| 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. |
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.