imnos

imnos t1_jeh4iig wrote

Reply to comment by Geeksylvania in The Luddites by scarlettforever

Nobody, including me, is trying to stop technological progress. The point is that common people will not be benefiting from advances as much as they should be, as long as we live in this unregulated capitalist society where the capitalist class reaps all the rewards.

If working people had been rewarded for the massive increases in productivity over the last 50 years, we'd all be on a 3 day week by now, or would at least have pay that kept up with inflation. But that didn't happen, did it?

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imnos t1_jegzbzh wrote

Reply to comment by Geeksylvania in The Luddites by scarlettforever

> No, they weren't

Jesus. No, they weren't what?

The luddites were taking organised action because they were about to be put out of a job. How is that any different to the rail strikes in the UK? The benefits of automation were not equally distributed - and here's a newsflash for you - they STILL aren't equally distributed or there wouldn't be mass strikes across the UK and US at the moment, to increase pay.

The line that you and others parrot about them just destroying machinery like lunatics as though they actually had it out for machines is laughable, and plenty of historians have spoken against this idea.

> Malcolm L. Thomis argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of a very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, to undermine lower-paid competing workers, and to create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centering on breaking threshing machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite?wprov=sfla1

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imnos t1_jegt8xv wrote

Reply to comment by homezlice in The Luddites by scarlettforever

Right. The luddites have been given a bad name when it's capitalists who should be getting flak. They're exactly the same as people protesting across the world today for fairer wages etc.

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imnos t1_jdpim3w wrote

The near future - you'll be using these AI tools to increase your output and productivity. Many, like me, have been doing this for the last year already.

The longer term future may be a little more uncertain. For example - what happens when we have an AGI that doesn't need the direction of a human developer? It just needs input from some product person and then it goes and builds an app.

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imnos t1_j8dlylh wrote

He doesn't have a technical background so wouldn't pay too much attention to it.

I'd be interested to know how someone with a BA in Creative Writing and most of their work experience being in news reporting, then marketing at Open AI, ends up founding a company like Anthropic, which gets investment from Google.

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