The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
Full source?
”Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”
I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.
Would be a bit more like “i consider myself a Christian, not because i follow the mainstream conception of Christianity but because i read what Jesus himself said and agree with it.”
"New Luddites helping regulatory capture ensuring their poverty for generations to come. "
Because that would require explaining how exactly most people (and not just a handful of lucky few) would get to outcompete AI-powered established corporations without having even a fraction of their marketing power. They can’t because that’s a complete fantasy, and also because most of them don’t actually care about those people.
So vague big bad government fearmongering it is.
I can’t answer for them, but I can say that I found the article irritatingly egotistical.
Over the last several decades, the US has seen a “hollowing of the middle class”. This is largely connected to the disappearance of the traditional blue collar jobs, esp. in manufacturing. Technical progress is not the only thing behind this. Over the same period, the welfare state was scaled back and the tax system restructured to favor the winners.
Now it seems that some writing tasks will be automated and suddenly it’s time to “reevaluate” how tech serves us. They don’t want a stronger welfare state; no help or compensation for those negatively affected. They don’t want to share the gains of progress fairly. Instead of the old fuck you, I got mine, it’s fuck you, I keep mine.
I wonder how much support this will get - it’s not the tool that’s the problem, but how it gets used.
- as a tech person, generative AI is already a useful tool, similar to how search engines are. However I’m not afraid of it taking my job because someone still needs to tell it what to do, plus it’s still pretty limited. I liken it to previous attempts to outsource software to the lowest bidder in the cheapest country. In general that was a failure and companies are looking for ability even in cheap labor markets, not just cheapness
- as someone who reads news and opinions online, I see the enshittification overtaking that industry over the last decade. Most content is clearly no longer written by journalists nor adhering to any standards for informing the user, but written by formula and template for SEO, and invoking outrage or other emotion. As someone watching videos, I see more choices than ever, but mostly poorly written and produced. It feels like these industries are racing for the bottom and not stopping. Generative AI can actually do a better job than most of the crap, and the most important skill of an online citizen is how to wade through the oceans of crap to find those morsels of journalism. How do we bring back journalism as a whole, regardless of what tools the hacks use to fill our attention and sell ads?
However I’m not afraid of it taking my job because someone still needs to tell it what to do
Why couldn’t it do that part too? - purely based on a simple high-level objective that anyone can formulate. Which part exactly do you think is AI-resistant?
I’m not talking about today’s models, but more like 5-10 years into the future.
That’s what I’ve been arguing with a fellow programmer recently. Right now you have to tell these programmer LLMs what to do on a function-by-function basis, because it doesn’t have enough capacity to think on a project level. However, that’s exactly what can be improved by scaling the neural network up. Right now the LLMs are limited by hardware, but they’re still using off-the-shelf GPUs that were designed for a completely different use case. The accelerators designed for AI are currently in the preproduction phase, very close to getting used in the AI data centers.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of weird takes on AI. It all seems to come down to ego guarding: But it can’t take my job, it just regurgitates combinations of what it was taught unlike me, only humans can be creative, who wants coffee made by a machine, well you still need a person to do things in the physical world, etc… Really highlights how difficult it is for people to think about change. Especially a change that might not end with a place for them.
It was actually the same thing with the original luddites. They didn’t oppose the new tool but the way it was used.
From the article :
The first Luddites were artisans and cloth workers in England who, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, protested the way factory owners used machinery to undercut their status and wages. Contrary to popular belief, they did not dislike technology; most were skilled technicians.
