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by simianwords 4 hours ago
I think your view is too simplistic and falls easily into the populist narrative so you end up mislabelling me as being invested.

You are again doing the thing I flagged in my original comment - the left right or progressive/conservative axis is not useful anymore. As an example: a lot of tech CEO's were originally against Trump but ended up caving precisely because the left became anti-technology broadly.

From experience and anecdotes, tech and AI optimism cross cuts into the old axis. Examples

1. third world countries are way more optimistic about AI than first world

2. many celebs (for the lack of better word) are pro AI - look at Redis, Django, NodeJS, Github

3. the existence of Effective Altruism itself should prove that this axis is useless - EA was largely leftist and support democrats while also being "pro" AI like Anthropic is mostly made from the EA cult

The nomenclature also doesn't make sense to me. Why would conservatives not conserve but rather push for progress? What are conservatives conserving instead? The academic consensus is that technology determines the societal culture and if conservatives wanted to conserve anything, they would conserve technology first wouldn't they?

1 comments

None of this changes the fact that average people aren't elites, no matter how much you may try to spin it that way.

And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.

You think there's a binary of elites vs non elites which is using a Marxist framework that I (and almost mainstream academic) would reject.

> And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.

Thanks for proving my point, you are emphasising the exact divide I was trying to show originally. You may try to twist the rhetoric to show that you are for slow and cautionary progress of tech. That's sensible and I don't mean to claim neo-luddites would outright deny progress itself.

> This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists.

You have multiple comments calling anyone opposed to AI in any way an "educated elite". If you don't accept that framework, stop using it.