Comment by sally_glance
7 days ago
Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ...
Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.
Many Luddites were fine with using the new Loom machines. They smashed them because they were precious to the capital holders and in a time when there were no labour laws. The Luddites were protesting child labour, forced labour, and having no social safety net when they were discarded by their employers other than workhouses.
This has been the dream of the capital classes since time immemorial.
And unfortunately (for humanity) this has been the status quo for the whole civilization. Small ruling elite class (you might designate them as masters, lords or employers) with all the wealth, minimal or no "middle class" and lots of poor people (you might designate them as peasants or slaves or workers).
The only exception to this has been the period of time since World War 2 when in most of the "western" countries the middle class demanded and took their share of the wealth. That's the time when modern well-fare states were born, universal health care became a thing, working safety improved, education became accessible. etc.
All these were NOT given by the elite but TAKEN by the working class via social reforms, workers unions and social democracy.
The capital owning class wants to take all these away and they're succeeding.
So yes, in fact the Luddites were not against technology, they were against the unilateral and uneven distribution of wealth produced by the technology.
There was another time of great social upheaval and progress.
It was after the Black Death.
Similar circumstances, if you think about it.
Industrialization actually helped the middle class insofar as you needed "skilled workers" to work the industrial equipment, make decisions, and process. The fact that production had scaled in a world of scarcity meant that your worker had greater leverage. They often knew each other as well, went to the same schools, etc which meant less info asymmetry as to their worth/value. It moves the value to something that takes time, skill and sometimes luck to achieve that being skills and experience. This was hard to replicate (e.g. our school, college, university systems), required significant training and created "pets not cattle" with hard to get skills meaning the new skilled middle class could rise and exercise their new found negotiating power.
Somewhat unprecedented in human history. All because intelligence had scarcity. AI changes that.
AI is the real dream of the capital classes. It makes intelligence cheap potentially undoing the very thing that gave birth to the last century's middle class. In the long term, given current trends, I wouldn't be surprised if these AI technologies revert us back to most of human history -> where the world is very unequal, meritocracy dies and most of us are trying to just exist/survive whilst the capital holders have abundance. It explains the large valuations as well of AI/Tech lately and the weird deals going on; this isn't a game of economics anymore; its an arms race of power in the new world structure. I suspect to these people no amount of money is enough; if you win you win for the next era of humanity.
If you think about it, Luddites were the original victims of capitalist propaganda.
Exactly. Most people who haven’t studied the history think the Luddites smashed the machines because they were against progress and industrialization. Hence the modern interpretation of Luddite meaning, “against technology.”
Many Luddites were shot against the wall or jailed. History often lies because it is written by the winners.
The OG alienator was the Agricultural Revolution, settling and toiling repetitively in predetermined ways, unlike the more adventurous lifestyle from before with all the camping, hunting, gathering, where circumstances brought always novel challenges, you could be a man spearing a deer, instead of just killing some docile domesticated cow. Searching for pheasant eggs and being happy if you found some, instead of going out every morning to the predictable presence of eggs in the chicken coop.
Although, gradually, all over the world people chose that lifestyle rather than take their chances with the seasons and the hunt.
Chose is a little strong. They were forced into it because agricultural societies could field armies orders of magnitude larger than hunter/gatherers.
It's telling that the nobles of agricultural societies generally still hunted, and often reserved that privilege.
Exactly, and similarly people may adopt AI too, whether they like the aesthetics or not.
Mostly because if you settled down a tilled a field of barley you had a reliable source of beer. Finding beer in the wild was and still is an almost certain failure.
The roots of global civilization are brown and frothy.
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Comparing the impact of LLMs on programming to the agricultural revolution is a pretty solid analogy!
I'd say the fear is justified. The economy should serve the people and the citizens not the other way around. Yet, our economies are increasingly the other way around, people have to fit into to the shape of the economy.
It's not hard to see a future where the workers displaced by AI get pushed to the sidelines and fringes of the society while the capital holders hoard more wealth and get the benefits of the "value" created.
We already have half the population on this planet living in slums without access to economic means and in the "developed" countries larger and larger group of people are barely hanging on either already displaced and unemployed or working jobs below living wages.
Frankly, It'd stupid not to be concerned.
This is true, but it started way earlier than AI with software development though. A lot of software developers' job is just being ticket monkies, adding small things or fixing bugs for a huge company that nobody cares about. The alienation is real.
This is, of course, an attribute of capitalism.
Like carpenters, gardeners and farmers, there are very few software developers who truly have the luxury to treat their work as a craft and not a factory output.