Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand.

They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).

They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.

It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.

I am absolutely convinced that in just a few years 90% of what we know as the Internet will be AI and possibly there will be an entire new class of economy that is based around these agents.

I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early.

And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?”

That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".

Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI.

When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.

The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

lol

Two More Weeks(TM)

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

> Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work.

But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.

I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.

These types of posts are tediously regular. Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” in 2024 [1]. Fraudster Matt Schumer’s “Something Big is Happening” in February [2].

Next viral doom post in September-ish?

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:

Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.

I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste.

If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?

Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's.

The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.

We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor.

The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work.

I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.

This "how to adapt" prop-slop is getting tiresome. So much of it is obviously intended to project and demoralize rather than provoke thought or give legitimate advice. The trick of this kind of writing is to skip arguing that something rather questionable will happen and go straight to giving advice about how everyone should adapt to the new, totally inevitable reality. This isn't even a particularly sophisticated method of manipulation.

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.

Which is based on what?

> AI can process the entire world

It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication.

I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).

I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thought of one way how AI can pay all of us for our content ..posted quick thoughts on my Substack... https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

SLOP ALERT!!!

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop.

AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.

I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.

SLOP

> Every machine is waiting for the next machine.

I like that. We are all machines.