CONCEPT
The Luddite Debt
The structural obligation a new tradition incurs to the practitioners whose specific knowledge and specific lives the transition consumed — a debt that aggregate prosperity cannot discharge, only specific institutions can.
The Luddite debt is the institutional obligation created by residual problems — losses the new tradition cannot solve because solving them would require maintaining the practices the new tradition exists to replace. The debt is not paid by aggregate prosperity. The framework knitters' wages collapsed. Their communities dissolved. Their specific embodied knowledge — accumulated over generations of patient practice — disappeared from the economy because the new system did not require it and therefore did not preserve it. The aggregate gains of industrialization, measured over a century, did not compensate the specific people who bore the cost of the transition. The debt was eventually addressed, partially and belatedly, by the institutional structures the industrial society built. Where equivalent structures were not built, the debt compounded.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Laudan's framework gives the concept precise content. The debt is not moral regret in the abstract. It is the specific obligation a progressive tradition owes to the holders of knowledge