Rethinking the Luddites
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
People at all level should do better using the time there is. For the ones (workers) to move up or away in their skills. For the others (businesses) to recognize a looming availability of human workforce which might be useful for some (other) business opportunity. For the third (governments) to - just in time - organize or encourage re-training at scale and in time. Trying to impose on each business to manage this whole world by itself is idiotic - normal business is tough and precarious enough. Trying to let each worker manage their own training is also insufficient: few people can optimally manage their own career at the same time as everything else.
An example in this direction is, I believe, Denmark's "Flexicurity". Firms can adapt to follow their needs; while workers can in general principle retain earnings while they retrain; while the state orchestrates availability of training (which itself can be a big industry sector). No doubt not perfect for anyone, but the general idea sounds solid.
Production moving overseas is not the same as technological advancement. One can be against outsourcing but in favor of domestic technological progress.
Yet they complain about joblessness and how the education system and their neighborhood/towns are going to the balls.
Absolutely yes. Compare gas prices in countries with high taxes on gas and countries with low taxes on gas. Compare products that are subject to vice taxes. It is not hypothetical, it's reality.
> Also, if taxes are lowered on businesses, the tax burden will be passed to the working poor/middle class.
All taxes on businesses are passed onto the consumers already. For businesses that sell products and services that everybody uses, that means the taxes are passed on the working poor and middle class. The only way to have taxes explicitly excluding the poor and middle class is to have tariffs on luxury goods, and maybe vice taxes since those products are not essential.
There's no doubt that many company owners would try to use any tax reduction to make more profit for themselves, but that leaves space for competitors to take market share.
Let me push back on that. We are all TOLD to want, using psychologically manipulative tactics. Advertising as corporate/Capitalist propaganda.
You are replacing labor input with capital input, whether it's buying a machine or offshoring the work. Workers offshore can be thought of as a machine.
Not that it's bad either way! But the labor economics are the same.
But meanwhile Denmark has been making a go at a constructive, thought out, response. Perhaps let's look at how that works - who retrains for what? (Which I don't know in detail.)
… and, well, infamously Joe Biden in his 2019 campaign:
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...
> Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
To note, luddites' issues were not just losing their job. Let's remember that the earlier machines were very crude, safety was absolutely not in their design, and a worker life's also didn't have much weight. So, the early days of machine assisted production were in inhumane conditions, people losing limbs, kids getting killed in them (less skills needed also meant kid labour was a viable option) etc.
So yes, regulation on how the machines work, how much they get introduced, how the workers are impacted, trial periods to see the impacts etc. should help a lot in all respects. The difficult part being that those all mean putting breaks on profit making.
It, however, would later give Marx a nice example of how the government is the tool that the ruling class uses to oppress the working classes and get their way: because when seen from this angle, the reaction was entirely reasonable.
Such “Libertarianism” can't even claim that their own name originates with themselves.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/27/us-leg...
https://www.wdam.com/2023/07/20/should-not-have-been-hired-m...
Yes, it was, but it was far cheaper. You can still get extraordinarily good fabrics today, extremely well-made hand-sewn leather goods. But a standard size carry-on suitcase made of high-quality leather in the US will run you around $1000-1500. You can buy a crappy mass-produced plastic one of the same size for around $100, or a well-made nylon one from Asia for around $300.
Note that sometimes government action forcing people to do things they don't want is necessary e.g. paying taxes and protecting the environment. That's hardly ever the case, though.
It was not layoffs that caused the revolts much worsening working conditions. They wanted things like getting paid in the promised time frame, and not having their children killed. It seems the protests were sprawling and later integrated every disappointment under the sun.
The other side took that as an opportunity to paint them as being generally anti progressive and against all forms of mechanization, but from what I understand there's not much to suggest that was actually true. Yes, machines were broken but so were a lot of other things as the protests turned violent.
Our lesson from the luddies should be that winners write history, we should not reiterate a centuries old smear campaign.
I read the article (twice - it's interesting), and I wrote "spend all the time they do have in a ludicrous war".
For the workers of the time it looked probably like a fast combination of things. Which the author kinda summarizes as "the inequitable profitability of machines". Things likely included: at first a boom in employment: the factories started at the same time the old, somewhat distributed production method mostly continued - but probably with minimal worker freedom of choice as to who went to which. Then layoffs as the old method just about disappears and more factories start or fail in seemingly (to the workers) random occurences. Then working conditions as factories no doubt did not start safe or comfortable. Then like you say every complaint under the sun.
I don't think it matters actually: the workers reacted to upheaval and probably felt they had no time to be heard. That's the complaint we hear now: "The current jobs are going and that's not right". That's the point of my response: "How does that help anything or anyone?". The lesson should be to try responses that actually have a chance to succeed as opposed to getting in the papers for (metaphorically) breaking frames. Denmark and Co seem to have thought up something in the right general direction.
In other words: a cheap labor force of people now desperate enough to accept lower compensation that their previous employment. If these later employers were able/willing to pay a similar wage, they would have already been doing so. Predicting a forthcoming a wave of despite people as a business opportunity, a chance to pay people lower wages tomorrow than you would have to today ... that is a dark sentiment. I think twitter is going to fail, but I'm going to wait on launching my new startup until the market is flooded with x-twitter employees willing to work for peanuts. Dark.
The job market is strange currently. Low unemployement rate (in part because of how many people withdrew). Businesses complaining they can't find people (some in part because they offer too little money). Many perenially underemployed. Absurd hiring processes (because of perceived cost of hiring the wrong person rather than nobody at all.)
My point is that simply "calling it dark" is not helpful to any of the participants.
We could for example say that 90% of jobs get automated away. The benefit for the businesses are astronomical as all those jobs get turned into direct profit. Meanwhile the workers get the change to... upskill? Yeah, so they just have to “upskill” forever while the businesses get free profit because they sit on the means of automation. (Remind me how the businesses have to put in work, here? Seems like they only get the upsides while the workers get all the downsides.)
Until there is nothing to upskill into anymore because only 12% of the labor pool is needed for actual work.
The notion that workers and employers are anywhere near to being peer competitors is bizarre.
As long as workers are not self-organizing, top to bottom, up to and including what to produce, how much to priduce and how to produce it, the domination will exist. What is the added value to the society of having bosses ? Of having people not producing but deciding how to produce ?
Scratch the destruction of machines, the sudden uprise, the distinction between what group acted and what group negotiated. The real lesson to learn from this all: society doesn't need someone telling you what to do if they're not also a worker.
It's revisionist because he's conflating the earlier movement when workers tried to negotiate with factory owners and organize with the Luddite movement. True - the failure of the first movement led to Ludditism out of desperation, but the groups are separate. Luddite literally is named after Ned Ludd smashing machinery, so it cannot be the name of the movement that was around organizing and negotiation because they only turned to smashing when organizing was made illegal. Basically workers tried to negotiate, were stymied, and a bunch of frustrated people started smashing machines, which caused a positive reaction from people so it started spreading and others started smashing stuff too.
When I first heard of Ludditism it was with more nuance that it's used today - to be a Luddite was to rage against technology with the art of a bull in a china shop. It wasn't a blanket term against "anti-progress" like it is now, but rather a dumb approach to dealing with change. Of course now it is used just to shut down people who don't like technology, so that's why I'm ok with some amount of revisionism, since the way it's being used currently is revisionist itself.
The only danger in conflating these legit concerns about automation with a violent movement is this implication that violence is the only way to bridge this gap, and I can see a strong argument that is was true back in those days, due to the Crown literally making any organizing and collective negotiation illegal, I strongly don't believe it's true today. I believe a violent reaction today would cause more harm to workers rights than help.
Talk about a slippery slope...
Part of us building the future is interpreting the past in a way that applies to our current world. For example - our modern western world was built on reinterpreting Romans and Greeks and idealizing their use of democracy. We had to throw away a lot of awful things they did to focus on just the good stuff. And even that period of history is being debated about how to interpret it in an attempt to understand who we are now - was it slave owning colonists who only prospered due to others labour or was it enlightened open thinkers who brought prosperity to the world, or was it a mix of those things or something else entirely. Revising the Luddite movement to include the earlier peaceful methods with the goal of saying healthy skepticism about technology is IMO a good thing - the Luddite movement specifically is tightly linked to the earlier movement so it's not a stretch to revise things it to include that whole chain of events.
But I'd be lying if I wasn't annoyed when he said things that weren't technically correct during the 99% invisible interview. But it's also revisionist to use Luddite as bludgeon, so if people are going to remove any subtlety from a word, I'd rather it was revised in an helpful way.
Interesting, I never thought of the term as pejorative. I always thought of the movement as a kind of working-class heroes trying to navigate an uncertain future where rich people made them obsolete.
Change isbinevitable, and in the long run society usually benefits as whole. The transition period is the problem, and on that front we are making no progress what so ever right now.
I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
Nor making a political assumption about someone.
There are no universal properties?
A non-trivial universal property for a domain asserts something non-trivial about everything in the domain. You think 'political' is a trivial property?
But this is reference to exceptional (low entropy) properties. If you multiply highly informational properties, they stop being informative. And move more towards white noise.
It's the attempt made to label someone as "liberal" because they didn't know that Luddites was/is used as a pejorative, to someone who clearly has not stated they identify as such.
Which is just absurd, like labeling someone as a supporter of imperialism because they didn't know that royal means "of having the status of a king or queen or a member of their family".
Not only that but to then also indirectly insinuating this is because they are essentially too sheltered/spoiled to understand the value of goods.
Specifically:
>I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
Despite the original poster never stated something that would highlight such a point of view, beyond admitting not knowing the definition/use of a word.
Not exactly sure what your point is regarding the unabomber (who is considered a neo-Luddite, not a traditional Luddite). Is it that movements and labels change over time? Because what the unabomber wanted vs what the luddites wanted (almost a full two centuries before the Unabomber), were completely different things.
But even if we’re comparing the Luddite movement within their respective times, you’re taking an extreme example of a mentally ill domestic terrorist and conflating him with the entire Luddite movement, a movement that barely even exists in the 20th/21st century. Luddite is now used pretty casually to describe a technophobe or someone bad with technology. It doesn’t really describe a member of the Luddite movement anymore.
Do you mean a strike? A very common event in many first-world countries like the US or France ?
Which is fair and proportional if people doing it got their own livelihood threatened by introduction of said systems. Especially in 19th century when not having a work to do meant not having food.
In a sense, this propaganda win in England gave us the current oppossition to unions we see in the US and among corporations.
But somehow the rich dudes in their villas, and especially their money, need protection.
Really, all through collage and career, in the US for last 30 years.
Calling someone a Luddite was an insult, someone that is standing in the way, not smart, desiring to just go live on a farm without any technology because it is all just too complicated.
I've never heard the term used in a positive way.
Not saying this is true of the actual Luddites, just how the term is used in the US.
This book came out in 2021, so there's definitely a trend to look back at the Luddites, investigate what their movement and actions were about, and apply some of those ideas to today. I actually just happened to pick this up in a local bookshop on a whim this weekend, but haven't read it yet.
If you want to defend Luddite positions you don’t need to defend the term itself. Then the correct retort would be I’m not a Luddite I’m an X where X is something intuitive and short.
The violation of people's trust through the use of telemetry is precisely what turned me skeptical of modern day stuff. There's a lot of stuff that I would probably use, if it wasn't hellbent on learning the color of my underwear, how often I snore, or what products I'm interested in.
You won't catch me with a Ring camera, any Alexa device, I use uBlock, etc. There is so much more I would be comfortable using in this world of technology if there was a modicum of mutual respect.
This sentiment was likely shared by many of the original Luddites.
Individuals will decide how to respond to AI, and we will see what happens. My guess, based on past adoptions of work-saving technologies, is that anyone capable of using AI to make their job easier will do so. And that may result in the elimination of other jobs.
The economic framework, including rules, regulations, incentives, and penalties, amongst others, are set by government (“the country”).
Also, if government decides to employ and find AI, that already pushes things in a certain direction.
So yes, while individuals decide how to use AI, it is very much governments that have tremendous capacity and interest to bend and accelerate or decelerate its adoption patterns.
We must find far more effective ways for governments to think, deliberate, simulate, act or not act, implement, enforce.
There could be a future where the fields that matter the most are heavily impacted and most of the work is automatized, while a flurry of other parts are strictly kept off AI and automatization.
I have in mind the extent to which agriculture requires way fewer people that we'd imagine given its scale and importance, while we have people making money doing funny faces on camera [0].
[0] that's also absolutely needed by the society, but it's not at the same primary level
Then they came for the skilled craftsmen, and I was not a skilled craftsman, so I did nothing.
Then they came for the clerks and bookeepers, and I was not a clerk or a bookkeeper, so I did nothing.
Now they've come for the chattering classes, and there is no one left to speak for me.
First they came for the writers and illustrators, and I did nothing because I'm not a writer or an illustrator.
Then they came for the musicians, and I did nothing because I only listen to music.
Then they came for the text-dependent professional classes, and I did nothing because I'm not one of those people.
They they came for the programmers, and the plumbers sat around laughing saying "and you thought you were so much better than us!"
How every pipe fitting links to each other. In that case plumbers aren’t needed for small things since a user could state their problem to a smartphone and AI could guide them to the correct fix as it debugs the users house.
Same with construction or doctors or teachers.
If AI can truly learn and reason the physical world, then it doesn’t mean much to be human.
What is being a human in terms of labor? A 100 watt 80kg biological agent with general intelligence that can learn and follow steps. With eyes and ears they sense, with legs they move and and with hands they apply fine motor skills to move other objects.
The whole point of AI is to build cheaper labor that follows instructions, never sleeps, never forgets, replaceable if broken.
The rich and powerful will 100% get more rich and powerful, the question is how well that prosperity will be shared with the rest.
It could be that some powerful nations say let’s go kill entire other continents and take their land with our robot and drone army.
Globally 35 billion barrels of oil / yr are consumed. Thats 1700 kWh/barell * 35B = 59.5TWh/year = 6.8 TW. This means if someone could make human equivalent robots that take gasoline as energy, they’d have an army of 68 billion human-like robots.
> The whole point of AI is to build cheaper labor that follows instructions, never sleeps, never forgets, replaceable if broken.
How utterly tedious, boring and unimaginative.
We are and should not try stopping technology: we just have to sublime our human qualities and keep proving technologies' limitations (many of which are so obvious as requiring only some commonsense).
And this isn't common knowledge?
Until at least some data centers get burned down to the ground, comparing the current anti-AI movement to Luddites is just ridiculous.
There are also many law suits against AI works:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/books/authors-openai-laws...
You really require that they resort to physical violence when they know fully that data in one DC will be backed up elsewhere so it will have no effect. From my pov, they are using the violence of the legal system to stop/slow AI.
Hollywood strikes are something that happens every ~5 years even without AI. [1]
> There are also many law suits against AI works
If they won then maybe that would count. Otherwise I see it as "PETA sued zoos".
Luddites used extra-legal methods to try to accomplish their goals, so I don't think the comparison really works.
In that the luddities were either extinct or had merged with the labor movement?
Since that is what most people would in practice object to, a no safety net or regulation for the protection of their jobs.
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/12/02/bill-joy-why-the-fut...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
The growth in consumption seems to always ever so slightly outpace innovation.
A result of this relationship between consumption and innovation seems to be that there is always some drudgery for humans right beyond the edge of what we can automate. The drudgery serves to eek just a bit more out of the system in order to match the demands of consumption.
Tomorrows drudgery will not look like todays, but it will remain drudgery all the same.
And regardless, if the masses would try to use the ballot box to make moves to something like FALC, it would be taken away, by force if necessary. This has been seen countless times.
Looking at how wealth, capital and power are concentrating, we are well on our way to some sort of new feudal system.
Machiavelli too had many interesting ideas, in particular how the elite moved through the various forms of government. A monarch decays into a despot and is eventually overtaken by an aristocracy of nobles which decays into democracy over a few generations which has a very short life and takes on the darker side of “rule by few” as an oligarchy. Eventually they become so decadent that a populist government (rule by many, the darker side of democracy) overtakes them and soon after a new prince, or monarch “of the people” is born and the cycle continues possibly over many hundreds of years.
Looking at America I think we are in the oligarchical phase and pushing hard towards a populist whom will reform the government dramatically.
I'm also very taken with the idea of systems propagating themselves. Formally, this is called "autopoiesis" and is its own fascinating and related rabbit hole.
The coolest thing this morning, prompted by your comment, is the "self-licking ice cream cone" [1]. This paper [2] is particularly intriguing. Thanks again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
For example, at one point 50 years ago it was decided that we needed to do things to get more females into universities - a noble goal. So we set up a variety of things that made it more accessible to females and the things we did were successful. The way we did this is questionable (lower standards for females, in part) but they accomplished the goals. But we still have these systems setup and the people who run them have become entrenched and organized and any motion to dismantle them is met with aggression. You can extrapolate this well beyond females.
So we end up in a situation where more and more people find a prime mechanisms of elite credentialism (elite universities) as unfair and meaningless. And our pool of elites are weaker and unable to defend themselves against the rise of populism since so many of them aren't actually elites in reality, even if they pretend they are or believe they are being oblivious to all the artificial mechanisms that put them there in the first place.
Anyways, the book "The Machiavellians" is a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Machiavellians-Defenders-Freedom-Jame...
> Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies.
"Iron law" isn't a law in any real sense here, other that it was one fascist guy calling it that. Still, there's a valid point:
> By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes
This really shines a light on the innovative system that Australia uses[1], which I think helps mitigate the non-participation factor: voting in Australia is compulsory. It's your civic duty to participate in elections and everyone is automatically registered when they reach the age of 18.
Overall I think that it's hard to make any 'iron laws' in modern times, because these laws were based on looking back rather than forward. A lot of these are based on assumptions that technology wouldn't change, but that's not the case - modern telecommunications have moved us past the age where information only traveled as fast as a horse could carry you. For 99.99% of human history it was totally impossible for a direct democracy to function, but with instant, global communications and information access that's no longer a safe assumption.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia
This is certainly something worth learning from today, and a new book bringing this interpretation to more people is worthwhile, but it's not a novel take on the movement, just an attempt to reclaim the colloquial phrase.
Should I have the right to preserve my way of life when it imposes costs on others?
There’s also a third assertion which can help our thinking, and that is that we have just about the right amount and type of technology, so we should halt now (vs regress or progress).
So the question then is: which of these three assertions are likely correct?
"The right amount of type of technology" is again a value judgement, tied into ideas about what a good life involves. It is also complicated by long term side effects, as we are seeing with the use of fossil fuels - there was a fairly good argument for their use 120 years ago, but it turns out that whether that argument was or wasn't correct, planning to continue to use them "forever" is not only infeasible, but utterly detrimental.
Also, costs? We're caring about money in a discussion about technology and culture? By that measure, the only cultures we should have around are the ones that cost the least.
Me and my pals have some skill that you can now buy a machine and replace so me my pals put on masks and come visit you to smash those machines. Me and my pals want to keep getting paid for the work the machine can do nearly free now. Are me and my pals not imposing costs on others?
> We're caring about money in a discussion about technology and culture? By that measure, the only cultures we should have around are the ones that cost the least.
What would you say to slave owners struggling to preserve their culture and way of life when slavery was being outlawed? Would you support them? Because to preserve their culture and way of life which imposes costs on others is ok?
Vandalism or destruction of property is nowhere near as insidious as the erasure of an entire culture and squeezing money out of them for literally generations.
I'm not convinced you have a clear view of who the Luddites were. We should look back at that situation as a hint as to how we should move forward with technology in society, if we make that choice. Choosing to leave certain people behind and not offer retraining or some other opportunity is exactly what creates the malice that would motivate a tradesman to destroy machinery. People know when they're being screwed or left out. So, maybe we shouldn't screw people over whose skills become obsolete by technologies. We should be forward-thinking and responsible in the effects our innovations have on our social systems.
Or we can blame individuals and call them names. Good enough I guess?
> The Luddites were free people who knew a trade that machines were threatening to make obsolete.
Did Luddites not feel it was their right to impose costs on others to maintain their way of life?
> Slave owners didn't care one iota about their livestock, they were a means to an end.
Slave owners not feel it was their right to impose costs on others to maintain their way of life?
The two cases are obviously different however do you deny both involve the the belief that it is ok to impose costs on others to maintain some way of life? There is nothing in common?
>Choosing to leave certain people behind and not offer retraining or some other opportunity is exactly what creates the malice that would motivate a tradesman to destroy machinery.
A society that leaves members behind will be out competed and replaced by societies that are smarter about this. Ditto for a society that imposes costs on others so that some group can continue to maintain some legacy way of life.
Self-preservation? Do you expect them to roll over and die?
> Did Luddites not feel it was their right to impose costs on others to maintain their way of life?
Did the factory owners not feel it was their right to suddenly and massively disrupt the industries that Luddites were making a living in? What about the cost on them?
Above I said “A society that leaves members behind will be out competed and replaced by societies that are smarter about this. Ditto for a society that imposes costs on others so that some group can continue to maintain some legacy way of life.” Are these ideas unreasonable? If you think they are good ideas, the rational thing to do is spread them so there is collective will to have a safety net that ensures nobody is left behind. This needs to exist and be collectively paid for ahead of time. That many do not understand this is a problem. One solution is laws like forced purchased of private vehicle insurance. Another is to include such insurance as part of citizenship which now has a higher price / taxes. What is needed are some prices signals so that those who make decisions that put them at greater risk should pay higher costs to prevent such decisions.
> Did the factory owners not feel it was their right to suddenly and massively disrupt the industries that Luddites were making a living in? What about the cost on them?
Nobody “owes” you a job. Factory owners must follow laws but are otherwise free to run factory as they like even shut it down. They are at the mercy of a market of consumers. Are you willing to pay for hand made goods / services when machine made offer better value? What do you suppose happens to a business that refuses to modernize?
“But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” [1]
“Part of why Ludd could count on such support was that Lt Mellor began by strategically targeting the factories that had the worst records of safety and that paid the lowest wages.” [2]
“Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." [3]
“In the place of a “cottage industry” where clothworkers, often working from home, could work as many or as few hours in the day as suited them, a new institution was arising: the factory. Inside the factory, workers would work long hours at dangerous machinery, be fed meager meals, and submit to the punitive authority of the foreman. The Luddites saw that the winners from this technological “progress” would not be workers—neither the expert textile makers losing their jobs, nor the exploited children replacing them. The winners were the factory owners who, having found a new way to disempower their workers, were able to amass a greater share of the profits those workers generated.” [4]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-future-encyclopedia-o...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
[4] https://time.com/6317437/luddites-ai-blood-in-the-machine-me...
By preventing the others from buying the less-expensive machine made goods, thus harming their quality of life.
The McDonald's hot coffee lady case wasn't frivolous.
"The customer is always right..."? Yeah, "... in matters of taste." It means you don't sell a customer who wants a green car a red one.
The "welfare queen" story wasn't about a woman who was lazy and collecting benefits, she just fit a profile that matched peoples' prejudice. It's difficult to stay on the government dole and there's a lot of conditions for receiving it. Defrauding them can disqualify you from further benefits or land you in the slammer. People aren't out there living the high life off of SS.
Sorry if it seems scattershot, I'm just describing other things that get twisted far away from their original circumstance, usually just to enable anti social behavior, like calling someone who takes a careful approach to technology a Luddite.
If the term wasn't "luddite", "vandal", or "barbarian" then it would be something else to describe the same thing. That is: these terms aren't really a source of any sentiment, and merely used to describe it.
This is different from e.g. the McDonald's coffee lady, where people draw real conclusions about modern society from the case (usually with very limited knowledge of the facts) and is the source of a sentiment.
No, this isn't "twisted in our living memory". The people who think that the lawsuit is frivolous haven't forgotten that the coffee was hotter than other fast-food coffee, or rather, it has no bearing on their assessment.
Coffee is a hot beverage, and it's in your personal responsibility not to put a flimsy cup containing a hot beverage between your legs, especially not while sitting in a car. It's completely irrelevant whether the coffee was 85°C, 75°C, or 65°C, or whether there's a large warning label on the side of the cup – as an adult you can be expected to exert common sense, and if you don't, then McDonald's shouldn't be held liable for your clumsiness.
They sold 180–190 °F coffee, with a lid, to a 79yo lady at a drive-through window. She was sitting in her car and spilled the coffee in her lap while trying to remove the lid. I don't have an opinion on the legal ramifications, but the setting has 'horrific accident waiting to happen' written all over it.
I already have, thank you.
> They sold 180–190 °F coffee, with a lid, to a 79yo lady at a drive-through window.
I know. That "79yo lady" is an adult who is liable for her own actions. Coffee is hot, duh, I would expect someone of that age to know that. McDonald's isn't responsible for babysitting people who should know better than to squeeze hot beverages between their legs.
> the setting has 'horrific accident waiting to happen' written all over it
Not more than handing someone knife and fork. If you go out for dinner and you cut yourself in the finger, or you stab an eye out because you forgot how to use cutlery, is that also the restaurant's fault? Should they give everyone dull knifes and spoons only, just in case?
Are you aware that during discovery, it was uncovered that McDonalds had undertaken studies to determine how hot they needed to make the coffee to avoid in-restaurant guests from drinking it too quickly and getting free refills. They knew the coffee was too hot and had received many complaints, and other people had been burned, but it was in fact "the point" to ensure the coffee was too hot, to save a couple of cents per customer.
This is a dim moral view of humanity. Basically nobody is liable to you, even if they fuck up? That's not how morals and ethics work.
I'm convinced those that beat the drum of personal responsibility are simply conservatives that want everyone to lead a shit life. There is only so much one can do to avoid the damage that others cause. But of course, no personal responsibility to the businesses hurting people, right?
Dead giveaway of conservative, backwards outlooks. You would not be able to build a community with those values.
What are your thoughts on sexual assault?
People in this thread don't seem to understand what the more archaic form of "preserve their way of life" actually means.
It means not starving to death. Back then there was no social safety net. Once your trade was not needed back then you were likely kicked to the street. There was not retraining to learn some new trade.
This is something in the times of "Learn 2 code", or "Go be a plumber" that we hear tossed about so casually. When you cause mass unemployment in a trade, especially very rapidly, you can destabilize society, you can induce crime, and even if you're not directly affected by the trade, you can be indirectly affected by the instability of the changing employment market.
This is precisely what happened to Luddites and their families, at least the ones who weren't executed or exiled by the state.
Just because Luddites were sympathetic doesn't change the fact that they were wrong. They didn't care for the welfare of workers in general so much as they were looking out for themselves. It did not matter to them that hundreds of thousands of peasants chose to move to find work in the cities because it was better than life in the countryside and by destroying machinery, Luddites were taking away their livelihoods while the factories were shut down.
It's usually at this time that someone will bring up the enclosure of common land as the reason why people were forced out of the countryside, but that doesn't change that factory life was still offered a better alternative for a lot of people. The privatization of fertile land was inevitable with a growing population. Without the new factory jobs, even more people would be stuck as serfs like they were in China or Russia at the time.
So what? How is this even relevant? ATM machines also made the lives of bank tellers worse cause they lost their jobs. As well as the countless automations that happened. "Oh, better stop all technological progress to ensure I have a job", it doesn't work like this, it never did, and anyone who tried this failed miserably because it is selfish and it doesn't work. What matters is that society as a whole was better after every automation. Honestly this whole whining about automation NOW is mainly white collar workers, such as journalists and artists, throwing a hissy fit and asking for special protection because they feel like their job is """"really special"""" unlike other peoples job, it's not like other people have bills to pay and stuff.
> What matters is that society as a whole was better after every automation.
If your family's wealth had historically sat somewhere around the median in your society and then a major change occurred which caused your family's wealth to drop to the bottom 20% in your society, wouldn't you be angry about that? I would be. And I wouldn't be placated by assurances that society as a whole will be better off.
Not that I think demanding a halt to technological progress is a rational response (I've mentioned elsewhere I don't think that's really possible to achieve, even if we wanted to), but I understand why some people might respond that way.
The people "throwing a hissy fit" are, in my opinion, right about the problem but wrong about the solution (which is often the case). Automation rapidly making a large number of people redundant is an economic shock which can be softened via sensible intervention.
Nit: this isn't accurate. ATM machines are the textbook example of a case where automation actually increased employment. Bank teller employment continued to grow at around the same rate as before ATMs were introduced even while ATM installations skyrocketed, because it suddenly became much cheaper to operate a bank branch. So while tellers per bank went down, the overall number of tellers increased because there were so many new branches opening.
Because when the luddites were kicked off their fiefdoms, there was no social safety net to ensure they didn't starve.
This is the point the gun ho capitalists tend to completely forget about while bitching that taxes are too high. When people are given the option of 'starving in the street' or 'burning your factory to the ground' they'll choose the later. If you setup a society where losing your job is not losing your life, for example by providing retraining, you the rabid free market fiend will have a safer life.
This! It's the same deal with white collar workers complaining about AI just now, while ignoring previous automation, when it benefited them.
Both the Luddites and the enclosure of common land as discussed in history books both were in the context of the UK, which had a very different system that was not at all comparable to serfdom. To the extent that it is true the UK cities were better than the UK countryside, it's not because the people moving there were already an abused underclass of near-slaves like you imply, and the enclosure of common land would absolutely have had an impact on the ability of the free farmers to get by.
Unions don't fight for the welfare of workers in general. They fight for their members and their members only.
So thank you for your strong anti-union speech, I guess.
IMHO having to work more when productivity and automation increases is quite a clear sign of a fundamentally broken economic system.
https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bu...
Being against the inequitable profitability of machines is just as dumb as being against technology, especially outside of a socialist context which this definitely was. It's basically crying that someone else is doing something better than you. In fact, I think being against technology wholesale is a much more defensible position since it creates an arms race, its unpredictable, it forces everyone into a lifestyle, etc.
That "someone else" used state power to beat you, imprison you and starve your family if you dared to organize with other workers.
Meanwhile, literal conspiracies of factory owners had full legal protection and the ability to write laws, including laws that gave the death penalty for machine breaking.
> That "someone else" used state power to beat you, imprison you and starve your family if you dared to organize with other workers.
Luddites pre-dated socialism and worker organization. Unless you mean, organizing a terrorist organization to blow up factories.
The Combination Act of 1799, and following Combination Acts, made it illegal for workers to organize in any sense[1][2].
> Luddites pre-dated socialism and worker organization
They pre-date Marxist socialism, but the term socialism predates Marx and has had various meanings before then. Marx chose to adopt the existing term to describe his concept of socialism.
It's weird for you to say that Luddites pre-dated worker organization, when workers had organized for collective bargaining in the past, and owners made it illegal. It's also interesting considering the history of workers organized in guilds that certainly predate the Luddites by centuries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Act_1799
[2] https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/in...
"I hate AI but also I've had the most insightful conversations with it about writing. It has been more honest, helpful and playful in workshopping story ideas than any real human I know. It's like chatting with a room full of actual writers and the value of that can't be ignored."
I've seen similar sentiment from a few digital artists. Those who are very anti-AI will get left behind and be outcompeted by more productive AI users. There will be a lot of disruption. We should think how to best support people whose jobs will be irreplaceably lost because of AI. There is only so much content that the market wants. Eventually we should get some form of UBI as more and more people are affected.
> In the era of A.I., we have another opportunity to decide whether automation will create advantages for all, or whether its benefits will flow only to the business owners and investors looking to reduce their payrolls. One 1812 letter from the Luddites described their mission as fighting against “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.” That remains a strong standard by which to judge technological gains.
Paraphrasing Alan Kaye here. There's a certain inevitability to AI. The proverbial cat is out of the bag. Our choices are simply to be part of this revolution or to be left behind while the likes of China and others, not blocked by mildly hysterical ethical activists protesting their own irrelevance, plow ahead. It's really that simple.
I call out China here because 1) they have lots of people actually working on AI. 2) a lot of the hardware we use for AI is actually being created there. 3) they have a history of getting stuff done once they decide they want to do something.
Delaying tactics, insisting it is done right, getting upset about things changing, fearing the loss of control, and similar sentiments simply aren't constructive. It's not going to stop this. If you want it done right, make sure you are involved in the doing.
What I suppose some people worry about is stuff like:
1. That they will have some means of feeding themselves and their families going forward
2. That they won't be at the whim of increasingly totalitarian (and arbitrary) governments with increasing power
3. That they will continue to find human connection
4. That they won't be overwhelmed by lots of crap content
If someone _thinks_ there's a problem, there _is_ a problem: It's pretty tricky to talk people out of their fears. You can tell them to shut up, or you can address their fears and make them feel better about the future. That typically includes putting some checks and balances in place, as well as adjusting their expectations.
China started doing mass surveillance early on, they're probably better at the technologies involved than the average country. By your logic, other countries should stop whining about it and start doing the same (or more), to not be left behind. I don't think everyone needs to do the worst thing that's technically possible to do. Sometimes those things aren't even all that beneficial for the success of a country, which I'd measure in citizen satisfaction and safety from hostile countries ultimately.
But that's a specific subset of generative AI they object to. Maybe there are people who oppose _all AI_ (including symbolic AI like pathfinding algorithms), but I'm not aware of any.
"the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die"
"Shut down all the large GPU clusters...be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike"
https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
https://www.lw.com/admin/upload/SiteAttachments/Chinas-New-A...
And that's just surface level government usage. Go on, in, or near any of the "elite's" assets, and you will be recorded and analyzed from a dozen angles, whether those assets are physical or digital.
The monitoring infrastructure might be largely built and/or deployed by private companies, but those companies know who their paying customers are: entities that are governmental, non-governmental and entities that blur the lines, that want to monitor and police citizens.
The same will happen to modern wage labor due to AI. Automation will not be a sudden an obvious moment (eg. Google deciding to lay off every software engineer), rather it will be a slow hemorrhaging of the working class where vast swaths of workers will be laid off, and unable to find work of similar pay and stability ever again. The job market will continue to get exponentially more and more competitive, and the illusion of stability will collapse. This same trend has already been playing out over the last few decades, but the pace at which it's playing out is now accelerating exponentially.
Because jobs will still exist, the status quo "just re-train them" optimists will remain ignorant and in denial, clinging to old models of the past. They'll say ridiculous things like "we can re-train the bus drivers by teaching them how to code", or "just teach illustrators how to prompt".
Of course advancing technology should be a good thing, and with the modern technology we have now we already could afford a society of leisure and abundance. But our current capitalist system drains most people of the time/energy for big picture thinking (unrelated to making a buck), and our representative democracy (compared to direct or delegative democracy) further discourages political participation from regular people who aren't wealthy enough to have the abundance of leisure and financial security required to think about anything other than money.
The result is that governments only serve the interests of the wealthy, while providing only an illusion of representing the masses. The rigidity and inflexibility of government systems means that nothing will change short of a revolution.
The easiest and simplest policy change that can be made to alleviate job loss + destitution from AI and to reframe AI automation from a game with winners + losers to a game where everyone wins is to implement a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Think we can't afford a UBI? Fine. Start small, and peg it to the revenues of something specific like a Land Value Tax (Henry George's "citizen's dividend"). Watch society not collapse and everyone be happier (eg. like when COVID forced employers to allow more remote work) as society collectively moves up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The increasing abundance of leisure will start the flywheel towards increasing political participation and representation of the people, systemic political reform towards delegative democracy (liquid democracy), and the next evolution of the human species in the "AI Age".
Until then, the only way to safeguard yourself from the AI automation wave is to achieve financial independence and to fully embrace AI, since workers who know how to leverage the latest AI tools will displace those who don't.
If an artist can lose his job to AI, it means he was never anything more than a weaker version of AI. you can't be angry because someone does your job better than you and for cheaper.
Should we regulate and control the advancements, so something like the atomic bombs, like hiroshima doesn't happen with AI? Absolutely yes. Should we have our guards up and say AI is bad, it will be end of us, etc.? No. opposing progress is something that humans have always loved to do.
“There’s just a total lack of empathy or recognizing that what they’ve done has hurt someone or it’s only benefited themselves,” he says. “And sometimes they might recognize what they’re doing is wrong, they just don’t care or they justify it to themselves.”'
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sociopath-personality-dis...
TFA article is about how Luddites were not opposed to technology per se.
Up until now, you were only really automating away the boring stuff.
Do not be fooled by GPT, it's a fancy Markov chain hooked up to training data. It cannot come up with anything that wasn't already in its data set.
“AlphaGo showed anomalies and moves from a broader perspective which professional Go players described as looking like mistakes at the first sight but an intentional strategy in hindsight.”
Doesn’t matter if the data was already there if a human overlooks it. It took an AI to do something that everyone thought was a mistake at first.
It's not even the ideas that are valuable, it's making them happen. I can think up tons of things, but lack the resources to make any of them happen.
By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring.
We have a mandate for us and our future generations to learn from the lessons of history and stand together as human beings to ensure that the value that we have created is respected and shared with those who created it.
We don't deserve the scraps that fall to us, we deserve a seat at the damn table.
I'm not sure what hierarchies you've been a part of where people actively trying to treat people poorly leads to their success - I'd wager those are few in far between in reality, and over represented in media. Maybe you're cynical about a few high profile companies or how U.S. politics appears, but positions of power exist everywhere in society, and society wouldn't be even remotely functional if people followed your assumed behavior.
I think some people treat people well, but I've met too many small business owners who bristle at paying minimum wage.
So, yeah, Americans aren't working 16 hour shifts in mines anymore and child labor laws are largely in effect. But, I also wouldn't say most people are treated "quite well." That's not the media force-feeding me stuff. That's first-hand experience and watching what friends and family are going through right now.
Within any organization, you will have the sociopaths who want the glitz and title and power but have no respect for those they'll have to knock down to get there. That is what we're talking about.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
This is a very important point and the strength of capitalism. Even a self asshole like Elon Musk is incentivized to provide useful goods and services and create jobs that raise people's standard of living.
Profit > everything else
People who align with that are profiting from capitalism.
The burden of proof is thus on those who want to destroy it, to prove they have a viable and useful alternative that will ACTUALLY make the lives of people better. Instead, what I see is a direction that is guaranteed to lead to bloodshed and misery, with only a dreamers hope that what comes afterward is any better.
I'd like to see some real numbers for this. Capitalism creates inequality which even the feudal eras of various countries couldn't match. Serfs enjoyed more spare time in their day than the modern full-time worker. Granted, they had their own problems to deal with, but to pretend that capitalism is the best because it's created the most inequality (i.e. someone's hit a really high score)
Capitalism enables sociopathic behavior. In fact, it rewards it. The more profit you get from something, the better you're playing capitalism. Doesn't matter if what you're selling is remotely close to what you're charging, in value. Endless growth and profit must come from somewhere. Money and resources do not just poof into the world. Money can be printed, but that has consequences.
A corporation exploiting my labor so they can profit, and shareholders giving them money with the expectation to make more back later (i.e. gambling) is not making the world any better. It's trapping people into a cycle of giving their most valuable resource -- time -- to others of its kind that wouldn't care if they died tomorrow.
I'm not sure what an alternative would be. People act like there's only 2 or 3 systems out there. That dogmatic myopia is part of what traps us in shitty systems.
Without capitalism, I could have control over my life. Why should an economic system dominate one's waking life? Businesses are not more important than individuals. They have no more right to exist than we do.
Says who? You think people in China and Russia have more control over their life than those in the west? You've still not offered anything other than wishful thinking. You've not proposed any system to replace capitalism. Ultimately you're just offering destruction, with no vision for rebuilding other than, "I hope it gives me an easier life".
Do you really think there isn't a better system than accepting that some other human out there is going to get more out of your work than you?
In nations with extreme abundance, it should be trivial to solve problems of homelessness and hunger. We have the means, but capitalism says "no, people must not be allowed to survive without working for others".
Why are we the only animal on Earth that pays others of its kind to survive and exist?
If capitalism cannot bring people up then its cancerous nature will naturally give way to unrest and change. Expecting me to know what that change would be, and what conditions would settle, is unreasonable.
Labor should be a choice, and you should get the vast majority of the benefit for it. Capitalism cannot offer such things. It has nothing to offer except exploitation. It rewards preying on your fellow person and justifies everything with profits. Cancer incarnate.
There's unemployment benefit. In the UK, that's £85 a week. There's also council housing.
People who are mentally ok and who land on the streets via a series of unfortunate incidends are often back into a house and a job a year later - it's really not that hard in most developed countries.
Capitalism's goal is to maximize the creation wealth by allowing individuals to privately hold wealth and efficiently leverage it to produce more wealth. Currently, humans are a crucial element in the production of wealth, which has allowed labor to capture some amount of that wealth for themselves. But that's not central to Capitalism. If you can generate massive amounts of wealth and give none of it to your workforce, you've succeeded at Capitalism, even if it means the 90+% of the population who don't own much capital at all starve in the streets.
In contrast, Communism's stated goal is the achievement of a classless, moneyless society that provides to each according to their need, and each works according to their ability. Unlike Capitalism, the elimination of the necessity of labor doesn't intrinsically cause everybody to starve. It just dwindles away the necessity of the "from each according to their ability" part.
So you can argue about what other better solutions there are, but if we're pushing towards a world with less and less need for human labor, Capitalism is flatly untenable. Capitalism's answer to human labor being optional is that the former labor class dies.
What good is a stated goal if the reality is the opposite? Capitalism may not have a lofty sounding goal to your ear, but the fair trade of goods and services is actually a pursuit in the betterment and empowerment of mankind. Of course, human nature gets in the way, and leads to corruption that needs to be constantly addressed and readdressed, but that will never change no matter what system you dream up.
And while capitalism isn't draped in utpoian idealism, it has the benefit of having proven to be able to lift a huge bulk of humanity out of subsistence living.
Look at a company. The purpose of a company is to make money. Not all companies are successful: lots of companies fail to make money. But, when push comes to shove, and a company needs to choose between "make money" and something else, say, a commitment to not being evil, the company will choose "make money".
Capitalism does not have meeting basic human needs as a core goal. Capitalism's distribution of money to labor is a side effect, not a goal. It has the freedom of capital to amass capital as a core goal. Thus, if something needs to go, it's not going to be capital's ability to amass more capital.
As automation comes for more and more jobs, the demand for labor in general will fall. Capitalism, even in its most idealistic "a rising tide lifts all ships" form, does not care about those it doesn't need. If your preferred answer to "what do we do when human labor is no longer necessary" isn't "extinction", you can't rely on Capitalism as an ideology.
Are non-profits not “companies”? Are there no small businesses that opt against expansion?
This is a reductive and ridiculous take. The real world isn’t Soc101 or a poor reading of Marx, nor is it black and white.
Well, non-profits are not exactly capitalist companies like the ones for profit. Neither necessarily are the small business where the owner values other things over the expansion and profit. But these things are not much relevant when concerning most of production, the things that influence a country's GDP. These small businesses or non-profit organizations indeed may have concerns other than profit. But good luck convincing shareholders in a big company that they should take the less profitable path, especially if there is competition with other companies.
Shareholders can be convinced that a long term play may be less profitable today than it will be in a decade and opt to take that path. I’m not sure why that’s assumed to be prima facie untrue.
Is Uber or Door Dash not a company or mot capitalist? The latter especially appears to have no road to profit. If it’s not capitalist, by your definition, what is it? Why are its shareholders not replacing the board on a daily basis until someone makes it profitable?
> Are non-profits not “companies”? Are there no small businesses that opt against expansion?
The law makes such businesses slightly less likely to survive. There are ideas and ideals that are the source of that law.
Do you think that’s unfair? Do you think suggesting that capitalism is just about enriching shareholders today is not reductive?
Whether the law makes small businesses less likely to survive (citation needed) is immaterial to the question.
This is what happens when you smoke too much of your own propaganda.
America is very much a mixed economy, and we're the so called 'leader' of the capitalistic world. If the US had been allowed to be an unchallenged capitalistic country then we'd look very much like Russia today (which is not communistic in any way), a corrupt shithole. A huge part of our success was the labor movements of the mid 1800s in which a fair number of people died in. Then later in the 1930s after unchecked capitalism brought about a horrific crash that required a massive amount of socialistic policies to bring us back from the brink and get the economy working.
The reality of these situations is far more complex than the red white and blue cheerleading we're taught in school.
My point was that slavery is still a real thing even in poor countries. Hence the second link about Africa.
That being said, I know no better alternative, albeit I think high automation may make some solutions feasible.
2) somebody still has to fix those robots.
3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
Ah, I see we're following the foundation timeline.
Not necessarily. If the manufacturing of robots can be made cheap enough it may be cheaper to replace broken robots with new ones and send the broken ones off to be recycled rather than fix them.
CirclesUBI is an attempt at getting that alternative rolling. It ain't perfect but I think it's a good start.
This argument always gets made, but I don't think it works.
If 10 factory workers are replaced with 1 robot, the technician job created will not go to any of the people displaced by the robot. It goes to someone privileged enough to have gone to robot-mechanic school. We then avoid all mention of those 10 factory workers and pretend they never existed. We tell ourselves they landed on their feet, after finding lower-paying work amidst rising inflation-- but don't dare follow up with them because we don't want to learn otherwise.
"So let's subsidize mechanic school, make it free!" you say. "Those people can retrain to become mechanics!" Sure. Except the promises of tech have proven to be lies, and every generation of it is more demanding than the one before. "This guy knows computers" used to mean you could put some numbers in a spreadsheet and make a pivot table. Then, maybe HTML. Everything else followed.
Even auto mechanics-- you can't just understand how ICE works, now there's an electrical system. Now there's a computer. Now there are two drivetrains. Now there's also an optional all-electric system, requiring an electrical specialization. Now there's a network interface. And some self-driving tech (robotics). You have to understand the whole stack to keep up, and not everyone has what it takes to do that. And if you don't keep up, someone younger will, as you're able to service less of the market and watch your potential customer base dry up. You bring in partners and have to split everything with them, which doesn't advance either of you as much as it holds you both back.
My grandfather bought an apartment building (multiple units!) with the money he earned painting fucking lightposts. My dad was a network engineer, which he worked hard at, and paid for a middle-class life. That stopped being enough very shortly after I started working, and now we're all supposed to compete with "full-stack engineers" hopped up on amphetamines and doing the job of ten people-- just to live paycheck-to-paycheck, while your spouse also works, with the spectre of AI on the horizon poised to replace both jobs with schizophrenic parrots. Thankfully I bought a house right before the COVID price explosion, but the generations after me aren't so lucky. They're pretty fucked. Unfortunately they blame us, our parents, or their parents for this mess, ignoring the fact that while some of us are more upstream than others, we're all being swept in the same direction. If only the kids would direct their anger not at the Boomers, but at the oligarchs throwing coins at us from the shore and telling us to swim faster.
This idea that aging people can just infinitely "retrain" into fields that take longer and longer to achieve basic competence in is not founded in reality or history. Again, my grandfather bought an entire apartment building from wages earned watching paint dry. That was what he retrained into, after doing whatever gypsies do for 40 years before they're chased out of their host country. It was a job that required nothing more than a pulse, no degree required, no continuing education needed. Since then, the promise of tech was supposed to make our lives easier, but nothing is easier now. Everything is more expensive, less repairable, more competitive, and more difficult in every way. We're competing with people on the other side of the planet for jobs in our own cities, and competing with Chinese and Saudi billionaires (and domestic REITs) just to buy a home.
But that leads into your point 3:
> 3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
We've let the hogs become too fat. We're feeding them our grain reserves while we starve, then turn our knives on each other as we fight the emaciated hordes for the promise of bones and gristle. This is not how the human-pig relationship is supposed to work.
On what planet are lightposts painted?
I always wondered: how did the late middle-aged coachmen of England make a living when the railroad boom arrived in the mid 1800s? Even Charles Dickens did not seem to care about them. I can hardly believe that they "retrained" to become locomotive pilots.
Automation is a wonderful thing, it reduces cost, errors, labor and time. But we need to think of ways of paying pensions or such for the immediate generation who lose their jobs. There are also future generations who would have been gainfully employed in a low-skill job which will now be left out. I am not sure what to do about them except education at a younger age.
It's not sustainable, or even just possible on a larger scale. You can't have people doing simple, low paid jobs owning apartment buildings, as that means there'd need to be a 100+ million apartment buildings (or investments of comparable value) in America.
There’s this weird place some of you have ended up, wherein all prior automation is good and fine, but future automation must cease immediately, solely to preserve people’s current work exactly as is.
I don’t get it.
People have always been able to find other work when displaced by automation - unpleasant task though. What happens when there are no more “other work” or there aren’t enough remaining jobs to support the population?
Automating the printing press, building the cotton gin, widespread use of combines to harvest wheat (or whatever) - none of these led to mass unemployment. They all created change and churn, for sure, but people will always find new things to do.
I’m always struck by this discussion - should we continue to operate coal mines, and refuse to move off fossil fuel? Those are massive job displacements across, for instance, Appalachia. The common argument is that those people should retrain to new skills. Why is that not the argument for people whose job can be automated?
One of the first groups that will likely lose big to LLMs is lawyers - how hard should we fight to make sure that the law remains incomprehensible and inaccessible in order to preserve those jobs?
Why is anyone’s job a sacred cow?
Sorry, the number of questions read more aggressively than I intend them - I’m earnestly interested in the answers.
All the automations you have mentioned all automate a very specific task.
AI on the other hand can potentially become the do-it-all automation. A universal automation.
> but people will always find new things to do
That’s no longer true if you have a machine that can do it all - that can match (or even surpass) humans in all (or even the vast majority of) activities.
Every “new thing” it would do too.
Equal pay for robots!!
We need a new era of carefulness in computing, both as programmers and as users. We need to demand better accountability. As long as the leaders we have now are still there tomorrow, I'm afraid this goal will never happen. You need a nation who cares more about its people than its GDP to achieve that, and I posit no nation on Earth has that level of care for its people.
The only people I know who remotely care about things like data privacy and GDPR are techies. I personally will never install a “smart home” device.
Therefore, if a machine surpasses this threshold, they will win marketshare.
how are the capital owners deciding what a consumer would choose to spend their money on?
Selling lower quality goods like the article mentions is not a problem if the customers are fine with it given the lower price of the goods. The customer is responsible for making their own decisions about whether to prioritize cost or quality. As the person you were replying to says, by their actions (purchasing the cheaper, automated cloth), you can tell that the customers to appear to vastly prefer the cheaper, poor quality cloth. Who are we to tell them their preferences are wrong?
Edit: I see your original comment. Where the heck did you get that factory owners were doing illegal worker displacement or doing false advertisement? I don’t see that claim in the article.
He has a long sections: > The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods. > > Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles.
Now. The New Yorker article simply states the factories sold worse goods cheaper. Other articles I’ve found published today on it are as vague, or say nothing at all about this specific thing.
The ebook is only sold with Adobe’s DRM, so I won’t be buying that. So I’ll have find another way to see what’s true.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#more-6752
People don't 'prefer cheap low quality' they can't afford anything else.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
I much prefer modern society over what they had. Commonly available running water, electricity, heating, insulation, the internet are some pretty nice things.
>You need a nation who cares more about its people than its GDP to achieve that, and I posit no nation on Earth has that level of care for its people.
And it will come at the expense of future generations. All the advancements of yesterday are what make our modern comforts possible. If we stop that in some redistribution fantasy then tomorrow will not be an improvement over today.
This is totally, completely, utterly irrelevant to the GP's point.
I mean, if you believe you live in a binary world everything is pretty easy. It's a one or a zero. Capitalism, or some kind of hellish pit of communism.
That is not the real world. Instead it is a moderation of forces. Capitalist robber barons would enslave you just as quickly as the most brutal authoritarian would, if allowed. We succeed not because we let the captains of industry do what they like, for we know their greed can never be sated. Instead we have we share are progress in a way that benefits humanity and not the few. We strive to make the world better and not just ourselves richer.
We put radium on shit because it glowed, without adequately studying why until women's jaws were deteriorating in their faces.
We put asbestos on shit to prevent fires, but oopsie poopsie, better not breathe any in! And man, those knocking engines just need a little heavy metals to settle down. Whoops, IQ just noticeably dropped? Oh well.
History shows us that humankind, even when assembled and "organized" is always a day late and a dollar short to averting disaster. Nothing ever happens of import until something unavoidable and existentially threatening happens. That's when, magically, we'll be "friends" and "allies" and talk about "camaraderie". As soon as disaster is averted, they go back to being assholes to each other, just like during COVID-19.
What, pray tell, do you think humankind was able to do about evil in the past 5 years?
Imagine if we were all working 18 hour subsistence farming jobs now just to survive, it's ridiculous to argue that eschewing automation for anything is detrimental, it only serves to enhance society and make it more productive.
Then you definitely shouldn't look at actual reports of time spent, leisure time, etc, in those eras.
Because that's nothing at all what life was in the eras you're thinking of.
How much of our modern time - work hours - do we spend to maintain the cars we take to work, and the large houses we were convinced to buy "as an investment," etc? Or just our personal tech stacks that always somehow seem to need replacement?
Sure, they might not have spent as many hours farming, but they also needed to manually do all of the other things necessary for a decent life. Wash clothes by hand, take care of the (farm) animals, repair your house, build a house, cut trees, make firewood etc. It's an endless list of things that nowadays you just pay someone some money for.
Nurses, teachers? Those bring insane value but get little recognition, in all senses, for that.
but those value is not privately captureable by them, but is instead captured by the students, or the patients etc.
My theory is the 18 hour subsistence farmer story is a myth we tell ourselves that the world we’ve created is better, no questions asked.
I live in a part of the world where people do a surprising amount of farming by hand. Very little machines and almost no fertiliser is used. No one, absolutely no one is working 18 hours. Mostly they have busy springs, relaxing summers and festivals for autumn harvest. Most farmers are in their 70s so they’re not looking to work hard either.
I’m sure subsistence farmers existed, but they likely worked hard because they weren’t educated well. I bet there have always been some higher quality farming going on.
I’ve also stayed with a remote Aboriginal tribe in Australia. I have to be honest they had very relaxed lifestyles.
We bag out the last to make ourselves feel better about the future we’re creating. We’re insecure.
Pre-industrial workers actually worked less than people who have 40 hour work weeks do[1].
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Not in America - upskilling workers is too expensive.
Displaced workers are gonna break rocks in debtor’s prisons & the median voter already thinks they deserve it.
AI will bring mass downward mobility.
Companies already send that clear message even without AI. That's why there's fear here: we expect companies to behave as they always have, and that is with a level of contempt for human workers.
Your mistake is you’re looking at a future world in todays state.
Replacing horses with cars will free up those horses to do other productive work, like pulling plows and turning stone mills, thereby benifiting the horses.
Ultimately the fact that you an individual intended to intend an intention continues to hold a $1 value represented in metal coins until the last of us joins the rest in pickle jars.
Most of the people I personally know who are 60 and older have jobs.
The economy will shift to just addressing the wants and needs of those with wealth via luxury goods and services:
> How do we make money from this theme? We see two ways. The first is simple. If you believe, like us, that the Plutonomy exists, and explains why global imbalances have built up (for example the savings rate differentials), and you believe there is no imminent threat to plutonomy, you must in turn believe that the current “end of the world is nigh” risk premium on equities, due to current account deficits, is too high. Conclusion: buy equities.
> There is however a more refined way to play plutonomy, and this is to buy shares in the companies that make the toys that the Plutonomists enjoy.
You don't have to read between the lines, you can simply read the lines.
Companies are people. You are saying people running those companies are doing that to other people
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. - Aristotle
Companies exhibit emergent behavior that might be hard, if at all possible, to predict if you only had a single individual as reference. For instance, most individuals would probably never agree to manufacture a weapon that is specifically requested to kill your neighbor. However, this same individual will show no empathy and remorse for their labor in a company that produces something that is used to commit incredible destruction to the earth, even contributing to the deaths of millions of people.
Are you talking about gun manufacturing for law enforcement or military purposes? Because those weapons aren’t manufactured to kill one specific person (my neighbor).
If somehow the government were to pay me adequately to hand-craft a gun for the police or military, I would have no moral compunctions in doing so. I see no reason for the government to ask me to hand-make an inferior good at such high cost, though.
Everyone has a boss, and a budget to hit.
It is the Banality of Evil.
US corporations are full of layers of Middle management made of "Eichmann"s.
Be it violating environmental laws on dumping, covering up sexual abuse, or sending people to ovens.
It happens, has happened, and will get worse.
And yes, it will be done by humans to other humans.
Or that we should just allow for any group of people to do anything to another group of people, because it just happens, it’s just human nature, so whatever?
I guess that’s kind of the way the US has been going for a while now
Just because humans tend to create systems that tend to reward evil doesn't mean we can't try to be better.
The problem isn't capitalism or communism. Both are run by humans who could choose to be better.
I don't know how to improve humans. I know it isn't religion given it's tendency to just become another system that rewards evil.
Maybe it is just groups, humans don't do well in large hierarchies.
But not saying to give up, maybe just saying, stop arguing about capitalism versus communism, since they both can be good or bad depending on the humans that make it up.
Seems like you are just arguing with yourself there
Meditations on Moloch
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Companies are a completely made up concept. Made up by, you guessed it, people
People create them, people run them, people decide what to do with them
It’s the same for any organization
It’s people all the way down
Well, of course. Edge cases aside, why shouldn’t anyone save on money when it’s acceptable to do so?
Reducing costs is really, really important, and nothing to be ashamed about.
At that point, there's absolutely something to be ashamed about.
Eg you could build a smart phone that mechanically lasts ten years, but who would want to use a ten year old smart phone anyway?
The thing is we can't help but compare people on the value that they bring. We can't go on about human value being tied to our creativity, emotional sensitivity, or any skill because once AI can do that, that value goes out the window for humans. Humans have to be valuable for no other reason than the fact that they are human, even if they technically are a burden. This is the only mentality that will keep humans safe in the AI apocalypse.
It has always been unclear--in cases where people's objectives differ--just whose values are used determine what counts as "value".
It's a simplification that served us well when the common threat was famine or disease or war, but those threats weigh less on us these days. We're more concerned with mistreatment from each other, so we probably need something that answers "whose values?" instead so that we can be reminded to check if that person's agenda is actually worth persuing.
Such a shift might help interrupt dangerous optimizations such as optimizing for GDP at the expense of biosphere stability.
“Laborers fret not, you’ve been liberated from your job actually, and I sure hope you bought securities!”
Just imagine how many more people would be even more liberated from inhumane work and low living conditions if wealth didn’t accrue quite so severely to the top N%.
Not a reason to stop progress IMO but a good reason to question it and try to nudge it in certain directions.
Automation can be great when used to replace dangerous or back breaking work that is difficult for humans to preform. AI is not really that though.
I see many problems with this statement:
- Is a new robot-only company fairer than firing humans at an old company?
- Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed?
- Should there be a robot tax? What is a robot? Is my calculator a robot that keeps an arithmeticist out of a job?
- Should an enterprise created for profit consider other values than profit?
In my view, we should automate as much as we can, because we spend less valuable human time on what is achievable by machine. However, as more and more people fall behind as technology progresses, it might pose a problem, so I think we should institute basic income.
I wouldn't bother with regulating the minutia, just tax Laffer-optimally and give out benefits so as not to create perverse incentives.
But I am keen to know someone's thoughts to the contrary.
Basic income is the most counterproductive idea possible. We should have spent more on education over 100 years ago.
Or maybe it’s less counterproductive, more irrelevant, if some topic at hand is “what should we do about increasing automation [in the future]?”
If that's at hand, the answer is to let the rest of society catch up before increasing automation.
I agree some form of government intervention is needed because it's the government's fault in the first place. I'm just saying something that should not be controversial at all: throwing money at the problem is crazy.
It’s a time to be pro-human, across many topics.
Yes! Very much yes! Adam Smith himself noted that a capitalist enterprise, if not run according to good values (which to him meant Christian values, but it need not be that for everyone), would be a horrible thing. That hasn't really changed since. A business needs to have some values behind it other than pure profit-seeking, or else it becomes a serious ill for society.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- John Adams
Moral people don't really need laws, laws exist to deter crime.
Frankly I don't get what John Adams was trying say? Can someone explain?
As an example in recent news Super Court justices have been accused of taking bribes. It is no surprise because there is now ethical rules the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court says it would have to follow, by law. I'm not sure if that is true but surely there could be such a law.
So we need laws, and we need better laws, which means laws that have fewer loopholes, and which apply to all, even Supreme Court justices and Presidents. Are we there yet? Not yet.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
> Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by [...] morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or [amorous] galantry, would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- Douglas Adams
"If Joe Biden is elected to the White House, there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year." "Republicans will be hunted, police will stand down."
-- Scott Adams
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more […] I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off."
-- Scott Adams
"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."
-- Scott Adams
And from the lunatic, eccentric, enigmatic, passionate, romantic, homicidal end:
"We danced the Mamushka while Nero fiddled, we danced the Mamushka at Waterloo. We danced the Mamushka for Jack the Ripper, and now, Fester Addams, this Mamushka is for you."
-- Gomez Addams
"Fan out. Pugsley, head for the dung heap. Mama and Morticia, the shallow graves. I'll take the abyss. Lurch, check out the bottomless pit. Fester?"
-- Gomez Addams
Enterprises don't consider anything, enterprises cannot think. Only people do. Enterprise is made of people. Should people consider other values than profit?
Yes. AI generates sameness on a good day, and comical gibberish on a bad day, that will never change because, AI isn't human.
Sameness will drive customers to look for human made stuff, gibberish will drive them away.
unless the AI models surpass a certain critical point, with which new and original works could be generated without using original human derived works.
aka, an AGI.
It seems to be a lot of zealotry, buttery and violence. Learning to be good with all that free time will take work.
Of course, we often pay each other for these frivolities. So people don't treat them as free time.
Do we measure software engineers in terms of their lines of code per day? I feel that this is basically what you and others are doing when you compare writing or illustration to digging holes. You're seriously misunderstanding the economy of these fields. Productivity has almost nothing to do with the market for art or writing. What matters is the quality of a work (very hard to measure and deeply ingrained in our psyche) and the attention a work receives (Software engineers should be more familiar with this. It is the "algorithm" people love to disparage). We had more than enough productivity already in these spaces. Does giving people a content firehose actually do anything to these markets? Have you read any books written using AI? Do you know and follow any AI artists? Is anyone besides Nvidia and OpenAI making money here?
I understand the appeal of the models, and as a software engineer I've gotten at least some use out of them. But even in that space I have to wonder if producing more code is a net positive. There's a lot of drawbacks to producing more code. There's more chances to write bugs, more you have to document and maintain, and you're potentially overlooking simpler and more elegant solutions.
I guess all I'm trying to say is when you say this is just a hole digger, you're glossing over a lot of nuance.
Depends very highly on what kind of art we're talking about.
There's the "I get my stuff into galleries" artist. This IMO has an extremely high social component. It's in good part about who you know, how well you can spin your work, how much some rich guy has paid for it in the past, etc.
There's the "I sell commissions on Deviant Art" artist. That's to me a kind of hole digging position already. Certainly you need to produce good work, but what seems to make a good artist in that scope is good work, reliably, fast.
There's the "I illustrate stuff" artist. A more properly commercial version of the above. From my limited experience there's demand to pump out work quickly and as cheaply as possible. Eg, a book may need a cover or a few illustrations, or an ad might need something drawn on it. In many cases the client is basically looking for a hole to fill. The cases where somebody wants to have something truly beautiful that lots of effort went into seem vanishingly rare. There's a reason why corporate styles like "Alegria" exist and are annoyingly common.
There's the "I draw comics" artist. Those need extreme consistency because they're on a tight deadline.
> Do you know and follow any AI artists?
Honestly, I'm beginning to. AI is just a tool like any other. Some people use it to faff about and make random stuff, but I'm starting to notice people using it to produce things that have a coherent plot or tell a story, or at least keep a consistent setting. It's still janky at this point because it's hard to maintain consistency.
Really, there's nothing weird about that. Think about supremely lazy things like Garfield or Ctrl+Alt+Del. They still had a following even when graphically they were supremely lazy. If you can copy/paste body parts to assemble a comic and still get some people interested, no reason why you couldn't do it with AI. Heck, it'd come out looking better at this point.
Even better, agricultural machinery. At one time > 90% of humans were unfree agricultural laborers ("unfree" = slaves, serfs, or something similar). The remaining 10% were mostly soldiers, with a thin veneer of lords and priests at the very top.
We as society aren't the beneficiaries of automation, those profits go to private owners. Given that price points exist, the benefits of lowering costs of production are captured by increasing profit margins.
After those profits are captured, we as society have to shoulder the burden of caring for potentially thousands, or more, people who are put out of work, and their families.
Historically, that hasn't held true for long: competition catches up.
Or increased diversity, customisation, higher quality, more availability, and because of competition - where it exists, cheaper products and services.
Increased capability leads to demand scaling. Making a road wider will increase traffic to match.
Should an AI created to make paper clips consider other values than making paper clips?
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-pa...
Diving all the way down ad absurdum: What's the point of maximizing profit if there are no humans to utilize those profits?
"Dude, you broke the future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4
It’s better to have a machine that makes 100 cakes for 100 people with only 2 people working than to employ all 100 people without the machine to make 4 cakes.
The people who make the profits have the power to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep from sharing in their profit. This is one of the fears that actually gave rise to the Luddite movement, and so far history has only proven that there is merit to this fear.
When workers brought up these concerns, the factory owners brushed them aside which forced the Luddites to use more extreme measures to be heard like breaking factory machinery. Eventually the wealthy owner class pushed parliament to pass a law that made machine-breaking subject to the death penalty.
“In an attempt to halt or at least make the transition smoother, the Luddites initially sought to renegotiate terms of working conditions based on the changing circumstances in the workplace. Some of the ideas and requests included the introduction of a minimum wage, the adherence of companies to abide by minimum labour standards, and taxes which would enable funds to be created for workers’ pensions. Whilst these terms do not seem unreasonable in the modern day workplace, for the wealthy factory owners, these attempts at bargaining proved futile.
The Luddite movement therefore emerged when attempts at negotiation failed and their valid concerns were not listened to, let alone addressed. “
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...
What are you talking about? Taxation has been around for a very very long time.
False dichotomy + poorly statistically worded.
The proper question is always "Would society be better off at the margin with more automation". The answer someday may well be "No, because many people are already unemployed, and this will exacerbate that even further", but there's no reason to add that clause to the question.
Enterprise is created to provide a beneficial service to the society/humanity/world. Profit is a means to sustain the people, who are working in the enterprise, and subsequently the enterprise. The problem starts when some smartass in power becomes greedy and turns an enterprise for service to people into an enterprise ONLY for profit. If you only want to make money, work in a govt mint.
This just sounds like rent-seeking. People should get paid, because they once upon a time had a job. Now machines do the job better and for cheaper, therefore you deserve to be paid for it?
How about the compensation is the improved products or better prices for all of society?
Lets imagine your future world.
Manual labor, right? No, that's done by robots.
Arts and music... well, no. Some generative LLM hooked up to the data feeds of all human emotions is cranking more art/music per day then all 10 billion people on the planet can ever consume.
Sex, the oldest profession. Na, Cherry (and Ken) 2000 came out a decade ago and has met our more primal needs since then.
So, now what do you do with all these masses have have no purpose. Oh, you don't care because you're going to be one of the enlightened few that somehow makes it out of the rat trap? Seems unlikely.
Stop demanding a future dystopia.
Somebody has to take all these disparate pieces of technology and glue them together to create useful stuff. Programming has an endless list of useful libraries and yet programmers are as much in demand as ever, because it's not easy to glue different libraries together. The same thing is important in every other type of business.
You want your AI to do manual labor? You better figure out a way to glue the AI to a robot and make it understand its environment and goals.
Want your AI to make music? It might be able to come up with a great composition itself, but you're still going to have to pick out the best one out of the 10,000 you generated. Then you've got to title it, publish it, and spread it around.
All of these are things AI could conceivably do, but it will require an enormous amount of work. If there's not enough scale there then that work is not worth it. Ie it's going to be left for humans to do.
Wasn't this message sent in the 80s and 90s when it was somehow acceptable to offshore manufacturing for increased bottom line devastating economies and people of small/mid size cities.
Huh, what? When you get a glass of fresh water from your tap, do you send a dollar to the displaced water carriers of yesteryear?
Compensation doesn't fix the problem. As more and more jobs get replaced with AI or robots, the number of ways of earning a living shrinks and people have no money to buy the products and services offered by the AI-poweered industrial complex. It's a problem that the billionaire gods don't want to see. The politicians don't have a clue how to address it either.
Is this true? it seems there are new ways cropping up all the time
Only now when "prestigious" white collar positions are being threatened people are starting to freak out.
Like there are anti AI art campaigns on Artstation and elsewhere.
Technological innovation is not enough. We also need the political will to ensure equitable distribution, otherwise it will create a yet bigger gulf between the haves and have nots.
20% of the world is very tiny?
> Would we still be in terrible conflict with hate and prejudice prevalent?
Yes, definitely yes. We don't stop being human when we are freed from labour.
Do you believe the luddites would have burned the looms if instead this offer would have been on the table
"Hello, instead of being starving beggars in the street, we will offer you retraining, and provide meals while doing so"
Oh, look, a social safety net actually can benefit capital owners and keep their factories from burning.
In my mind, there are no downsides in allowing individuals more leverage. The real downsides are with the orthogonal problem of what productivity means in civil society.
High productivity through technology is perfectly human - we're tool-builders and tool-makers. But, productivity does not absolve us of our responsibility to each other. People who suggest we should not use tools often justify their point of view with assertions of cost born by others. I am suspicious of this argument because the opportunity cost of _not_ letting people use the best tools available could be much greater. For example, had we not developed tools to create mRNA vaccines, many lives would have been lost to Covid that were saved. We don't know yet what AI will enable, but I'd rather we find out what people can achieve than focus on muddying the waters between productivity and society.
A side comment here is that I am equally skeptical that leveraging copyright work as training data is fair use. if the objective is to retrieve original copyright work, then I think its fair use, but if the goal is to draw me campaign poster in the style of Shepard Fairey, I'm not that sympathetic.
If we use AI to replace the creation of copyright free derivative works, it isn't clear what the objection should be?
None whatsoever, and I agree with everything you stated but this is right here and right now. If the technological boundary of AI had already reached its speed of light then there wouldn't be anyone raising concerns.
I think it is highly possible that even getting close would yield really great outcomes for humans. Better medicine, better travel, better understanding of complexity.
We should get closer to the end before we theorize about the finish line. Remember the classic line about not needing more than 640k of ram.
I see a similar trend with automation: it can do most of the job far cheaper than the specialist can, so short-term rationality says we should embrace it completely. But then the specialist goes away, and we don't have access to them anymore for the things that automation is bad at.
When you call in to customer support you can't talk to a human, because they replaced them with chat bots. When you need a good website designer because Wix won't cut it, they're out of your price range because the only ones left are working for large companies. When you want a new book, you can't find one written by a human, not because the robots have gotten as good as a good author, but because they've gotten good enough to spam the marketplaces so thoroughly that writing a good book isn't profitable anymore.
I suspect it's not worth pausing anything over due to the inevitable if we won't they will excuse and also because its part of the re-invention of business that goes with new technology. The things you want that have gone are now an opportunity for someone else to figure out. If I was an entrepreneur keeping my ear to the ground I'd weigh up starting a boutique produce delivery services, a human agency dedicated to dealing with companies on your behalf, a wix plugin market, a book review site etc.
But this just emphasizes the inequalities these automations create—poor people could walk to the neighborhood grocer and buy produce, but now that's reserved for people who can afford to pay for delivery or have a car and money for gas. Poor people could wait on hold like everyone else, but now only the rich can afford your agency. A small business could hire a designer, but now they're left buying stock plugins because being a small-time designer doesn't pay anymore.
The premise of this article isn't that automation is bad in and of itself, but that we are bad at considering the inequitable impact these automations have on our world.
You mention the web designer and that's again a good example - but not supporting the direction you want, I think. Web design is a field that's easy to enter (because does not require tens of years of experience or expensive in house server farms or expensive tools or license or large corporate team). It's not obvious for a busy small business to find a not-sold-out but good web designer but only because of near full employment. Probably that web designer should be more and more aware and agile using lower level tools (including generative AI and lower wage countries), but there is no reason supply and demand can't still meet each other in web design. Even in the age of Wix and such. They are different kinds of offerings which do compete with each other so that the boundary fluctuates but do not replace each other. Wix only displaces web designers that only do what Wix does. And even then only marginally so: a web designer can use Wix - just better than the customer - and have a service to sell.
I recently came across this, and I think it does a good job explaining the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQpUV--2Jao
However, it sells the boring usual cliché on how DG stores kill the local food stores: Dollar General sells the stuff they carry for far less. Well of course they do! Duh. While in the same video it is also shown that the local food store sells lots of things the Dollar General doesn't. Stop expecting to make a living by things you can't compete on. That just does not make sense. And the solution is NOT to get the other guy outlawed - that's tempting and seems easy but that only works in the short term. Shuffle prices around, carry other things, add services, change hours, do something! A potential issue could be that a tiny town may only be able to support so much retail activity. I don't think this one is in play. The stores of a small isolated town have a moat: their customers would have to drive at least 20 minutes, bus at least 40 perhaps, to get to the next store. And the small retail stores that persist all over Europe do NOT do so by selling the same stuff for more money. THAT is just dumb.
Another example shown in this video is 69 DG-equivalents within 10 miles of a downtown (all carrying the same things). There is plenty of buying power in that otherwise poor area. There should be space for other stores, probably for inexpensive fresh food and for more specialized stores. At least until Amazon figures out the fresh food issue. But obviously there isn't space for smaller stores trying to make a living selling the same things! Obviously?
For that matter, the video also describes the working conditions and salary of the DG-equivalents: minimum wage and employees who don't care. Another area where other stores can compete: by having a slightly more engaged workforce.
I would love to find videos discussing people who "actually did something rather than sit on their asses" and either it worked or failed. Pointers anyone?
The problem I have with tools like that is the technical quality of the solution (which Wix seemed somewhat reasonable in its output when I briefly looked around at Wix sites) and the social effects. Putting together a Wix site and buying or downloading/installing a theme does not make you a Web developer.
You're still getting to the end goal of a site, but without the knowledge of how it works and, should it break, how to fix it, it's more of an appliance to you than an environment to express yourself. (using royal you, not you personally)
It's strange to me that people want to be able to "do what the nerds can", but don't want to put any of the effort forth. I would love to be a great drummer or saxophonist, but I recognize it would take years of effort and practice to reach that point. I could compose tracks using synthesized instruments, and that's its own music skill I guess, but it's definitely not the same as playing the instrument.
Which jobs are you referring to that were lost? The dot-com era? As far as I understand, a lot of web design firms still exist, and tons more freelancers make cash through selling custom themes for clients or packaged themes on Wordpress, small client-oriented web apps, etc. And, given that much of the market is on Web tech still, a lot of the skills from 20 years ago translate pretty well and can now be used to make software within the browser. In my own efforts to learn how to make webapps, I've only really had to learn flexbox and grid. Most of my old knowledge has carried over, with some slight modernization tweaks as necessary. It's nice to never need to float a div ever again, haha.
Having good tools that create good work is a goal I think most of us can get behind. The challenge lies in building the tools and promoting healthy culture.
People, generally speaking, want outcomes. They don’t care how it’s done or what is used to get there. No one goes to the hardware store to buy a drill. They go there to buy holes.
The historical luddite example comes out - it seems - because the mechanization benefit is so massive to the owners that they convert very quickly. And an entire region relied on one industry. Little chance or time for the workers to convert even if they saw it coming, and they didn't.
Additionally as programming languages and toolkits have become higher level and more accessible there has been more demand for programmers.
So viewing it in such a contrived way is just not useful. If anything, the more automation we get, the more demand for tech workers there is because it's able to deliver increasingly more value.
Say your model makes 99% correct predictions, in 20-30 time steps that error rate drops to 73%, that is just not ok for automation. But real accuracy rates per time step are much lower.
Compounding errors even when they are small lead a system astray. I think there is no form of AI that achieves autonomy in any field. We're at minutes of autonomy, or seconds. Nobody can go on vacation and leave AI do their job.
On the other hand AI will open up new opportunities and markets. Demand will scale up to meet the new productivity level. We can always desire more, it's not a fixed sum game.
More fundamentally, LLMs are interpolating between and combining known skills. They don't do radically new discovery. Why? They train on human text instead of human text + world feedback. In order to surpass human experts AI needs labs, experiments or the ability to create its own experience.
I can only name AlphaZero, AlphaTensor and AlphaFold as superhuman AIs, and they have been trained on massive experimental feedback, not just text.
What?
It’s be callous to disregard that this probably also displaces some people from jobs but personally I think the difference of scale is important. In particular what scale can society and the economy actually absorb. I think there are good arguments that there are social and economic issues already starkly apparent that have been caused by similar shocks. Extrapolating from those experiences the likely impact of large scale AI shocks right now seems to be larger inequality and more social and economic issues than less.
I'm not going to get into a bunch of debates about AI capabilities, and I don't tend to take an extreme stance one way or another what current AIs are capable of or will be capable of, but this sentence strikes me as very strange. Modern AI systems have pretty significant problems that will likely only be solved through heavy amounts of training and data curation, and maintaining good performance over time will likely require regular insertion of newer data.
The idea that these systems are self-sufficient is fiction, they're not even close to reaching that point and they have serious gaps in capability. Maybe those gaps will get closed -- again, I'm not going to get into a debate about what AI can theoretically do in the future or how fast it will improve, that discussion is a little bit too speculative for my tastes. But while modern LLMs can do a lot of impressive stuff, the idea that we've hit some threshold where we aren't going to need to make further jumps and where those jumps won't require additional data or training or input is just buying into the worst of LLM hype.
What we're seeing is that for many tasks that involve creative output, getting new data to put into LLMs to keep them current and up-to-date is important and is likely to continue to be important. And the typical shortcuts around that data (doing web searches, merging contexts) don't always work as well as retraining does (and also require their own up-to-date inputs). Again, not a commentary on whether LLMs are good at those tasks; just pointing out that AI does very definitively need continuous input for many of the highest-profile tasks people want to use it for. And the areas where it doesn't need that input are probably not in most cases the tasks people are most worried about being automated.
"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the robots paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind".
And I think that sums up the feeling quite well. I do agree that automation in general has not paid off in the way the utopians would predict - instead of freeing humanity from the need to work, we have disenfranchised large portions of the population. That said, more people than ever (in the west) are freed from manual labour, and are working historically shorter hours for better quality of life than ever before. But the fruits of our productivity gains are not distributed equally and it is all too easy to imagine a future in which it is the owners of the smart systems who reap all the rewards, with everyone else fighting for scraps.
are we worse off than we were before industrial automation? I thought the economics said the opposite (even if we exclude the eastern nations that benefits from western job loss from our utilitarian analysis here -- which we shouldn't)
that meme was really good btw
May I suggest your read Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules"?
We've created a society which requires us to spend oodles of hours doing bullshit work and administer hundreds of bullshit services.
We could easily feed, house, clothe, entertain, and care for everyone with 25 hour work weeks. We (as a society) just chose not to.
Assuming zero innovation or growth, yes. If a society is comfortable opting into declining relative living standards, they should have the right to do so. But framing this is a costless trade-off is facile.
Better argument: we can afford to feed, house, clothe and care for every American, possibly, almost every human. (The long tail is exhaustingly costly.) But it would come at the expense of some peoples’ lifestyles, majorly, and everyone’s, in small ways. It almost certainly doesn’t occur with a reduced work week and current adolescence/education and retirement expectations.
I don't think the complexity of human society can be boiled down to "we just choose not be perfect"
Thank you for this quote! This speaks out the reason for my innate disgust toward the current "creative" AI which I couldn't quite articulate before.
"Having to do manual labour to make ends meet while the _______ paint and write poetry was not the future I had in mind"
For the less fortunate people struggling to make ends meet, it may not matter that much whether it's robots or the aristocracy, or the upper middle class doing the poetry writing.
Until the last couple decades, 99% of humanity was always doing doing manual labor to make ends meet. It's just that the literate class throughout history always identified with the 1% rather than the 99%. We're conditioned to think that creative endeavors are always more "noble" than manual labor because that's what nobles did.
Ironically the fact that we pay "knowledge workers" more than manual laborers might have contributed to this outcome. If toilet janitors commanded a $500k salary maybe more R&D budget would go to inventing robots that are good at cleaning toilets, instead of AI systems that are good at solving leetcode.
The US went like: socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For many that are poor in the US people "being equally poor under socialism" is not the threat you think it is, even for the ones that currently go the authoritarian route. Something is brewing in the US and it is an explosive mixture — you can squeeze out only so much from the people without things going sideways.
> socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer
The US free market moved scores of millions of dirt poor immigrants into the middle class and beyond.
Based on Pew's income band classification, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018.
Before China switched to free markets, they had an equal distribution of all income economy. You might want to check it out.
So, too, the USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam, Jamestown, Plymouth, etc.
Did you mean to say they moved from a planned economy to a market economy? A market economy yes they do have, but free? Boy oh boy that it is not. Plenty of western companies wanting to enter that market are finding that out the hard way
Socialism gets steadily worse the closer to "true" socialism it gets.
Hmmm I'm checking it out right now. Seems like life expectancy jumped massively under Mao, is that bad?
On its own merits, life expectancy is going to be difficult to evaluate China on during this period. Mao's government followed from both a disastrous Japanese invasion as well as a disastrous civil war. Wikipedia says Mao's policies were responsible for 40 to 80 million people dying. Do the life expectancy statistics account for that? How does that compare to the performance of Western governments during the same time period?
Seriously, do you think anybody will fall for cherry-picking like that, or was this more to convince yourself?
Not exactly. Old school automations are pretty limited. You can’t automate everything so there will always be work for humans.
Automation is what allows our quality of life today so I wouldn’t knock it.
AI though could potentially eliminate all jobs. How the heck is society going to function after that I have no idea.
In its current state it has the potential to eliminate “low end” beginner jobs. That’s problematic because if you don’t have juniors professionals today … you won’t have seniors in the future. Now you could argue that AI would develop to takeover senior jobs too but that’s not a sure thing. It would be really bad if you bet the farm on AI continuing to progress at a certain pace and it didn’t happen - we could even get another AI Winter as all the low hanging fruit from the advancement of tech the last few decades are picked clean.
Is it? I just fail to see how it "reaching its crescendo". Luddites DID destroy machines. Where are the anti-AI people buring data centers down?
If anything I will say there is barely any anti-AI movement happening around the world right now.
There are millions of vegan people choose to not eat meat as their lifestyles. Do you see people choose not to use AI product as their lifestyle? About zero? This is how small so-called anti-AI movement (if exist) is.
Also even this strike doesn't demain to ban AI.
Disney’s stock is down about 20%. Netflix up almost the same amount. Why do you think one of these has cheaper access to capital?
And not only are they a US company and not a foreign film market, they're also not even separate from the strikes. Netflix was one of the companies that signed agreements after the writers' strike -- Netflix capitulated to union demands just like Hollywood did.
> Why do you think one of these has cheaper access to capital?
In any case, cheap access to capital or labor also has about a zero percent chance of allowing a foreign film market to dethrone Disney in the domestic film market any time soon.
Disney owns Marvel. And Star Wars. And basically everything else. It doesn't matter if you can make a film more cheaply somewhere else.
The Luddites struck too, the difference is their strikes involved riots where they intentionally destroyed factory equipment and where they clashed directly with police. Modern AI "protests" barely register, Silicon Valley workers just think the backlash is extreme because the modern tech industry is culturally disconnected from the history of most blue-collar labor movements.
There is something to the idea that this is the first time that many white-collar workers have ever seriously thought about the cultural impacts of automation before and on a small-scale it's the first exposure many people have to backlash over automation and so that backlash feels novel to them. But that doesn't mean the backlash is actually more extreme now, Luddites captured an attitude about automation's impact on labor and worker rights that is largely absent in today's society.
Not really the point, but "struck".
> with specific anti AI demands, which were then capitulated to today.
The AI provisions of the tentative agreement seem to be (1) GenAI can't be directly used by non-covered people to (re)write content in place of union writers, (2) writers can't be forced to use GenAI (but can use it to the extent that the employer allows), and (3) GenAI produced materials given to writers to use must be disclosed as such.
That's...not particularly anti-AI. Its certainly nothing along the lines of the Luddites destroying machines.
Partially its a class difference, partially its a context difference (legally protected labor rights and a government that isn't actively working with employers to suppress strikes help make strikes in general much less violent), but partially its that the even if the rhetoric painted the terms the AMPTP was seeking as an existential threat, the union itself isn't anywhere close to as fundamentally opposed to the tools involved as the Luddites were, only to the particular business methods in which management proposed to incorporate them.
What makes you think so? People in eg their 20s or even 40s writing books today, haven't been around long enough to do much of anything 50 years ago.
And hand-writing about automation stealing jobs does have a long and storied history.
I'd say it's more than sitting back. Complaining about the loss of manufacturing jobs or immigrants competing for jobs and housing is seen to be poor peoples' game. The middle class want to be (seen to be) wealthy and educated so they'll signal that these trends are nothing to worry about because it's only an issue for the plebs and they're definitely not a pleb with this opinion.
Every technology has it's equal and opposite force.
Smart phones result in dumber people with lower attention spans. Medicine has taken away most evolutionary selection pressure. Modern agriculture paired with car culture means a lot of us are unfit and overweight. Social media makes people less socially connected and promotes unrealistic beauty standards.
When the worker degrades technology to ensure a job he’s a Luddite and terrorist.
The connotations of "luddite" are apt because they're accurate, we have evidence of their activities but also documented evidence of their intentions and beliefs.