I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.
https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...
There’s no way they would have been pro-AI. It would take a very skilled VC to warp the world enough to make that sound true.
LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
Yet
The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere.
Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarriages.
And horrible tech like "weatherproof camera + AI + battery + solar + cell" (FLOCK) are easy to implement and already have been used in tracking women with miscarriages in Texas and across the country.
It seems for every new tech, theres 1 really cool good thing for the public, a few neutral things, and 1-3 absolutely terrible things.
And those terrible things make money. Lots of money.
Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power.
The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.
Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory.
In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.
I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts.
edit: add whether
I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.
In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.
One such perspective is Tools for Conviviality, a 1973 book by Ivan Illich.
Your ultimatum is imaginatively anemic.
There has not been "an effort to stop people noticing this". The Unabomber Manifesto has been available everywhere and published across mediums from the start. The topic beat to death by everyone from anarchists to eco-fascists to internet edgelords since it was released. It has also occupied a place of debate in academia, being studied and criticized in a lot of courses.
The Unabomber Manifesto wasn't even a particularly good critique in this topic. It just happened to become a popular one because he was a terrible person who murdered a lot of people and wanted to murder a lot more. The common criticism of the manifesto is that it was a bunch of cliches tied together with some writing that appeared eloquent, and then he forced it into notoriety by being a literal terrorist.
It doesn't stop comments like this from implying that he was on to something or the next step of implying that there's some broader conspiracy to stop us all from noticing that he had a point. The latter conspiracy breaks down when you look at how much everyone knows about the manifesto and how it has been reprinted and discussed to death for years. He even wrote and published entire freaking books from prison.
It's like Silicon Valley overdosed on Adderall.
You can have the same tech, just in 5 human generations. I don't see why you have to have it now.
The fallacy is believing that some kind of invisible hand will guide it to automatically produce an equal outcome and therefore any and all regulation is inherently bad. This seems to be a prevailing belief in the US in the current climate.
We have institutions that are designed to redistribute power and they are called governments. People have to believe in their role in doing that enough to actually empower them to implement it though.
A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power).
Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or cloud services.
Perhaps if we understood open source less as a process and more as a movement (so: if libre software movement was more popular) things would be different.
I'll go further and say that it accelerated getting us into this mess we're in today.
The OSI is owned and controlled by the tech titan hyperscalers who benefit from free labor.
Useful "open source software" always gets encrusted by the big titans that then build means to control the tech, and then the means to control us. And just to rub salt in the wounds, they rarely compensate the original authors.
Android is Linux, right? Then why can't we install our own software? Why does it spy on us? Open source is so great, right?
95% of humans will never own a phone that gives them freedom. And we enabled that.
Everything we as tech people own is also getting locked down. We're going to have to start providing our state ID to access the internet soon.
But OMG, Year of Linux on the Desktop 2012!!12
Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.
Open source hasn't stopped power from accruing to the titans. It's accelerated their domination.
People rush to defend Google and Amazon when you criticize how they profit off of Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. The teams that build the tech aren't becoming wealthy, and most of the bytes flowing through those systems are doing so behind closed source AWS/GCP/Azure offerings.
These companies then use their insane reach to tax everything that moves. Google owns 92% (yes, 92%!) of URL bars and they tax every search, especially searches for other companies' trademarks. They do even better - they turn it into a bidding war. Almost nothing that exists in the world today can make it to you without being taxed by them.
If they don't like your content, you just disappear.
Mobile platforms have never been ours. We can't install what we want. We're soon going to be locked at the firmware level to just Google and Apple and forced to use their adblocking-free, tracker-enabled "browsers" (1984 telescreens). Any competition can't get started due to the massive scale required, meanwhile Apple and Google tax everything at 30% and start correlating everything you do, everyone you talk to, everywhere you go in their panopticon.
"Open source" was wool pulled over our eyes so that we happily built, supported, and enabled this.
Open source should be replaced with "our proletariat users and small businesses can have this for free, but businesses listed on any stock exchange cannot commercialize this ever unless they pay out the nose for it".
"Source available" / shareware is peak. Give your users the thing, and the means to maintain it after you're gone, but tell Google et al. to go away.
"Fuck you, pay me" as the artists frequently say.
But also, let's stop giving the Death Star free labor.
(edit: I'd love a feedback sampling of the heavy downvotes. OSI purists? Goog employees? Surely MIT/BSD fans and not anyone who follows Stallman.)
Some technologies concentrate power, some technologies distribute it. "The WWW" is still too coarse of a category to have just one of those effects up there.
Some people just don't show the capacity to handle nuance or complexity.
I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.
As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned.
Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.
Here's the problem: you can't.
First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force.
Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things.
Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since.
So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.
It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True.
But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole.
> Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power.
That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must not be arbitrary nor permanent.
This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history. Any human structure is vulnerable to outside attack, and most (all?) vulnerable to internal decay, but they can be established and are worth establishing.
An example I can think of are the Republican Militias as described by George Orwell in Road to Catalonia, and activist groups I have been involved with here in Aotearoa.
Nothing lasts for ever - that does not mean we cannot work together for good things.
--
In one group I was involved on we used to have monthly meetings, by phone, of the organising committee. We had thirty members (all activists running hot with their own opinions), made decisions by consensus. I was on that committee for five years and we went over our allotted two ours twice: Once by ninety minutes (that was a day!) and the other time by five minutes. Nobody ever felt unheard - that mattered to us.
It is possible, people have been doing it forever, the good things we make are vulnerable but we should still aspire to and achieve them
That's not what I said. What I said was that you can't enforce a value system "that benefits us all"--because "us all" will never agree on what value system that should be, at least not once you get beyond small groups of people. But of course you can just declare by fiat that your preferred value system "benefits us all", and ignore objections, and if you have enough brute force at your disposal, you can enforce it. You just won't be enforcing a value system that actually "benefits us all".
> We must have webs of trust
Yes.
> within those webs there are power hierarchies.
Only if you let that happen. But in a sane web of trust, you don't--because in a sane web of trust, everybody understands that power--in the sense of someone you trust doing something that harms you, simply because you're unable to prevent them--is a betrayal of trust.
> This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history.
I disagree. I certainly don't see the Republican Militias in the Spanish Civil War as solving this problem.
> that does not mean we cannot work together for good things
Of course we can. But our ability to do that without violating any trusts is limited, often very severely, by how many people we can get to agree with us, without any force or coercion being applied, on what "good things" to work together for. Unfortunately utopian dreamers and "revolutionaries" throughout human history have failed to recognize this basic fact, and their attempts to make a better world have always resulted in mass suffering and death.
If "us all" is a small enough group, sure. It doesn't scale, though.
I think that organized religion wants to say a few words here.
What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain.
What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were always going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule.
For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth.
Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.
True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.
I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder
We could have fun defining what's good usage but we're so far from it, it would just make me sad.
My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains.
In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.
The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.
So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.
Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.
Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.
You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?
How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?
Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages?
The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up.
And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.
Medical professionals have better diagnostics, health records, MRIs and other imaging equipment and so on. The medical profession is pretty much a perfect example of my point, actually. Do we train more doctors (per-capita) or just expect existing doctors to work more hours? There are a whole bunch of vested interests in constraining doctor supply.
Likewise, resident physicians are incredibly profitable for hospitals because they create a lot of value and cost nothing. You see this where various parties are trying to increase emergency medicine residencies from 3 to 4 years.
Hospitals hate fully-qualified attending physicians because they can't artificially suppress their salaries. It's why we've gotten things like Nurse Practioners, Physician's Assistants, CRNAs, etc. It's also why, for example, you see a case like in Oregon where private equity is trying to destroy physician organization. I'm of course talking about Peace Health and ApolloMD, a case in Oregon recently.
We also make medical people spend a bunch of time dealing with insurance BS, for literally no reason.
This isn't just a BS "corporate job" thing.
Now its been 20 years later. The technology is mature and many of the patents have expired, but GMO has done absolutely nothing to solve world hunger.
We do not need GMO for food, I agree.
But where is the genetically engineered heart muscle that sits in the engine bay of my car running on nutrient solution, excreting C02 and urine while driving my car with a hydraulic motor?
Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth.
IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.
You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem.
The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.
no no, we're not doing that.
I get that hacker news would rather avoid inconvenient issues or simply satirize them but I take absolutely no care of this.
Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.”
We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be.
Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations?
I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center.
It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.
Clearly, powers that be learned all too well from internet rollout.
I stopped reading. No point in engaging this if that’s how you’re kicking things off.
