sighs pulling out this quote again:

"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to >>circumvent standard labor practices<< of the time."

Luckily, the brave government's troops, show trials and making '"machine breaking" (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime"' solved the crisis of these awful, entitled workers' demands once and for all and across all time.

I'm sure that any uppity workers in our present age can also be taught the appropriate lessons.

The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:

> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.

> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological.

Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market...

But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel like there isn't enough time anymore.

I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish.

when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand.

when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might change, but claims that we're at the point where computers can meaningfully displace that work are pretty weak.

sure that might change.

It has nothing to do with luddites.

Software quality about speed of delivery and lack of bugs.

If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.

Ive yet to meet many AI champions who are explicit about their desire to make that trade off though. Even the ones who downplay software quality arent super happy about the bugs.

> It's biological.

Nonsense. We never evolved to send text messages and yet here we are with social networks, chat systems and emails used everywhere for everything.

Maybe kids will end up preferring to talk to bots, much like the generations after my own actually preferred digital compression artifacts in their music.