we have definitely jumped on the bandwagon of far right angst going on with the rest of the world.

It certainly seems to be a rising trend. We were on the leftist bandwagon for a while, but now it seems increasingly to be the other way around. I'm terrified where that might lead us, also. I was just listening to a podcast discussing how you should be worried more not about the other "side" (be it left or right), but rather the extremists on your own side.

Id hate to be an immigrant anywhere right now.

💯

 5 days ago  

Bandwagons of any kind are ill advisable.

God I'm pretty sure there would be lynchings if immigrants started behaving that way here. That's fucking terrible. I'm glad I don't live in Europe tbh though I miss it terribly.

Last night, my son and I watched a YouTube video about Elon Musk's android robots. They're improving very quickly. My son and I had a conversation earlier about how androids would quickly become a part of our lives, just like smartphones once were. That can't be changed.

But we tried to find the positives in this. We decided that if a person had a small plot of land and electricity, an android robot would grow the maximum harvest for that person (food would become much cheaper). It's just unclear how everyone would earn a living; perhaps there would be some kind of universal basic income (but not in poor countries).

 6 days ago  

I thought UBI would have to be the answer. Because what happens, in particular, to the people who build countries through the sweat of manual labour? It's these people I was thinking of as I wrote this. I was talking to the guy across the road today whose mate, at fifty, had so many work injuries he was like an old man. You don't think of that driving through a city...

I just don't know if anyone has seriously thought about what it means for our feelings of meaning and purpose either. Or they have, but the forces that be outweigh this. Progress is all, after all! I also think about the techies who have professed profound regret for their codes ...

Buy yes, I would like one to dig a garden bed for me!!

These creatures won't just dig a garden bed; they'll grow perfect vegetables and fruits, each with a unique taste, just for you. They'll also prepare incredibly delicious dishes in the kitchen, and they'll be able to repeat them anytime.

 6 days ago  

But if everything is perfect, how do we feel joy? It's only through experiencing the bad that we know something is good.

Believe me, humanity will face many more bad things. We are not omnipotent and are susceptible to many illnesses, some of which we acquire voluntarily.

As for the kitchen, we will become more refined and capricious about food :)

I love this. Prophetic. Spooky, evocative. The image generation nailed it too.

I watched an interesting youtube video about a woman who was musing on what would happen of we forgot how to make computer chips, and how society might regress.

 6 days ago  

Oh I'll watch that later. Thanks.

I was going to write a longer piece but sometimes paring it down is ... Sharper.

 6 days ago  

I love those post apocalypse narratives where the artifacts are unusable and the survivors wouldn't have a clue how to use them or even what they are. Any story of things we rely on FAILING is fascinating. We take for granted so much.

Looks like our old Land Rover would grow in value in such a scenario...

It certainly would be tragic for Jamie who would lose touch with his family in the UK...
.

My feeling is that what we really need is direct democracy. No more leaders.

As AI and robots take care of our day to day abundance let each citizen be paid through UBI to participate in that direct democracy. We have the block chain tech to make it transparently happen. Perhaps as crypto makes us more self sovereign about our finances it will naturally move to politics. We could take it a step at a time. With AI and robots making the sandwiches and filling the pot holes the average citizen will have more time to focus on governance.

Perhaps something like school boards first. Something that will not disrupt society immediately yet has a large long term effect. Then slowly move it to all aspects of governing. Decisions made locally where the decisions shall have the most effect.

Right now most elected officials simply set policy and the bureaucracy does the work. That bureaucracy normally continues on as different governments come and go. My guess is that in short order we will wonder why we ever required leaders in the first place.

 6 days ago  

Ugh, bureaucracy is the worst. And we are charged for it too.

Decisions made locally where the decisions shall have the most effect.

Yes. Though it would worry me that things would get rather tribal.

Yes. Though it would worry me that things would get rather tribal.

A case can be made for tribalism in some cases, in my opinion.

For example my province has a long tradition of fishing. Decisions in the central government favored large commercial fisheries which tended to rape the offshore banks and devastated the local fisheries and depleted such stocks as the cod fish. If the decisions about the fisheries were made in the areas were those decisions would have their greatest effect then perhaps the choices may have been different; resulting in th defence of the inshore fisheries.

 5 days ago  

Sorry, yes. I think if I'd thought about it for a second longer I would have countered my own concerns with how freaking annoying bureaucracy is making decisions for swathes of the population it knows nothing about. Most of my dreams are a return to pre globalism!

Skynet! We are headed to a day when we design our way into stupidity. Where AI and its mechnical minions will be doing all or most of the work. We will be left as just another species surviving in the wild.

 6 days ago  

I think we are already there, tbh. Or maybe the older you get the stupider everyone seems
..

I think im becoming the old man in the movie Gran Torino more everyday.

 6 days ago  

Haha embrace it...

AI is about to take over the world. People are going to let AI do the thinking for them and critical decisions will be out of our own hands. !BBH

 4 days ago  

I think sadly, and programmatically, the population is years or decades behind the curve with what they should really be concerned about. Immigration is for sure an important issue because massive influx of people who move from one place to another is going to cause disruption no matter what way you shake it. Assimilation takes a long time.

The tipping point of AI and robots is coming a lot quicker than many people realize, sadly even myself. I'm likely able to insulate myself a bit better than others, but who will be immune? That's a difficult thing to say. I just hope we can navigate it as best we can! It's one of the biggest disruptions in what we know of for human history, I think.