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Rethinking the Luddites

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Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#161

Post by Aerroon »

Syonyk wrote: post #84
rossriley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People bring the value that they generate for an economy. Once they can be replaced with AI/Robots then that labour can be reallocated further up the value chain which in turn makes our economies and culture richer and more productive. 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 e…

> Imagine if we were all working 18 hour subsistence farming jobs now just to survive... 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 investm…

In those eras your entire life was basically work, because nobody else would do things for you. Fence broke? You gotta fix it.

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.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#162

Post by lolinder »

hexage1814 wrote: post #136
HDThoreaun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of people ever to exist were only looking out for themselves. The luddite claim that the industrial revolution made their life worse was absolutely not wrong, even if their actions were selfish.

>The luddite claim that the industrial revolution made their life worse was absolutely not wrong 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…

> ATM machines also made the lives of bank tellers worse cause they lost their jobs.

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.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#163

Post by [deleted] »

w_for_wumbo wrote: post #3

There's plenty of rhetoric about whether technology advancements will be a good thing or not. But I think that distracts from the core message, that the most important matter is not whether we use technology, but how we treat our fellow humans. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#164

Post by notpachet »

Gigachad wrote: post #91
coolhand2120 wrote: post #14

People are happy to use tech like wix to build a web page because building web pages is hard. Virtually every designer, artist, writer, and musician, were all very happy to use wix even though it cost the jobs of legions of developers. “Finally I can do what these nerds can do without their help”. I really don’t see the difference.

Reality is that it didn't cost any jobs. Everyone just moved up to making things more complex than what Wix can do. I don't feel my life is any worse off having moved from building static marketing pages to complex web apps.

So that's why we have SPA's for things that should be simple HTML sites!

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#165

Post by danuker »

Aerroon wrote: post #156
talent_deprived wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we as a society forego the benefits of automation, because it makes some people unemployed? 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.

We should apply the same rule to all improvements. Can you imagine how many people we could employ if we banned all tools for digging and required everyone to dig by hand? We could literally create hundreds of millions of jobs!

My worry exactly! Ideally we should need no jobs, and machines should do all the work.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#166

Post by kibwen »

epolanski wrote: post #134
rossriley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People bring the value that they generate for an economy. Once they can be replaced with AI/Robots then that labour can be reallocated further up the value chain which in turn makes our economies and culture richer and more productive. 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 e…

> People bring the value that they generate for an economy. Nurses, teachers? Those bring insane value but get little recognition, in all senses, for that.

The sleight of hand that has been perpetrated here is to conflate "value", as in the degree to which something is good, with "value", as in the market price for which something can be purchased, in order to suggest that markets reveal how good a thing is rather than merely how scarce/in demand it is.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#167

Post by __loam »

nemo44x wrote: post #106
fiftyfifty wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about as consumers then? Without workers who's going to buy anything? We have some serious logistics to figure out if we automate the majority of jobs away, and yet somehow all these companies are expecting people to still be able to buy their products.

There will be more companies making things and providing things than there are today because there’s more labor available. We can do the things that aren’t of higher necessity today.

Neoliberal economics is so exhausting.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#168

Post by paxys »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #125
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #9

I'm not observing a situation of people massively losing their jobs or losing money. If you do, feel free to share your experience. So far, the AI technology has been a nice toy/support for the people.

Respectfully, AI is a core issue in the strikes in Hollywood right now, and a whole industry has been out of work for months now.

AI is very far from a "core issue" in those strikes, but merely something that is being thrown around as a bargaining chip (the actual issue is the streaming business and how it affects the entertainment economy). Not a single writer or actor to date has lost their job because of or been replaced by AI.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#169

Post by lolinder »

Aunche wrote: post #50

> Today, the word “Luddite” is used as an insult to anyone resistant to technological innovation; it suggests ignoramuses, sticks in the mud, obstacles to progress. But a new book by the journalist and author Brian Merchant, titled “Blood in the Machine,” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines. Just because Luddites were sy…

> Without the new factory jobs, even more people would be stuck as serfs like they were in China or Russia at the time.

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.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#170

Post by paxys »

It's telling that this anti-automation and anti-AI movement is finally reaching its crescendo now that creative and white collar jobs are under threat. These same people writing books about the evils of AI sat back over the last few decades as countless factory jobs, farm jobs, retail jobs and even "lower class" intellectual jobs (like bookkeepers, travel agents and telephone operators) were automated away. "It's just how human progress works." "Think about the printing press/water mill" etc etc. Well the exact same argument applies now.
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