Luddites

19-06-23 00 / episode: 154

Script

"Luddites.

Wow.

Now there's a kind of a hard word.

I bet you haven't heard this word before.

Luddites were people who followed a guy named Mr Lud back in 18 11 in England.

The problem was there's uh factories with machines that were making things better than people could make them.

And a lot of people were losing their jobs.

Mr Lad and his friends and associates all decided to go and break the machines.

It was a revolution and it lasted about five years.

A lot of the guys, the Luddites were executed and it was a kind of violent but they were against technology.

At least they were perceived as being against technology.

I think that the truth might be more complex than that, but Luddite means somebody who's against technology.

And now we have New Luddites, the Neo Luddites.

I think I'm a neo Luddite.

I like technology.

I enjoy learning about it and using it, but not too much.

I'm kind of against using a lot of technology for a lot of things.

I like to cook with simple cooking instruments.

I don't like newfangled cooking uh tools and I prefer walking to driving my car if it's, if it's a short distance.

So I try and avoid technology.

I like low tech better than high tech because it's safer.

I, that sort of comes from my background as a mountain climber.

High tech things are complex and they may fail or break if you're climbing, that could be very serious.

Low tech tends to be simpler and easier for me to fix in the field and I can spot breakage quickly.

So I, I'm much more of a low tech guy.

I'm a New Luddite.

And now as I look at technology changing things even more rapidly than before, I'm deeply concerned about the changes that I see happening.

I think we should start putting the brakes on technology.

There are a couple of problems with this.

The first being, you can't, the second being, if you stop here, a lot of bad guys will keep on going.

And number three, we'll never find the bad parts of technology unless we use it.

So I know we've got to keep going with technology, but I don't like it.

I'm a Luddite.

How about you?"