I'm a Luddite (and So Can You)
thenib.com
thenib.com
I see big petitions against "irresponsible open source models", calls for expansion of IP laws such as to make "styles" into private property, and praise of Getty/Universal/RIAA. Repeatedly the target of ire seems to be just someone experimenting with Stable Diffusion, or a free book analysis tool[0], with disproportionately little focus on issues like employee surveillance.
[0]: https://mashable.com/article/prosecraft-novel-ai-analysis-sh...
This misses how technology actually works. Technology is a lever, or amplifier of human will. There has always been a dark side to human nature, but the amount of damage a single human could do was historically capped by physical limitations to their power. For example, a crazy person in 1000 AD armed with a broad sword could not kill millions of people, regardless of their desire and intent. However, a crazy person in 2024 with access to a hydrogen bomb could theoretically kill billions.
The moral of the story here is that even the most moral among us have some level of darkness in their soul and technology gives us far more power than we have the ability to handle responsibly, given our innate human flaws.
People think we can somehow manage AI when we can't even manage social media effectively.
People have been predicting this possibility ever since H-bombs existed. It's been a common trope in fiction -- Peter George's 1958 novel "Red Alert" featured a mad US general who starts WWIII (it's the novel that Kubrick adapted to make his Dr. Strangelove, although he made it a comedy and George was being serious).
First, this misses the point entirely. The H-bomb was just an example. The point is that technology allows an individual with access to the right tools the ability to scale their will, for good or evil, orders of magnitude beyond what they could do in a pre-industrial society.
Second, the H-bomb was only invented in 1952, so it's only been around a little over 70 years. Saying that nothing bad has happened yet as a result of the H-bomb, isn't saying much. Put another way, the H-Bomb is younger than the last two U.S. presidents.
I think the limits of how far a single person can project their power is physically is easily outstripped by how far they can project socially. (Tools do help with both those methods of course)
There's a much healthier way to deal with the growing pains: redistribution. When the return on capital is higher than the return on labor, we're being failed by our tax regime. Redistributing gains means everyone benefits. Destroying machinery means everyone loses.
The weird tangents about AI art and phones for children are also dishonest. Copyright law and healthy child rearing are pretty orthogonal to job automation.
Ultimately, any society that chooses the path of Luddism will defeat itself, because there will always be another society that embraces technology, and they will not be subject to your regulations, and they will outcompete you, and I want to live in that society.
I'll allow it, but at least be honest about the point and constructive in your choice of targets. Undirected rage does not engender sympathy.
uh, that's not a frame or detail in the comic you weirdo.
For example, nothing is said about inflation, or how inflationary economies based in money printing collapse to non-market socialism when the ponzi reaches the point of outflows exceeding inflows, this has happened quite a number of times beginning in the Song dynasty, albeit the effects are indirect and chaotic in the examples segmenting into hyper-inflation, or deflation with producers leaving the market when no profit can be made. This is relevant because of money printing today driving many of these companies to outcompete legitimate business (sieving the marketplace). Anytime there are constraints on only one party, the one with less constraints at a time wins.
The most modern iteration of this cycle involves private entities sieving the money supply through the FED's primary dealers, stealing ever more from people holding that money, where the theft is delayed until they spend the printed money. Any company who must hold a leverage ratio greater than 1, who does so through preferential loans is state-run/state-dependent apparatus. That's non-market socialism when the participants leave and the market collapses to only state-run entities. If all competing companies cooperate like a single cartel, they aren't participating in a market, they are just shifting inventory around and no economic calculation can take place. A market participant must be operating under an independent loss function, and for exchange to occur the loss, and profit functions must overlap as well as money storing its value that is earned by people (wages), sufficient to raise the next generation to the point where one has children (3 children, 1 wife).
It also doesn't touch on corruption which is the natural outcome when a distribution of labor among people is not present in centralized systems. There must be an incentive for work to be done. Corruption is the slippage of a serpentine belt doing work. Eventually the belt gets so worn out you can run as much money through it and you never get any work done, this make sense because corruption is caustic.
It also doesn't touch on how people feed themselves when work is no longer available. It focuses on work as personal growth demonizing repetitive work, which is a secondary to that first objective, Food. The secondary objective also shouldn't be about growth, but instead ensuring that growth pipeline. Automation removes entry level jobs that people sharpen their teeth on to eventually become experts. If you cut off the supply, eventually the experts age and die and you get collapse.
When all is boiled down, the comic follows almost the exact same rhetoric found in chinese/marxist soft propaganda (the criteria pointing to this is in the absence of common things not mentioned, which results in making it obscure for those unaware). The problem with the entire narrative is that the solutions proposed will never come into being because it doesn't address what is driving these dynamics in the first place.
Luddism as portrayed is just another historic variation on socialism, which resulted in syndicalism (this fails to in more brittle ways), it wasn't the answer before because those type of systems fail in 6 intractable, impossible to solve ways (Mises), and yet that is the only bread crumb towards a solution that it pushes you towards. A known-failed solution, while trying to make it hip or critical again as a label. Ironically, capitalism at the extremes also results in socialism. If one were to graph out from the lowest wage earners to the highest, everything but the middle (the fat ends of the graph), are where socialism based systems come from among the population, and we know they fail in a number of ways (Menger, Mises).
If you don't know what and how the dynamics are being driven, you can't ever come up with a viable solution, rationally, and economic systems are life-critical systems, so you can't afford to play at chance. The consequences are too dire if you do. Large percentages of the population die as in Mao's Famine, The Soviet Famine of 1921, and other crises faced by the red perils.
Overall I found this is a waste of time to read. It doesn't accurately describe the issues. It dovetails you into false solutions, where you need to know something to recognize it, and it makes apples to oranges comparisons. Its important to push objective information to people based in fact and truth, anyone reading this and accepting it as truth, not knowing any better would be deluded, and become delusional about this subject matter. There are already too many deluded people in the world. Lets vote for rationalism.
Honestly, I wish I could get my reading time back. I really dislike being bombarded with propaganda that pretends to be something else deceitfully.
I can just play out this conversation in my head, I know exactly how it goes, every time
Me: we are dead by default, even if climate change doesn't kill us then population collapse will, or a natural disaster. The only way forward is to increase our technological power as a civilization and take control of our environment, we can't go back
Them: What's so bad about a declining population? We need fewer people on this earth to make life sustainable
Me: OK, we can discuss what's the optimal number of humans, but the population cliff that we're heading towards only means one thing: civilizational collapse. We need robotics to replace the work of the non-existant youth, and we need AI to cure aging
Them: it's selfish to have children anyway, humans are a virus
Me: Ok, so you're just anti-humanity? Why don't you start by offing yourself first then?
Them: Whatever, Elon-Stan
Unfortunately today, that naturally occurs in such places where you have a many-to-one platform that can squelch others arbitrarily. Distorted reflected appraisal is one of the most effective ways in how the left today brainwash people to embrace solutions that will inevitably result in their own destruction.
Importantly though, it is not just the left but also the extreme right. There are two groups that pretend to be others, obscuring their nature. That is something that people don't understand, you need a push-pull mechanic to have a platform for insurgency, and that is what is intended. To promote insurgency from within.
The educated know, you lose your platform (power) when you have no problems, so the problematic cohorts of people often know to only support solutions that make problems more frequent, creating the problems to empower your group.
Both the Fabians, and Communists understood this back in the late 30s, and moving forward, and the need to obscure their origins. That is partially why they have gone through so many different labeled names over the years (same ideologies), there are people who believe this stuff today hook line and sinker and act schizophrenic as a result, which is common in totalitarian societies.
Everyone who wasn't educated thinks its just a new thing, but its not, which is why education was the first thing to be corrupted. While the communists went after the proles and borgious at the low end of the spectrum (through education), the Fabians went after the money supply and hid themselves among industry, they are what we call Globalists today.
Business isn't real business if its propped up by money printing, and money printing has as part of its dynamics an inevitable collapse to non-market socialism.
The simple fact is, bridges were burnt so we can't go back. It was purposeful.
Economic systems underlie production, Socialism economic systems fail inevitably to predictable problem classes. When order fails, food production fails. Ecological overshoot (malthusian reversion), then occurs. We get collapse proportional to the reversion. That is the truth of socialism, and its variations, as it stands with those 6 intractable unsolvable problems (100 years later). Now that's not to say those problems are unsolvable, just that no one has been able to solve them. This ceases being ideological when there is objective external proof that the problems can be solved; but like most great proofs, most people don't even attempt it when they are told something is impossible. I feel I also need to mention, the harm isn't in discussing the subject matter, the harm is in believing the deceitful promises made within it that are at this point delusional. If it was stable and worked following rational principle, there wouldn't be a debate. So few people are capable of rational thought today though which is another sign of the ailing times.
Until that day comes, no one should be allowing these things in ways that promote a delusional majority.
Economies only tend to regulate, when only two parties are involved (a 2-body system, static store of value). The moment you have a third party adjusting the ratio between those two bodies arbitrarily (via store of value), you get a 3-body system.
We know how mathematically chaotic and unsolvable that is when you can't measure the important irreducible parts, since they can only be measured by lagging indicators; and not very accurately.
I'm a robotics engineer trained back in the 80s, but still working with pretty cutting edge stuff today. It's true that automation poorly thought out can be anti-human, but to assume that it's inherently racist is just raw woke racism at its purest.
Good automation solutions reduce or eliminate mindless, menial drudge work and free up people to things that people are better at than machines - dream, think, and make it happen. And IMO, it will still be a long time before the machines are better than people at those sorts of jobs.
Even our best AIs don't really understand, they just mimic their training set.
That's true, but the same can be said about a large percentage of office workers.