AI and reading: Are we asking the right questions?
How the innovation of a spindle gives us clues about our current predicament.
*This piece is too long to be read completely in email. The full text is available to members by clicking through to the post on substack.
Tech innovation as target
Prior to the 1760s, cloth was limited not by raw material available, but by how fast it could be spun. Cotton cloth came primarily from India, with Europe largely dressing in linen and wool, as it had for centuries.1
But after an overturned spindle inspired weaver James Hargreaves to construct a different type of machine, innovation leapt forward, moving the bottleneck from labor to supply. And the rest is history, with all the accompanying gory details: an out-of-control production cycle powering international trade that depended on enslavement to keep the wheels turning at the speed of the world’s greed.
However, the objections raised to industrializing fabric came not from consumers, nor — initially — from humanitarians horrified by the labor required to grow previously unfathomable amounts of cotton.
The biggest pushback came from the displaced spinners, whose livelihoods shrank as the capacity for spinning more, faster grew. A group of outraged spinners broke into Hargreaves’ home and smashed the new spindle prototypes, as if destroying this one invention would halt the march of industry. But the issue was already far beyond one technical innovation. They saw the change, but failed to zoom out far enough to see the system driving it.
A.I. and Reading
The recent A.I. boom resembles other tech booms we’ve seen in the past, in that it’s accompanied by terror that this new technology will destroy the culture that existed before. I do not mean to imply that these fears are unwarranted — watching my husband compete for fewer and fewer graphic design and animation positions over the last few years has, if anything, confirmed the threat A.I. poses.
The creation of A.I. as we know it is rife with intellectual theft, including the unlicensed use of thousands of books2 and other creative arts. However, the pushback I’m seeing recently once again targets the tech itself as the risk, not the system that built, maintains, and profits from it. Why aren’t we looking at that?