Great post by @leeS on AI and Luddites:

They were called the machine breakers. You may know them as Luddites.

They would break into factories at night carrying hammers and smash the machines that made their workplace less safe or took away their livelihood. They fought against a powerful tech elite.

This was happening in 1799 in England. But it’s all too real today, with the way AI is replacing humans on the job right now, driven by the elites who stand to make the most money.

via 500 Words from Lee Schneider, Issue 110—Machine Breakers

Reading this really got me thinking about the parallels between then and now; from the age of industrialization to the age of AI everything.

In the long run, technology kept rapidly evolving regardless of the Luddites. Conditions remained pretty bad at a lot of factories for a long time. But at the very least, they set the stage for the future of workers' rights.

We’re now living in a world full of all sorts of different machines—everything from artificial heart valves to factories packed full of complex assembly lines. And especially AI data centers the size of cities.

In the beginning, I was an AI doomer…

But then I researched it a little more, tried it out first hand and realized the implications for the advancement of tech and life in general. It’s something I can see real value in; it does things that were only sci-fi daydreams not that long ago. It has so much potential to make life so much easier.

But as always, the people at the top don’t care about how us peasants are using it, only that we are using it, and paying at least $20 a month for it. So if left unchecked, it’ll certainly continue to drink oceans of water, eat cities worth of steel, silicone, brick and mortar, and wreck our rickety old power grid. It’ll continue to steal more copyrighted material and walk a thin line between being your digital psychologist and encouraging your worst delusions.

There’s always nuance

After I started using AI, I started to think it was silly for people to poison training data, or advocate for it to be completely shut down.

But there’s always two sides to a story.

I can’t always say what their motivations are, but I also can’t argue with their choice to stand up for a noble cause.

The companies behind AI aren’t any different than any other mega corporation with billions in funding. They’re just the hottest new thing right now. But at the end of the day, they care about advancing AI as rapidly as possible, at whatever cost—whether it’s literal monetary cost, the cost of the environment, our jobs, or our sanity.

Maybe I suck for using a thing so many people justifiably hate, but I also support the modern Luddites for stirring shit up. Anything this big needs protestors and advocates fighting to make sure life doesn’t actually end up like a Terminator movie.

Just as the Luddites didn’t stop industrialization, but helped shape how we think about workers' rights, today’s AI critics aren’t going to thwart the advancement of AI. But they could absolutely help shape how we develop it responsibly.

edit: I feel like I should add a disclaimer on how I actually use AI here.

I don’t use AI for writing, beyond asking stuff like “did I use the word ‘ethos’ in the right context?” or asking it to proofread something I’m not sure about. Mostly, I use it like Google. I ask it to pull up multiple sources about a topic. I use it to help me code more than anything; CSS or (especially) JavaScript things I would spend hours trying to figure out by trial and error and web searches. Maybe it’s lazy, but honestly I’ve learned a lot of tricks from it in the last couple of years.

I don’t use it for any images I use on my blog; I made my favicon in Gimp. And I guess that’s about the only “branding” image I really have on my site. I still believe in supporting human artists for any serious art or designs.