Luddites weren't anti technology, they were opposed to the improvements the technology brought about, being borne only by factory owners. https://locusmag.com/

Luddites weren't anti technology, they were opposed to the improvements the technology brought about, being borne only by factory owners. https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/ https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-i... > In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal. > What were they fighting about? The social relations governing the use of the new machines. These new machines could have allowed the existing workforce to produce far more cloth, in far fewer hours, at a much lower price, while still paying these workers well (the lower per-unit cost of finished cloth would be offset by the higher sales volume, and that volume could be produced in fewer hours). > Instead, the owners of the factories – whose fortunes had been built on the labor of textile workers – chose to employ fewer workers, working the same long hours as before, at a lower rate than before, and pocketed the substantial savings. I think this is an important conversation to be having around AI. Deeper in the thread someone argues that AI will make farming cheaper and then drive down food costs. But, food isn't expensive because it's expensive to produce. Food is cheap and easy to produce these days. Food is expensive because Monsanto copyrights seeds, because John Deere won't let you fix your own tractor, and because the usa government pays subsidies to keep production down to avoid the market being flooded and crop costs plummeting. The advancement in farming technologies didn't lead to the conclusion some of us find quite natural: one more thing we don't really have to pay for, like water or roads to walk on. Something so cheap to produce and distribute that our taxes can just take care of it, and we can always buy fancier versions of if we want. For me I think this will be the effect industry to industry that AI knocks on the door of. The technology itself isn't the important change, it's how those improvements trigger redistribution of wealth, if at all. I'm working on a blog post right now about how this might affect propaganda, when AI is turned to that purpose, and the risk therein of very effective propaganda written that convinces people that it's good that AI is being applied in a way that makes their lives objectively worse (as it drives down the value of their labor to almost nothing).