Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

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Whenever a new tech (or cultural phenomenon) appears, you have naysayers such as this one.

Luddites fought against automatic weaving stools - by destroying the machines. Reasoning: It is stealing our jobs.

Comics were sure to destroy our children's minds, because they wouldn't read real literature anymore (conveniently forgetting that only 100 years before that, reading was considered a plague of the youth and putting their minds into bad places).

Rock music is of the devil. If you play "Stairway to heaven" backwards, and squint your ears just right ...

Phones that memorise phone numbers? Surely it is brain rot if you are no longer forced to memorise phone numbers.

Social media? Work of the devil! Manipulates the minds, causes addiction, bad elections, and warts on the nose!

Cryptocurrency? Waste of energy, won't someone please think of the environment? Only used for crime!

3D printing? What if someone ghasp prints himself a gun?

And now it is AI. And when AI is normalised, and something new shows up, it will be that.

This is an extremely simplistic take that ironically ignores the human cultural context around these technologies.

For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families.

There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.

I think except for rock music and comic books and 3d printing the naysayers are proven to be right? The luddites went at it wrong , but the externalities are definitely terrible for all your examples.

Most of the things in this list are pretty innocuous and were never weaponized. Two exceptions, social media and cell phones, have been weaponized and after a certain point, I would say that we'd be better off without them.

I would put AI into that same group. It is and will continue to be weaponized against you by people with more power than you.

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