The luddites lost their status, leisure time, and middle class incomes. Their descendants worked 12 hours a day in factories. They definitely had good reasons to push back.
Revolutions are never smooth and privileged groups threatened by new technologies or ideas always have reasons to push back and will do so fiercely, that's plain human nature. But if we block progress to protect the status quo of said people, are they going to give back value to society in the same magnitude as said progress in the long term? I don't think so really, at least when reviewing history, it always pays reasonably well in the long run*.
This discussion is very old, as it applies to many examples as monarchy/nobles in the French Revolution and other similar revolutions, to horses (and highly specialized humans profiting from them) when cars became cheap, to hunter-gatherers when agriculture developed, and a large etcetera.
The only difference I see in "advanced AIs" as a technology is that the individual immediate wellbeing of almost every human is probably threatened as there will be more jobs destroyed than created.**
PS*: Personal positions in these kinds of arguments depend on other personal opinions and predictions about an specific sociological/technological "advance" being of net positive value for all society. If your opinion is contrary to that, possibly staying as hunters-gatherers or being governed by kings and emperors (or something in between, just some extreme examples to make the point) were better courses of action.
PS2**: I'm talking about human-aligned AIs. Bring a rogue AI agent with misaligned objectives and with direct or indirect physical presence to the discussion and there are no net positives to talk about (for humans).
This discussion is very old, as it applies to many examples as monarchy/nobles in the French Revolution and other similar revolutions, to horses (and highly specialized humans profiting from them) when cars became cheap, to hunter-gatherers when agriculture developed, and a large etcetera.
The only difference I see in "advanced AIs" as a technology is that the individual immediate wellbeing of almost every human is probably threatened as there will be more jobs destroyed than created.**
PS*: Personal positions in these kinds of arguments depend on other personal opinions and predictions about an specific sociological/technological "advance" being of net positive value for all society. If your opinion is contrary to that, possibly staying as hunters-gatherers or being governed by kings and emperors (or something in between, just some extreme examples to make the point) were better courses of action.
PS2**: I'm talking about human-aligned AIs. Bring a rogue AI agent with misaligned objectives and with direct or indirect physical presence to the discussion and there are no net positives to talk about (for humans).