That's the difference.
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People who were disempowered by motors weren't exactly thrilled about them, either, but they were a minority underclass.
AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind. Long-press your Android phone's power button: There's Gemini.
Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, automobiles of all shapes and sizes (private and shared), power tools are all examples of electric motors that you own and can do useful things with.
What electric motors do is give you power over your environment.
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You don't own Gemini. You are allowed to use Gemini as long as your economic value to Google exceeds the cost of the electricity to run it.
With Gemini, Google has power over you.
> You don't own Gemini.
That distinction is academic here -- just as a car that I rent instead of owning offers me no difference in "power". I don't care at all who owns the thing that answers my "What is autorotation?" question about a clip I just saw on Reddit.
There are two categories of responses here, yours is all progress is terrible actually, mine is I like advances but slop just offends me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
Ludditism has a long history, and they made the exact same arguments about job loss in the 1800s as today.
They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not because they hated the machine itself.
Labor rights did not exist at the time (1768-1817), so nobody would need to circumvent them, either. This was when efforts were made to create them. And the Luddites made a negative contribution.
Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell
I think the same cycle is playing out with LLMs - the general public is somewhere between indifferent and actively hostile to them, as they have been with every new technology. Reconfiguring businesses and society to use them to their full potential - and benefits to society - will take years, if not decades.
Motors, electric or otherwise, made it so you can jump in a car, or a bus and drive you and your friends to the movies or on a holiday and go out and see the world. LLMs make it so people end up like delusional zombies talking to a screen.
Nothing has changed about people, they had common sense then and they have common sense now and they recognize when you try to sell them something useful that makes the physical world and their social situation better and when you want to sell them something out of dystopian sci-fi novels.