Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

We could let workers unionize and work out an agreeable private contract between their union and employer when it comes to compensation for jobs eliminated by machines. That option has left the table because of the violence, deaths and laws passed against workers and unions in the past.

Or we could do what's worked reasonably well at keeping people from dying in the streets and enact social programs through taxes.

Wealth accumulation to the extreme that it is today wouldn't be possible if not for the centuries of intentional enclosure of land, subsequent displacement of people, violence against workers looking for just compensation/treatment and political/legal/economic disenfranchisement of organized labor. This still happens today in the form of Right To Work legislation and in less luxurious industries and places.

Yet anything that can be couched as "redistribution" is deemed wrong and unfair.

Yes, the Luddite "fallacy" is also an assertion. It's based on strong historical data and weaker economical theory.

Your comment does make sense, but "we are losing the edge" does not automatically mean that we'll ever be completely defeated. And even a small victory is good enough to avoid a crisis, because of Jevon's paradox (that's also not a paradox).

To argue that we are headed to a crisis where humans won't be able to compete with capital, one needs evidence supporting that there'll be absolutely no economical activity where humans will outcompete machines (at least for a reasonably big share of the humans).

I do think that'll happen because there's no feature of a human that a good enough machine could not emulate, and machines are inherently cheaper (because we are "wasteful" from a production perspective), but my argument is fundamentally a repeat of materialism, for what the only possible evidence is the lack of evidence of the alternatives.

Also, the timing is iffy, there's little evidence that we'll have that crisis soon (there's little evidence either way, but it mostly points into a crisis soon). I happen to think we will because our current machines started to do lots of tasks that we learned that were very hard at the last AI explosion. But there's no guarantee that there aren't even harder tasks, that we just didn't try yet. Also, our computers are approaching the same capacity that people estimate that our brains have. But those estimations have lots of assumptions, that could easily be wrong.