alt Hacker NewsDefinitely not the same. Luddites were fighting for humane working conditions; breaking machines was just a means to an end. They weren’t doing it because machines were the problem.
Anti AI crowd on the other hand just doesn’t like AI. A modern equivalent of a Luddite would be someone going on strike to protest firings.
You are being overly dismissive of a mindset you obviously don't understand. Of course being anti-AI is about decent living conditions for humans. Most of us don't believe in singularity or Matrix-style threats.
But current AI is actively destroying our breathable/livable planet by drawing unmatched quantities of resources (see also DRAM shortage, etc), all the while exploiting millions of non-union workers across the world (for classification/transcription/review), and all this for two goals:
1) try to replace human labor: problem is we know any extracted value (if at all) will benefit the bourgeoisie and will never be redistributed to the masses, because that's exactly what happened with the previous industrial revolutions (Asimov-style socialism is not exactly around the corner)
2) try to surveil everyone with cameras and microphones everywhere, and build armed (semi-)autonomous robots to guard our bourgeois masters and their data centers
There is nothing in this entire project that can be interpreted to benefit the workers. People opposing AI are just lucid about who that's benefiting, and in that sense the luddite comparison is very appropriate.