[newaccountman2]

Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999:

> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.

[scoofy]

Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).

And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.

But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.

[newaccountman2]

> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.

Agreed.

I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.

[scoofy]

Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.

A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.

The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.

It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.