alt Hacker NewsThis is a normal reaction to ground breaking technology but these reactions never had any noteworthy effect in history. There used to be Maschinenstürmer during the 19th Century industrial revolution. There were also violent enemies of cars in the beginning of the 20th Century, some of them were even willing to kill drivers with lethal wire traps.
Replies
The comparison to cars is apt given how destructive this technology has been to cities, and how dangerous it is to drivers and non-drivers alike.
But otherwise you are wrong. There has been plenty of successful resistance to technology. For example a many cities, regions, and even entire countries are nuclear free zones, where a local population successfully resisted nuclear technology. Most countries have very strict cloning regulation, to the extent that human cloning is practically unheard of despite the technology existing. And even GMO food is very limited in most countries because people have successfully resisted the technology.
Neither do I think it is normal for people to resist ground breaking technology. The internet was not resisted, neither the digital computer, not calculators. There was some resistance against telephones in some countries, but that was usually around whether to prioritize infrastructure for a competing technology like wireless telegraph.
AI is different. People genuinely hate this technology, and they have a good reason to, and they may be successful in fighting it off.
I see a vast financial sector bubble, a flood of broken software at work, users who have incorrect expectations because they believed LLM summmaries, and a vast increase in bullshit everywhere in the public sphere; I am not seeing see the "groundbreaking technology" here. "Cheap bullshit at scale" isn't an advance, it's a disaster.
Sure, LLMs are "revolutionary". So were the Chicxulub impactor and the Toba supervolcano.