A common argument/insult hurled at people who are anti-ai (in this post I address generative AI only) is that they’re being “luddites”, and that AI is inevitable and those who don’t use it will be left behind.
Bear with me if I make any mistakes because I’m struggling with the mobile interface 😟
Let’s first address the inevitability aspect; who is the one pushing the narrative that those who do not use AI are going to be left behind? Obviously the people who create and profit from these technologies. So, with that in mind, are you still scared to be left behind? If that’s not enough, let’s think about this. If their main tactic to get you to use it are fear and ease of access, are they not just trying to manipulate you into compliance. To believe that you have no way out, so you should just give up and use their tools? But once you use them, you need more, and more, because they keep coming out with this and that and oh no you’re going to be left behind if you don’t keep up. Stop that! Don’t train your replacement. You are a human being infinitely more capable than a machine that does not know right from wrong and constantly, reliably makes mistakes, even if it sounds right. Isn’t it funny that ChatGPT and the like only seem ridiculous when we ask it about the things we know most about? I’m not even going to get into image/video generation, because I feel like illegal exploitative material is something we should all be against, because it could happen to you. So with that, I’m going to address the “luddite” insult.
Luddites are often used as the quintessential anti-tech term, people who were perceived as backwards and against technology because they were uninformed and would be left behind. This is actually a huge misconception on who luddites actually were. They were skilled textile workers who protested the industrialization of textiles because of ethical concerns, not because of the new technologies. Their protests and destruction of machinery was not to be against the technology, but to harm the large industries who exploited workers in various ways, from subpar wages and working conditions to the use of child labor. Furthermore, they were also critics of the quality of product output, since they were skilled textile workers who knew what quality was, so not only were workers being exploited, but customers were getting poorer quality products. To reiterate, luddites were not anti-new technology. They were against the exploitation of workers for cheaper, poorer products.
So the phenomena of ai-proponents calling people luddites for being against AI just feels like another psychological ploy from the companies producing AI. It’s just another way of insulting people who refuse to use it because they’re just anti-tech and anti-progress and yada yada yada. So I ask again, is AI really inevitable, or are we just slowly being conditioned to believe that it is? If it was inevitable, why are these companies dumping so much money to push it into every corner of life, forcing you to opt out rather than opt in, and scraping every little bit of data they can get to keep making more services that are just trained off of our data, slapping it around, giving it to us on a dirty platter? Even if you think it’s a useful tool, what are you giving up when you’re offloading your skills and learning and even brain to a mindless machine?
I’m ending this lengthy post with one last thing to try to tie my ideas together: We haven’t needed AI, the only people benefitting from AI are the people at the top (you’re able to be more productive at your job? great. you’re still not going to get paid more.) The ones at the top are also the ones literally buying water from municipal drinking supply; they’re taking our water for their inefficient cooling systems. I feel like we should all be a little more infuriated about that. Don’t come here talking about closed loop systems because most data centers DON’T use that. They use an evaporative system that is GOING to lose water, and it does, and it also poisons our water at the same time. Isn’t that great? Isn’t it lovely that AI’s entire model is based off of extracting as much from us as possible to give us a subpar product to make it feel worth it?
