[pugworthy]

I saw a talk by Brian Merchant (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/) a while back where he talked a lot about the Luddites and their revolts against automation. He's definitely not a fan of AI, but it was very interesting to hear the comparisons of AI resistance now to Luddite resistance to automation in the 1800's.

There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now?

It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.

[zombot]

There's one important difference: Automation worked and was affordable. Whether slop generation by LLMs is a useful instance of automation and how any productivity achieved stacks up against real, non-subsidized costs is currently a matter of (highly propagandized) opinion at best.

[bcjdjsndon]

> Automation worked and was affordable.

Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai

And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible.

Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it