>The net utility of AI is far more debatable.

I'm sure if you asked the luddites the utility of mechanized textile production you'd get a negative response as well.

Railroads move people and cargo quickly and cheaply from point A to point B. Mechanized textile production made clothing, a huge sink of time and resources before the industrial age, affordable to everybody.

What does AI get the consumer? Worse spam, more realistic scams, hallucinated search results, easy cheating on homework? AI-assisted coding doesn't benefit them, and the jury is still out on that too (see recent study showing it's a net negative for efficiency).

The luddites were often the ones that built the mechanized looms. They had nothing against mechanized looms, they had everything against the business owners using their workers talents and knowledge to build an entire operation only to later undercut their wages and/or replace them with lesser paid unskilled workers and reduce the quality of life of their entire community.

Getting people to associate the luddites as anti-technology zealots rather than pro-labor organization is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in history.

Luddites weren’t anti technology at all[0] in fact they were quite adept at using technology. It was a labor movement that fought for worker rights in the face of new technologies.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...

Apples to oranges.

Luddites weren't at a point where every industry sees individual capital formation/demand for labor trend towards zero over time.

Prices are ratios in the currency between factors and producers.

What do you suppose happens when the factors can't buy anything because there is nothing they can trade. Slavery has quite a lot of historic parallels with the trend towards this. Producers stop producing when they can make no profit.

You have a deflationary (chaotic) spiral towards socio-economic collapse, under the burden of debt/money-printing (as production risk). There are limits to systems, and when such limits are exceeded; great destruction occurs.

Malthus/Catton pose a very real existential threat when such disorder occurs, and its almost inevitable that it does without action to prevent it. One cannot assume action will happen until it actually does.

With this generation of AI, it's too early to tell whether it's the next railroad, the next textile machine, or the next way to lock your exclusive ownership of an ugly JPG of a multicolored ape into a globally-referenceable, immutable datastore backed by a blockchain.

The mechanical loom produced a tangible good. That kind of automation was supposed to free people from menial work. Now they are trying to replace interesting work with human supervised slop, which is a stolen derivative work in the first place.

The loom wasn't centralized in four companies. Customers of textiles did not need an expensive subscription.

Obviously average people would benefit more if all that investment went into housing or in fact high speed railways. "AI" does not improve their lives one bit.

They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

This sort of “other people were wrong once, so you might be too” comment is really pointless.

I mean, for them it probably was.