I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.

An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.

Then, ask what's different this time.

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AnimalMuppet 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The luddites have been right to some degree about second-order effects.

Some of them said that TV was making us mindless. Some of them said that electronic communication was depersonalizing. Some of them said that social media was algorithms feeding us anything that would make us keep clicking.

They weren't entirely wrong.

AI may be a very useful tool. (TV is. Electronic communication is. Social media is.) But what it does to us may not be all positive.

	▲	CamperBob2 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Social media is a hard defense, at least for me. The rest of the technologies you refer to are neutral, as is AI, but social media seems doomed to corruption and capture because of the different effects it has on different groups. Most of the people who are protesting AI now were dead silent when Big Social Media was ramping up. There were exceptions (Cliff Stoll comes to mind) but in general, antitechnology movements don't have any predictive power. Tools that we were told would rob us of our personal autonomy and keep the means of production permanently out of our reach have generally had the opposite effect. This will be true of AI as well, I believe... but only as long as the models remain accessible to everyone.