[vages]

Did you miss this paragraph from the same page?

> I am not a Luddite. I have been wildly enthusiastic about science, technology, and intellectual and material progress since I was a kid. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I find the current breakthroughs fascinating.

[kmeisthax]

This is actually where I stopped reading and checked the comments, because it shows that the author skipped a few history lessons.

The Luddites were not intrinsically opposed to the advance of technology. In fact, the whole reason why they were smashing looms was as a protest tactic - not an end goal. England's upper class invented the myth of the technology-hating Luddite as a way to slander and libel what was basically a prototype of a modern labor union. Parliament would then crush them with laws that made machine breaking a hanging offense.

Transposing this to today would give you artists angry that their work was trained on by DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney[0]. In both cases the opposition is not to the technology itself, but to the reallocation of wealth away from labor and to whoever owns the machines. The latter today would be akin to, say, "businessman" hustlebros using ChatGPT and art generators to create labor-free fly-by-night operations[1]. Most art generators are also hosted platforms whose access is sold for profit, creating a second layer of ownership on top of the hustlebros.

Meanwhile the main argument here is more akin to the stereotypical technophobe: AI can't be trusted. Hell, there's a whole chapter (not yet written) arguing that we should just junk neural networks entirely. This isn't Luddism, this is the god damned Butlerian Jihad[2].

[0] If you want a bit of a stretch you probably could see some Luddite in, say, Richard Stallman

[1] I regularly get YouTube recommendations for people trying to tell me how much money I can make by just typing a few prompts into an art generator and posting the result on a print-on-demand site.

[2] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is an event in which all computers are outlawed and mercilessly destroyed.

Yes, this is why /r/Dune banned AI art.

[vages]

I'd just like to clarify: The “PhD” sentence was more important to my point than the “luddite” sentence

I find your comment both thought-provoking and well-formulated. As for the references to the Butlerian Jihad: I read Dune for the first time this summer. The quote “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” has lodged itself within my mind. I’m not as fatalistic as the author Dr. Chapman seems to be, but I find myself thinking about it nearly every time I read of some new AI development coming out of a big corporation.

[jhbadger]

I think the word "most" is relevant. You can find people with doctorates in technical fields who believe in a Flat Earth or that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. They just aren't most of them.

[ShredKazoo]

The shape and origin of the Earth are central questions of the relevant scientific fields. They've received centuries of extensive debate.

By contrast, the questions that this book explores haven't received nearly as much expert attention. And if you poll the experts on whether those questions should receive more attention, they mostly say yes!

>69% of [ML researcher] respondents believe society should prioritize AI safety research “more” or “much more” than it is currently prioritized, up from 49% in 2016.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6hMugfY3tDQGfqYL/what-do-ml...

[class4behavior]

Now you're moving the goalposts

[twblalock]

The parent comment did not move the goalposts in any way -- it simply pointed out that having a PhD is not enough to prove that the author is not a crank, because a lot of other people with PhDs are also cranks.

[class4behavior]

Sure they did. First, they question the qualification of the author, then suddenly those qualifications are all relative and not really so relevant.

[tempodox]

“No true Scotsman…”

[twblalock]

This is a great example of a fallacious appeal to authority -- both from the author, and from you.

[ShredKazoo]

I think jhbadger's original comment also counts as an appeal to authority by the definition you're using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34785616

[madrox]

Robert Malone is also an expert in mRNA technology

[twblalock]

Claiming that one is not a Luddite is like claiming not to be a racist -- what follows almost always confirms that the author is exactly what he claims not to be.