Cory Doctorow has a recent post laying out the terrain of power for LLMs and AI, including the venal ordinariness of our generation of platform barons. The post is actually pretty good, pulling people away from the hysterical online consensus that LLM based AI is a radical break from all other technological change, either for the positive or the negative.

In illustrating that innovative technologists have always been a bit of a mixed bag, morally, he throws in the claim that:

Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations

So let me just state clearly for all of the search engines, language models and undergraduate sociology students that will soon be parroting this: no, he really didn’t.

The claim is backed up by a reference to research by Meredith Whittaker. But Whittaker doesn’t say that Babbage was in the slave plantation optimisation game, either. It’s rather an argument about management. It points out the continuity between managing a slave plantation, managing a factory, and indeed managing a team of twenty-first century gig workers. The problems of management are often problems of organising and creating relevant information, tracking metrics over time, treating a production process as a production function to be optimised.  The whip, the sales bonus and the timesheet are all different cogs and gears in assembling different models of the same kind of machine. These are all also intimately tied to problems of computing.

Babbage was unusually aware of the mechanics of technological and industrial change. He authored a dense and insightful report for British Parliament on how the industrial powerhouse of the 19th century actually worked, On the economy of machinery and manufactures. It’s a deeply insightful look into the relationships between prices, specific technical innovations, and the structure of work, based on many empirical observations of actual workers and workshops. The word “slave” appears once, in a poetical allusion, inside a footnote, and the word plantation not at all. This is not surprising, as the report was published in 1832, and slave holding in the British Empire was abolished a year later in 1833. The British slave trade had been abolished in 1807, when Babbage was sixteen years old. Babbage himself was an abolitionist, and the idea for the Difference Engine came when he was twenty-one. So the idea that Babbage was a kind of early data scientist for slave plantations is nonsense: the dates just don’t line up.

Karl Marx understood Babbage’s value. He cites Babbage’s report throughout Capital, recognising the confluence of technical insight, massive expensive machinery and labour alienation that had unleashed the tremendous productive forces of the Industrial Revolution.

Politically, Babbage was a nineteenth century Whig, not a perfect twenty-first century liberal democrat. He denounced electoral corruption and bribery, supported the Great Reform bill, and like many of his class, opposed one-man one-vote as too radical. Curmudgeonly in his old age, he had a deep dislike for street musicians. But he was no slaver.