It's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring.

Why can't anyone see beyond their job?

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defrost 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel.

Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.

Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.

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piloto_ciego 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, those are political decisions, and WE (not the nebulous "they") are who make those decisions.

Like, I lost literally everything when I got sick. I think I probably understand "hovering about the knife edge" better than most people on this site. I lost my career, my sense of identity, and more than most can imagine. When you have faced explaining to your son how you might not make it through treatment and how he'll be responsible for a lot of things I am responsible for going forward, you kind of look at these people whining about AI codegen and sigh. This freaking technological miracle that might make their jobs obsolete so they're afraid of it, those people are as children who cannot see that it could literally free them from stupid bullshit... You people are not your jobs, you're not your salary and your job at ServiceNow or SalesForce or whatever can never love you back. The robot isn't a threat to you, the system that values the robot more than you is. It's basic root cause analysis.

But I bounced back. I fought through it. I kept on slogging through the stress and catastrophe. This whole thing feels like the meme to me, "oh, fist time?"

You know what I learned though? That we are not always powerless to act. We can get up and go. We can create! We can just do stuff. People need to realize that they have agency! Your life can get better if you get to continue it (hopefully). You are allowed to live how you want to live, you can do things! You don't have to accept being fed dog shit every day. How many of these people bitching and moaning about AI have even thought to try to form a union? How many of these people vote? How many of these people get off their assess and go and participate in some direct action? How many?

Dammit, why don't I see anyone in the street protesting the war? Why don't I see anyone protesting the lack of social safety nets? Why don't I see anyone doing anything. You know why? Because doing things is hard. Because most people want things to change without putting in any of the work (sometimes dangerous, sometimes stressful) to change things. And meanwhile, I see AI - which could literally be a tool we use to fix the injustices of the world, the disaster of tying people's right to exist to their pay check - that NONSENSE that we mostly all hate, and the response is "oh my god what if it takes my job?" or so-called "leftists" bending over backwards to defend copyright law.

These people complaining don't want the system to change, they just want to maintain a privileged position within it. But if the system has always been harming people at the margins, is it ok if we go back? "Oh, thank goodness we made AI illegal so I can still have to fill out my manual TPS reports and report to Bob on my progress for the week! How great is that!" The lack of imagination of a better world is astounding and disheartening. The whiners and perpetual malcontents shouting about AI secretly want to be the billionaire, not overthrow a system that allows them in the first place. They want their previously privileged status as a "knowledge worker" to remain special.

Man, am I the only one in here who read Marx? Bell Hooks? Kropotkin? Dream bigger people!

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pibaker 13 hours ago | parent [-]

>read marx

>dreams of man made famine and desolation

Do you happen to wear glasses, mister Ciego? Me and my marx reading boys have some bourgeois liquidation quotas to fill.

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piloto_ciego 12 hours ago | parent [-]

You ever read Marx?

I’m not a Marxist, but jeepers, it should be required reading of people.

	▲	defrost 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As I recall he had a short passage or two on the Swan River Colony, and I'm pretty sure Don McLeod* read a bit of that. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara_strike

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happytoexplain 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Luddites were rational.

Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean the people whose family's lives get fucked up along the way are somehow assholes or unrealistic for demanding that we handle it in a more controlled/extended way that doesn't cause so much misery.

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scrumper 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Magical wishful thinking is as misguided as even the most rabid anti-tech critique.

Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.

All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.

AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.

Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.

The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.

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piloto_ciego 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Dude, I'm building an off grid cabin in the woods. I already live pretty "freely." Dream bigger. We can change and make the world awesome! We have to want to though.

> Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.

Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.

EDIT to add:

Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.

	▲	happytoexplain 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>Dream bigger. Ironically, this oversimplification is narrow-minded.
	▲	scrumper 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better. You are inadvertently proving my point. Yes an impact driver makes it easier to get a screw into a board, but a carpenter still works a full day. Technology's reducing effect on labor effort is always used to increase output, never to decrease input. > Dream bigger I am awake.
	▲	inigyou 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Until the AI people use some political games to justify why your land actually belongs to them, and then come and kick you, the trespasser, off their land. Such games may involve property taxes, eminent domain, or similar.