In Das Kapital, Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine, Marx talks about how the automatic looms caused some of the very first waves of mass unemployment under nascent capitalism.
He tells how in some German states they banned the use of looms, burned them, some say even drowned or strangled their creators. Both the state and the textile workers did this in order to preserve order.
Later, states allowed them but the textile workers formed sabotage units in order to destroy machines and keep their jobs.
At the end it ends with this: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production (the machine), but against the mode in which they are used."
Very relevant in the face of progress, especially of AI.
Ps: and a quick reminder that communism is about developing production for human needs not profits. The ills of unemployment would be unnecessary with added efficiency.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm...
112233•1h ago
The article quotes the reason being "inspired by" that loom. uh...
juancn•1h ago
Essentially, the speedups in textiles, inspired a speedup in computing (tabulating initially), which kicked-off the modern information technology industry.
And even if there wasn't any computation, it still is automated data processing (albeit simple).
andsoitis•1h ago
The Banu Musa automatic flute player doesn’t meet this bar. The flute player was mechanically configured, not symbolically programmed. It had no conditional logic or flow control. No stored symbolic instructions.
To contrast, the Jacquard Loom used an externally stored instructions (punch cards). It allowed arbitrary-length instruction sequences, which is a primitive form of control flow.
112233•1h ago
I'd imagine something that changes operation based purely on state (position of a dial, presence of a peg in a slot etc) conceptually being "symbolic". Punchcards are not it.
ajb•38m ago
They would be amused by the idea that this wasn't computing.
Punched cards store bits. Bits can store symbols.
andsoitis•29m ago
I don’t know that I said the punchcards are programmable.
It is the machine that is programmable via the punchcards.