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Knitting

make (a garment, blanket, etc.) by interlocking loops of wool or other yarn with knitting needles or on a machine.

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Pincushion, 1733,

England

1855 sketch of a

shepherd knitting

The Knitting Woman by

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1869

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The textile industry during the industrial revolution

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Weaving the Past

What previous automation events can teach us about AI

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What were the effects of Automation

01

For the average person

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What were the effects of Automation?

Enhanced Quality of Life of the Average Person
Improved Transportation and Communication
Accelerated Medical Advancements

The Good

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What were the effects of Automation?

Job Displacement
Overcrowding and Pollution
Loss of skilled Jobs
Worse working conditions
Inequality

The Bad

on the bad side, multiple things happened

Short term, there was job displacement and unemployment. Textile workers working in rural areas now had to move to the city factories. With that, urban overcrowding and pollution became big issues.

Traditional craftsmanship was replaced with machine operation that was typically lower-skilled and lower-paid. Factory jobs were repetitive, requiring less creativity and autonomy compared to traditional craftsmanship.

Working conditions got significantly worse. A normal workday was 12 to 16 hours.

Inequality was also on the rise. Factories that automated textile jobs used the situation to lower wages and the merits of mechanization often went to the wealthy few that owned the factories, instead of the workers.

All of this didn’t sit right with many workers. People protested them and one of the most profound movements was born. (Next slide)

Unemployment: https://fee.org/articles/the-industrial-revolution-working-class-poverty-or-prosperity/

Lower wages: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2226/the-impact-of-the-british-industrial-revolution/

Pros of Ind. Rev.: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-rise-of-the-machines-pros-and-cons-of-the-industrial-revolution

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The Luddites

02

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Who were the luddites?

Skilled textile workers

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“A person who opposes technological advancements”

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Demands

Minimum wage
Adherence to labor standards
Worker pensions

Goals

Preserving quality of work
Fair labor practices

Their Goals of the luddites were centered on preserving the quality of work and ensuring fair labor practices. They sought the implementation of a minimum wage, adherence to minimum labor standards, and the imposition of taxes to create funds for workers' pensions.

The most notable aspect of the Luddite movement was their method of protest, which involved breaking into factories and destroying the machinery that they believed was responsible for their plight.

The Luddites were smart, and their attacks were highly coordinated and precise. They attacked factories at night, destroying only some pre-marked machines and then disappeared.

They mainly targeted factories that produced vast volumes of low-quality textile and those who got rid of their skilled artisans in favor of machines and less experienced people.

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Background

Mercury takes a little more than 58 days to complete its rotation, so try to imagine how long days must be there! Since the temperatures are so extreme, albeit not as extreme as on Venus, Mercury has been deemed to be non-habitable for humans

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest one in the entire Solar System. Contrary to popular belief, this planet's name has nothing to do with the liquid metal. Mercury was, instead, named after the famous Roman messenger god Mercurius

In the modern day and age, a similar technique is used with Model Poisoning.

Artists use tools, such as nightshade, that make specific subtle changes to images (ironically made with another AI), that for a human are almost unnoticeable, but for a diffusion model, it completely messes up the training data.

Here, on the left we see the output of clean trained stable diffusion XL model. that is then continuously trained on another 100 thousand samples from the LAION-5b dataset. Out of these 100k samples, a number of poison samples were included. With just 100 samples (again out of 100k), we can see a significant shift in concepts and object generation.

This research paper is quite new, from October last year and Nightshade currently has more than 250k downloads. We are quite ill prepared for these kinds of attacks.

Model Poisoning: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/

Research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13828.pdf

Number of downloads: https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-poisoning-tool-nightshade-received-250000-downloads-in-5-days-beyond-anything-we-imagined/

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What was the response?

03

From Businesses, Government and Society

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Businesses

Increased Security Measures
Hiring guards and arming them

Government

Making machine-breaking a crime
Deploying spies and offering rewards for information
Army guarding the factories
Execution and Deportation

Society

Divided public opinion
Most support from those directly affected by mechanization

To put it simply, great efforts were put for stopping them.

Many factory owners and businesses in the textile industry increased security. This included hiring guards and sometimes arming them to defend against potential attacks.

Business owners with connections to the government also wanted to make the breaking of knitting frames punishable by death.

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The government's response was harsh and swift. They passed a bill making machine-breaking a capital offense.

They also deployed spies and offered of substantial rewards for any information on Luddites. The army was called in to protect the factories and More troops were deployed in the citie, than in the napoleon war which was also happening at the same time.

Those caught faced severe penalties, including execution or deportation to Australia.

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As far as society goes, public opinion on the Luddites was divided.

Some sympathized with their plight, understanding their actions as a response to unfair labor practices and the threat of unemployment and

Others saw them as criminals disrupting industrial progress. The violent tactics of the Luddites, were controversial and often alienated potential sympathizers.

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What happened in the near future?

04

In the text 30 years

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Declining popularity

Lack of central coordination
Suppression from government
Mechanized factories created more jobs

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Factory-based economy

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What did the future hold?

05

What did the Luddites teach us?

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Effects of automation

Some jobs will permanently disappear
Short term unemployment in certain sectors
Unemployment will stabilize shortly after, due to indirect growth of other sectors
50 years later, we will forget the trade existed

Well, I want to ask you again, how many of you have heard of hand knitting on a scale?

I think that history will repeat itself and some jobs will just permanently disappear.

In the first industrial revolution, just like today there were also great fears about mass unemployment, but they only materialized in the short term, and only for the textile and agriculture sectors. Unemployment never rose above 8% according to estimates.

I believe that short term, when it becomes apparent exactly what industries will be automated, things will look bad for people that invested a lot of time in the trade, like artists and maybe even programmers. But mid and long term, we will forget that this was even a trade. Just as we have with hand-knitting.

Unemployment: https://fee.org/articles/the-industrial-revolution-working-class-poverty-or-prosperity/

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Food for thought

Will we forget about trades like programming and illustration in 50 years?

Contact me

dani@cosmosthrace.com

cosmosthrace.com

How can we battle against model poisoning and other attacks?

What sectors of the economy will indirectly grow due to AI?

What is the potential impact of AI on income inequality?