6 ms·

Will the AI backlash spill into the streets?

34 points by paulpauper 1y ago

techpineapple 1y ago
I don’t quite understand the full extent of the AI will create jobs argument. In prior revolutions, say automation, automation created jobs because like building and maintaining robots is a whole thing. Building and maintaining AI is a whole thing, but if you’re talking about wholesale automation of intelligence, the fundamental question I have is: What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? In the automation revolution, the bots were largely single purpose, the bots couldn’t be created by bots. There could and probably will be trillions of jobs created by AI, but they will be done by trillions of agents. How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it.
- mjr00 1y ago
  > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? Part of the problem is the definition of "AI" is extremely nebulous. In your case, you seem to be talking about an AGI which can self-improve, while also having some physical interface letting it interact with the real world. This reality may be 6 months away, 6 years away, or 600 years away. Given the current state of LLMs it's much more likely they will create jobs, or change workflows in existing jobs, rather than wholesale replace humans. The recent public spectacle of Microsoft's state-of-the-art Github Copilot Agent[0] shows we're quite far away from AI agents wholesale replacing even very junior positions for knowledge work. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    in a sense I think this is my question, is anyone writing any of these think pieces providing specific definitions?
  - FeepingCreature 1y ago
    Yeah but LLMs won't stay at the current state though. I don't understand this argument. Is there any particular reason to believe that they'll stop getting better at this point?
    - techpineapple 1y ago
      Yes, I do think there is, that LLMs are a paradigm with a certain limited functionality and not a path to AGI. I actually find this assumption of constant and never ending improvement of LLMs interesting, almost all technology has diminishing returns in terms of improvements, why would LLMs be the exception? Why not believe that all future iterations of the LLMs will be gradual improvements of current behavior rather than LLMs necessarily can become super-intelligent AGI?
      - vages 1y ago
        Most of the adults alive today have lived sometime when CPU speeds doubled every 12–24 months (see Moores law). This has conditioned many to believe that all information technologies improve exponentially, while, in reality, most are not.
      - FeepingCreature 1y ago
        It kind of reminds me of the solar power chart that one institute made where every year they predict that growth will definitely flatten from here on out and every year it fails to do so. I don't have any reason to expect LLMs to be flattening or for the technology to be capped out. In fact, I have a lot of reasons to believe the opposite such as the plethora of papers and proposed techniques that haven't even been attempted at scale. (QuietSTaR my beloved, you will have your day.) It just doesn't look like a mature technology, rather the opposite. So my baseline assumption, on that evidential basis, is that number keeps going up, and if this prediction results in a strange-looking future then that says more about my taste than about the prediction.
        techpineapple 1y ago
        The question though is the rate of growth. To get the kind of “end of scarcity AGI” advertised by Sam Altman probably requires continuous over year exponential growth. Will that happen in the normal course of LLM research? Or will it be more gradual, and the exponential growth will come from future paradigm shifts. I’m arguing the second.
- TheCoreh 1y ago
  The jobs created by the need to build and maintain robots (and industrial machinery in general) are very few compared to the amount of jobs the machines replaced. The new jobs that the industrial and other technological revolutions created were mostly in other economical sectors, like services and commerce.
- skywhopper 1y ago
  You’re just making things up here. LLMs or other forms of “AI” can’t do most jobs, so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform. To the extent it can automate tasks under the direction of humans, it’s not even clear it makes those humans more productive, but it is clear that it harms those humans’ own skillsets (beyond prompt engineering).
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    Technically the article is making things up, and I’m responding to those assertions.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    They can't do most jobs, but they can still reduce the amount of jobs. For example, even outsourcing giants like Infosys shrank hiring by 20% AND increased personnel utilization from 70% to 85% just by mandating employees to start using code-gen tools, and as a result were able to significantly enhance margins.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    >so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform Why? If you're waiting around for AI to do these things by the time it happens it will be getting hit like a truck. The speed of technological implementation these days is very fast, especially when compared to the speed of regulation. Moreso we are not just seeing improvement in things like LLMs, there is broad improvements in robotics and generalized behavior in AI.
- visarga 1y ago
  > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? AI lack skin-in-the-game, they cannot bear responsibility for outcomes. They also don't experience desires or needs, so they depend on humans for that too. To make an AI useful you need to apply it to a problem, in other words it is in a specific problem context that AI shows utility. Like Linux, you need to use it for something to get benefits. Providing this problem space for AI is our part. So you cannot separate AI usefulness from people, problems are distributed across society, non-fungible. I am not very worried about jobs, we tend to prefer growth to efficiency. In a world of AI, humans will remain the differentiating factor between companies.
- rongenre 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox If AI is roughly where IT is in the 60's, we might see actually decreased productivity for a while until people (yes people) figure out how to use it effectively.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    The question is how long? The exchange rate of information is very fast these days and there are typically less broad secrets on tool usage and management these days.
- karmakaze 1y ago
  Jevons Paradox likely applies here. There could be an initial reduction in jobs, but longer term humans using AI will reduce the cost (increase the efficiency) of those jobs which will increase demand more than merely satisfy it. Basically any job that uses a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, etc will all become more efficient and if Jevons Paradox applies, demand for those things will increase beyond the reduction due to efficiency gains. I can imagine that for many fields it will be cheaper to have humans use AI (in the near term) rather than try to make fully automated systems that require no/little supervision.
  - pants2 1y ago
    Agreed - let's say your employees cost $100/yr and your revenue is $150/yr, with a $50/yr profit. Now your employees suddenly become 2X more productive because of AI. Do you... A) Fire half your staff, now earning $100 profit? ($50/yr to employees, $150/yr revenue) B) Attempt to double your business, now earning $200 profit? ($100 emp, $300 rev) C) Double your headcount and earn $400 profit? If companies are profit-seeking, B and C should be more common than A!
    - lightbritefight 1y ago
      Firing people is the number 1 way companies improve short term profits. Since our stock market is based on quarterly results, firing people is absolutely what the business will do. You can watch all the AI layoffs and "not hiring because of AI" in real time, right now.
- creer 1y ago
  > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? Good question. And one where "in the immediate..." is not relevant. In the long term then, what? One direction: Humans are not good for semiconductor fabs. Humans bring contamination of all kinds into a space that shouldn't have any. Humans can't help themselves and tweak things they are not qualified to. Humans can't help themselves and don't report changing conditions that they should. etc, etc. So that current fabs contain mountains of automation. And yet they also have lots of humans. Full automation is really difficult. It's more that automation creates the economic conditions that make it manageable to employ the remaining humans. > How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it. Is this very relevant? For example the entertainment industry - I expect - relies on just a handful of data centers for digital distribution. But creating the movies and TV shows employees insane numbers of people. The question is more "What does NextGenChatOpen enables, that it cannot exploit itself"?
- creer 1y ago
  > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? If we are looking long term, PART of the answer may be that asking about jobs is an insufficient question. Pending other unresolved questions, GDP is already not a good measure of standard of living anymore. Other measures such as happiness index are in their infancy but some people are thinking about alternatives. So perhaps these non-AI jobs are non-jobs: humans living their lives instead of filling jobs. Which means whatever humans like to do: playing games (sometimes competitively), performing, hiking, collecting stamps, painting murals...
alephnerd 1y ago
No. Most of the recent (5 years) labor shocks from automation have been in white collar industries. White collar professions are those most likely to be impacted by AI/ML driven automation gains [0] Industrial automation has already taken over skilled manufacturing jobs and HN's demographic of white collar professionals didn't complain then. Those who were impacted during that era of automation and outsourcing will not come out to the streets in solidarity with white collar employees getting impacted by Copilot or domain-specific models. Frankly, they mostly vote for Trump and HNers mostly voted for Harris. Imo, a major undercurrent of the current culture war across the west is that it is morphing into a class war due to economic segregation leading to echo chambers in consumption [1] along with vocations [2]. As a result, White collar professionals live in an entirely different ecosystem from blue collar professionals. No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs. We've already seen this realignment with skilled trades dominated unions like the UAW backing the current admin, but white collar leaning unions like AFL-CIO opposing them. This article itself falls into the same trap of failing to recognize that HNers jobs are most exposed to AI and automation [3]. Low skill jobs have already been automated and commodified significantly over the last 25 years. [0] - https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.3286 https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.328... [1] - https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/how-did-corporations-get-stuck-politics-and-can-they-escape https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/how-did... [2] - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/19/red-doc-blue-doc-rich-doc-rich-doc/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/19/red-doc-bl... [3] = https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u-s-workers-are-more-exposed-to-ai-on-their-jobs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...
- pessimizer 1y ago
  Agreed. AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future. They finally see automation as dangerous because no one will need their opinion or their recall any more. The working class were already automated to death (and the opinion-havers cheered it on), because their working class opinions hasn't been taken into consideration since Taylor and Ford figured out that we can eliminate individual knowledge in physical work and push that knowledge upwards into the institution itself. They can just lay you off and train some new ones, and the new hires will have a worse contract than you had. The reason working people's jobs haven't been automated away is because people are cheaper and more conscientious than robots. Even worse, the robots are owned by famous rent-seekers who see you as prey, so defending yourself against the robots as a customer adds to the overhead of choosing them. How do you know it's not going to cost you 10x as much to fix/update them as it cost you last year? You don't, because you were locked into a scammer who unilaterally decided to raise rates on you or the entire industry, or simply got in over their head and shut down, leaving you without a vendor. Minimum wage employees don't do that. Now asking some dipshit McKinsey consultant or some social media expert for 10 ideas to increase sales? LLMs can give you 100, summarize them, and rank them with references. They are only getting better at this. We criticize them because they only give us a list of obvious answers, but the reason we hire recent graduates is for them to give us the list of obvious answers they learned while being educated in their specialty. "Creativity" gets assigned to whoever has the social capital to be seen as a legitimate and worthy "creative," or, more accurately, the person with the money either chooses somebody to run the show who they suspect has a magic secret formula or aura, or they take on that identity themselves. That white collar middle-class magic is gone. People who could do difficult arithmetic quickly used to make a lot of money, too. > No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs. Only people who get protection would be the ones that are unified enough to have the institutions to launder cash to give to politicians. Doctors, realtors, etc.
skywhopper 1y ago
Lots of silly things in this article, but in re the poll data they lean on so heavily, the “AI experts” are “people who work in the AI industry”. So, in other words, people who are highly biased by the money inflow that’s chasing human job destruction.
sitzkrieg 1y ago
curious how the ai experts are so wrong on truck drivers. apparent to anyone whos been on the road the US road system will be completely revamped before self driving cargo trucks are viable
- mjr00 1y ago
  Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away. April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0] Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1] Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2] Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-self-driving-cars/8451889/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-self-driving-cars-2015-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will-travel-l-nyc-2017-says-musk-n670206 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
  - romaaeterna 1y ago
    The general consensus may be whatever it is, but a Tesla can drive from L.A. to NYC today with no interventions other than at charging stops.
    - staunton 1y ago
      However, it might kill you and other people at any moment, so be ready for that intervention...
      - romaaeterna 1y ago
        And the same is true for a human driver. I imagine that you could differentiate on accidents per vehicle mile.
        1y ago
immibis 1y ago
No. Feudalism is the normal state of human society, and everyone is okay with that.
ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap. Society as a whole will produce more products and services and have to work less for this. In other words, products and services will become much cheaper. In the future, living on social welfare might offer a lifestyle more luxurious than working full-time is now. So if most peoples life goes from "I have to work hard to pay my bills" to "I don't have to work as hard and can afford more", that will not drive people to go fight on the streets.
- kgwgk 1y ago
  Living on social welfare now offers a lifestyle as luxurious as working full-time in the past.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    Only in a handful of countries.
- staunton 1y ago
  If most people don't work (or most people's work contributes only a small fraction of the economy), where do they derive their political capital that gives them any social welfare at all? Why would the powerful AI overlords owned by large conglomerates give them anything or care what they think?
  - aianus 1y ago
    People who don't work today have more political capital than workers because they have the free time to vote and attend primaries and protests and town hall meetings and things like that.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  > It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap. Frontier models are being provided at a loss right now to my "knowledge", and they're already as crap as you'd want to go, if not even crappier, for worker replacement in my experience.
Macha 1y ago
I'm surprised cashiers are listed as the job most likely to be replaced in the graphics in the article. Unattended self-checkouts have been possible for like 15 years now, and it feels like 5 years ago was peak self-checkout, with some stores drawing back from entirely self-checkout experiences and expansion slowing in others. My understanding is that the obstacles to stores replacing the remaining cashiers with self-checkouts is not so much "we need a better machine" but (a) the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing, (b) customers are slower at packing than cashiers, which can cause queues and other inefficiencies.
- echelon 1y ago
  Self-checkout won. Every time I go to Target there are two lanes manned by staff. Everything else is self-checkout. This is every Target I go to in my state. Every time I go to Home Depot, there is one person manning the checkout. Everything else is self-checkout. Even fast food places have self-checkout stalls that seem to be growing in popularity. In the last few years, McDonalds has been rapidly deploying the tech. Boba places. Self-checkout has been promoted to first-class and is the only way to order at several of them. It's everywhere. When I was growing up, Kroger used to have every single checkout aisle staffed. Now they have one or two. I'm honestly shocked that the perception is that self-checkout hasn't won. It's everywhere and dominates the checkout modalities. > the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing This is all cost modeled. They have lots of cameras and security staff by the door. Even if the tech doesn't work, the mere threat of getting caught is enough to stop most losses. The business accepts that they won't catch everything. They're still saving money by using automated checkout.
  - aetherson 1y ago
    It's uneven, I do see places that seem to have kept self-checkout minimal or nonexistent, but I think that you're right that overall it's winning.
  - abenga 1y ago
    Isn't the perceived worsening of service (maybe more the various boycotts) one of the reasons Target is hemorrhaging foot traffic?
currymj 1y ago
software is really weird as a test case for understanding AI automation on white collar work. it seems exceptionally well-suited to AI-based automation because software engineering has already needed to figure out how to efficiently cope with humans who sometimes produce code which may have defects. most obviously automated testing and type systems. also a lot of programming tasks have verifiable solutions so it's also better for training. it seems natural that the most obviously successful AI tools are for coding. yet the software industry has also been absorbing waves of automation for 70 years. Fortran and COBOL were referred to as "automated programming" and there was a narrative that these new tools would make it easy for non-specialists to program. this time may be different, or it may just be another wave of automation. i think software has pretty unique properties among white collar jobs, and I would hesitate to draw conclusions about other industries based on AI progress in software engineering.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  The issue is people are assuming 100% automation and job replacement by AI/ML overnight - that is NOT happening in the near future. Realistically, we are going to see 20-30% reductions in headcount in the near-to-medium term. THIS IS STILL CATASTROPHIC. A number of earlier stage companies I've funded have already been heavily utilizing automation to simplify code generation or scaffolding/project ops work. They use the cost savings to hire experienced SWEs at high base salaries and are able to hit the same development metrics as they would have if they had a large team of average paid SWEs. On the BDR side, they are using a massive amount of video/audio automation to scale out cold calling or first impressions, so reducing the need to hire teams of BDRs hitting the phones all the time. And finally, they are automating tier 1/2 support ticket responses and communication so reducing the need for teams of support engineers spending time basically respondng to customers with the polite equivalnet of "read the docs". Basically, a Series A startup that would have had a staff of 50 employees 10 years ago can essentially output the exact same as a Series A startup with a headcount of 20 employees today, and with a tangible path to FCF positivity. This is a net reduction in jobs, and a significant one at that, because most people just cannot upskill - it's hard.
  - keybored 1y ago
keybored 1y ago
Tech CEO writes about hypothetical worker strikes and protests caused by AI. Accompanied with AI stock photo with moronic placcards. I’m learning that every topic that people read should be about AI. Also the hypothetical ones. One I barely read one month ago was some pseudo-psychological self-care piece about how to soothe ourselves as we have to deal with the inevitability of AI changing our very self-identity. They do insist too much not to raise concerns about their intentions. Oh, and very regular commenters on the Web are also very weirdly insisting that if some specific percentage of “your code” or higher is not AI then some bad stuff is about to happen to you. Also whispers about management demanding... yes their very own percentages for how much AI code output. Could tech CEOs be motivated to write about every hypothetical thing that is not a thing yet (but will be immediately surely, probably tomorrow)? Of course it’s not my place to be cynical. Everyone who writes about AI has good intentions until proven otherwise. Now, any CEO is comfortable with writing about protests against job loss in an American context. Because they just are flashes in time. > Bias is a little different. America did flood the streets after George Floyd in a more sustained manner, for many months, but major reforms stalled out once marches faded and partisan lines re-hardened. Do you remember when Occupy Wallstreet changed America and put the 99% in charge? Me neither.[1] America has these heroic uprisings spread across years. Then what happens? The out of touch people in power listen a bit more attentively? [1] In hindsight (three minutes later) that’s unfair and hyperbolic. What could have more realistically happened was that some organizing came out of it that would have survived to this day. Organizations that might have changed names and members and “leadership” (as everyone calls it now) but that anyone with a slight interest in the matter could point to and say, oh yeah that’s a product of Occupy Wallstreet, right there. > How do we help the displaced? Of course the chosen focus is on helping the displaced. Do they deserve handouts and from whom? But this misses the mark, right? If AI hypers like himself are correct then “helping” becomes at best outdated, outmoded. I’m sure the powers would be would love the dichotomy of helpless displaced people getting either help from the government or the “AI winners” (he uses scare quotes for reasons).[2] But if AI job displacement becomes massive this is a dead end. Displace enough people without making new jobs and jobs themselves become outmoded. Remember that people don’t strike or protest “for jobs” because they intrinsically want a wage job... they want to live and survive and this is the means they have to do that. So what if jobs are gone, then what? Then the means of AI should be socialized. If AI displaces jobs we don’t need jobs any more. Because we can just use AI. If we own the AI... not if dozens of billionaires own them. Some CEOs might disagree on this point. [2] The right-wing libertarians are the ones who love Universal Basic Income. > Two historical moments that resemble this pattern: When automated textile frames wiped out skilled jobs in the U.K. in the early 1800s, the Luddite riots turned violent enough (including killing a factory owner) that Parliament dispatched roughly 12,000 troops to restore order, which concluded with over a dozen executions. Noteworthy that he chose a violent crackdown example (sorry, restoring order) with no mention of any fruits that were won. I have no doubt that he will report any violent occurrences of restoring order as dispassionately as he does here on this hypothetical piece. > Do protests even matter? > I need to dig in more, but the short answer seems to indicate yes, in a few ways. They seem make the people who attend them more politically motivated, at least for that issue. As a result, if enough people go to them, then they can swing elections. Political scientists are funny. The kind of people who make ostensibly democratic participation into rat maze experiments. The link just seems to be about whether or not protests can affect elections. Like they specifically and narrowly studied that. That’s a bit boring? I don’t think the Vietnam War protests just helped impact elections. Are you kidding me? The anti-war movement up until Reagan forced that administration to make their Central America interference clandestine. Well, it was bad enough that they did it. But popular resistance was strong enough that they forced them to at least do some things differently. Imagine a repressed or apathetic society where the government just supports anti-democratic paramilitary groups in foreign countries out in the open. That’s worse in a sense. There’s some anecdote about Kissinger and Nixon in a car where Nixon says that he’s afraid that the crowd could kill them. That’s a bit more than swinging an election. I’m sure that Apartheid South Africa was crushed in part because of protests and boycots. Although it wasn’t on my news back then. ... But what do we get according to this article? Swinging an election. Wow. That sure will motivate Americans with their two-party system where either party serve slightly different sets of corporate sectors. Notice these people. These people who insist that you protesting and organizing and working to change things, well it might move the needle electorally. That’s what they want you to think. That that’s all the political power you have. You can change the ballots that are presented to you. And you can persuade fellow voters. That’s it. Now go home. We are gonna have to change more than that if the AI hypers are correct.
purplezooey 1y ago
As others mentioned, self-checkout has been widespread for 30 years. They had it at most stores in the 1990s. The answer is, simply, it's cheaper for companies to hire someone at a non-living wage than it is to install and maintain these systems. Perhaps if we had some policies with teeth -- if you're going to hire a person, they must be able to afford to plausibly live and work in the area. Else, your business isn't actually a functioning business and needs reconsideration.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Self checkout is now much better than it was 30 years ago. As far as the living wage requirement, that just leads to what we’re seeing here. You get replaced by machines. If sub living wage is the best available job why should the government ban that? How is closing the business better than hiring people at shitty wages they are happy to accept?
  - const_cast 1y ago
    > How is closing the business better than hiring people at shitty wages they are happy to accept? Because it brings down the market value of said person, basically ensuring they can't make a livable wage. These companies are cheating, in a way. They're paying well below market value for the labor because of asymmetrical power. Those people are working two or three jobs to make ends meet - so, their employers aren't paying what the labor actually costs. They just get the labor at a discount because employees have zero negotiating power. It's sort of like getting a vacuum for 15 dollars because when the vacuum salesman rang my door, I held him a gunpoint.
    - HDThoreaun 1y ago
      Reducing the number of jobs available reduces wages. It does not increase them. All the people you just got fired will now take the other jobs for lower pay. Employees have tons of negotiating power on this country. Unemployment rates are consistently close to structural minimum. There certainly are times when employers have monopsony power but there haven’t been any recently.
tim333 1y ago
I'm skeptical there is much AI backlash to spill out. Obviously some people don't like it, some do. Overall it's probably a positive thing or we wouldn't be investing so much in it. Unemployment levels are fairly low by historical standards (eg https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS). For each taxi driver laid off due to Waymo there are probably more people hired to make and operate the Waymos. The Luddites were kind of unusual in the history of things. We've had all sorts of tech innovation over the last two centuries and not much has lead to riots. The luddite riots happened at time of high unemployment and inflation after the Napoleonic wars and may have been more a last straw rather than the root cause of the dissatisfaction.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  The thing people forget is that the luddites were right. They were selfish assholes, but they were right. Automation cost them their jobs and made their lives worse. Of course their kids were all better off but the luddites themselves got fucked.
dissent 1y ago
Are people, developers included, who feel threatened with the loss of their income to AI, any different to the Luddites? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Genuine question. I'm trying to find a difference, but not succeeding.

34 points by paulpauper 1y ago

I don’t quite understand the full extent of the AI will create jobs argument. In prior revolutions, say automation, automation created jobs because like building and maintaining robots is a whole thing. Building and maintaining AI is a whole thing, but if you’re talking about wholesale automation of intelligence, the fundamental question I have is: What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? In the automation revolution, the bots were largely single purpose, the bots couldn’t be created by bots. There could and probably will be trillions of jobs created by AI, but they will be done by trillions of agents. How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it.

mjr00 1y ago
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? Part of the problem is the definition of "AI" is extremely nebulous. In your case, you seem to be talking about an AGI which can self-improve, while also having some physical interface letting it interact with the real world. This reality may be 6 months away, 6 years away, or 600 years away. Given the current state of LLMs it's much more likely they will create jobs, or change workflows in existing jobs, rather than wholesale replace humans. The recent public spectacle of Microsoft's state-of-the-art Github Copilot Agent[0] shows we're quite far away from AI agents wholesale replacing even very junior positions for knowledge work. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
- techpineapple 1y ago
  in a sense I think this is my question, is anyone writing any of these think pieces providing specific definitions?
- FeepingCreature 1y ago
  Yeah but LLMs won't stay at the current state though. I don't understand this argument. Is there any particular reason to believe that they'll stop getting better at this point?
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    Yes, I do think there is, that LLMs are a paradigm with a certain limited functionality and not a path to AGI. I actually find this assumption of constant and never ending improvement of LLMs interesting, almost all technology has diminishing returns in terms of improvements, why would LLMs be the exception? Why not believe that all future iterations of the LLMs will be gradual improvements of current behavior rather than LLMs necessarily can become super-intelligent AGI?
    - vages 1y ago
      Most of the adults alive today have lived sometime when CPU speeds doubled every 12–24 months (see Moores law). This has conditioned many to believe that all information technologies improve exponentially, while, in reality, most are not.
    - FeepingCreature 1y ago
      It kind of reminds me of the solar power chart that one institute made where every year they predict that growth will definitely flatten from here on out and every year it fails to do so. I don't have any reason to expect LLMs to be flattening or for the technology to be capped out. In fact, I have a lot of reasons to believe the opposite such as the plethora of papers and proposed techniques that haven't even been attempted at scale. (QuietSTaR my beloved, you will have your day.) It just doesn't look like a mature technology, rather the opposite. So my baseline assumption, on that evidential basis, is that number keeps going up, and if this prediction results in a strange-looking future then that says more about my taste than about the prediction.
      - techpineapple 1y ago
        The question though is the rate of growth. To get the kind of “end of scarcity AGI” advertised by Sam Altman probably requires continuous over year exponential growth. Will that happen in the normal course of LLM research? Or will it be more gradual, and the exponential growth will come from future paradigm shifts. I’m arguing the second.
TheCoreh 1y ago
The jobs created by the need to build and maintain robots (and industrial machinery in general) are very few compared to the amount of jobs the machines replaced. The new jobs that the industrial and other technological revolutions created were mostly in other economical sectors, like services and commerce.
skywhopper 1y ago
You’re just making things up here. LLMs or other forms of “AI” can’t do most jobs, so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform. To the extent it can automate tasks under the direction of humans, it’s not even clear it makes those humans more productive, but it is clear that it harms those humans’ own skillsets (beyond prompt engineering).
- techpineapple 1y ago
  Technically the article is making things up, and I’m responding to those assertions.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  They can't do most jobs, but they can still reduce the amount of jobs. For example, even outsourcing giants like Infosys shrank hiring by 20% AND increased personnel utilization from 70% to 85% just by mandating employees to start using code-gen tools, and as a result were able to significantly enhance margins.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform Why? If you're waiting around for AI to do these things by the time it happens it will be getting hit like a truck. The speed of technological implementation these days is very fast, especially when compared to the speed of regulation. Moreso we are not just seeing improvement in things like LLMs, there is broad improvements in robotics and generalized behavior in AI.
visarga 1y ago
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? AI lack skin-in-the-game, they cannot bear responsibility for outcomes. They also don't experience desires or needs, so they depend on humans for that too. To make an AI useful you need to apply it to a problem, in other words it is in a specific problem context that AI shows utility. Like Linux, you need to use it for something to get benefits. Providing this problem space for AI is our part. So you cannot separate AI usefulness from people, problems are distributed across society, non-fungible. I am not very worried about jobs, we tend to prefer growth to efficiency. In a world of AI, humans will remain the differentiating factor between companies.
rongenre 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox If AI is roughly where IT is in the 60's, we might see actually decreased productivity for a while until people (yes people) figure out how to use it effectively.
- pixl97 1y ago
  The question is how long? The exchange rate of information is very fast these days and there are typically less broad secrets on tool usage and management these days.
karmakaze 1y ago
Jevons Paradox likely applies here. There could be an initial reduction in jobs, but longer term humans using AI will reduce the cost (increase the efficiency) of those jobs which will increase demand more than merely satisfy it. Basically any job that uses a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, etc will all become more efficient and if Jevons Paradox applies, demand for those things will increase beyond the reduction due to efficiency gains. I can imagine that for many fields it will be cheaper to have humans use AI (in the near term) rather than try to make fully automated systems that require no/little supervision.
- pants2 1y ago
  Agreed - let's say your employees cost $100/yr and your revenue is $150/yr, with a $50/yr profit. Now your employees suddenly become 2X more productive because of AI. Do you... A) Fire half your staff, now earning $100 profit? ($50/yr to employees, $150/yr revenue) B) Attempt to double your business, now earning $200 profit? ($100 emp, $300 rev) C) Double your headcount and earn $400 profit? If companies are profit-seeking, B and C should be more common than A!
  - lightbritefight 1y ago
    Firing people is the number 1 way companies improve short term profits. Since our stock market is based on quarterly results, firing people is absolutely what the business will do. You can watch all the AI layoffs and "not hiring because of AI" in real time, right now.
creer 1y ago
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? Good question. And one where "in the immediate..." is not relevant. In the long term then, what? One direction: Humans are not good for semiconductor fabs. Humans bring contamination of all kinds into a space that shouldn't have any. Humans can't help themselves and tweak things they are not qualified to. Humans can't help themselves and don't report changing conditions that they should. etc, etc. So that current fabs contain mountains of automation. And yet they also have lots of humans. Full automation is really difficult. It's more that automation creates the economic conditions that make it manageable to employ the remaining humans. > How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it. Is this very relevant? For example the entertainment industry - I expect - relies on just a handful of data centers for digital distribution. But creating the movies and TV shows employees insane numbers of people. The question is more "What does NextGenChatOpen enables, that it cannot exploit itself"?
creer 1y ago
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do? If we are looking long term, PART of the answer may be that asking about jobs is an insufficient question. Pending other unresolved questions, GDP is already not a good measure of standard of living anymore. Other measures such as happiness index are in their infancy but some people are thinking about alternatives. So perhaps these non-AI jobs are non-jobs: humans living their lives instead of filling jobs. Which means whatever humans like to do: playing games (sometimes competitively), performing, hiking, collecting stamps, painting murals...

alephnerd 1y ago

No. Most of the recent (5 years) labor shocks from automation have been in white collar industries. White collar professions are those most likely to be impacted by AI/ML driven automation gains [0] Industrial automation has already taken over skilled manufacturing jobs and HN's demographic of white collar professionals didn't complain then. Those who were impacted during that era of automation and outsourcing will not come out to the streets in solidarity with white collar employees getting impacted by Copilot or domain-specific models. Frankly, they mostly vote for Trump and HNers mostly voted for Harris. Imo, a major undercurrent of the current culture war across the west is that it is morphing into a class war due to economic segregation leading to echo chambers in consumption [1] along with vocations [2]. As a result, White collar professionals live in an entirely different ecosystem from blue collar professionals. No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs. We've already seen this realignment with skilled trades dominated unions like the UAW backing the current admin, but white collar leaning unions like AFL-CIO opposing them. This article itself falls into the same trap of failing to recognize that HNers jobs are most exposed to AI and automation [3]. Low skill jobs have already been automated and commodified significantly over the last 25 years. [0] - https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.3286 https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.328... [1] - https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/how-did-corporations-get-stuck-politics-and-can-they-escape https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/how-did... [2] - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/19/red-doc-blue-doc-rich-doc-rich-doc/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/19/red-doc-bl... [3] = https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u-s-workers-are-more-exposed-to-ai-on-their-jobs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...

pessimizer 1y ago
Agreed. AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future. They finally see automation as dangerous because no one will need their opinion or their recall any more. The working class were already automated to death (and the opinion-havers cheered it on), because their working class opinions hasn't been taken into consideration since Taylor and Ford figured out that we can eliminate individual knowledge in physical work and push that knowledge upwards into the institution itself. They can just lay you off and train some new ones, and the new hires will have a worse contract than you had. The reason working people's jobs haven't been automated away is because people are cheaper and more conscientious than robots. Even worse, the robots are owned by famous rent-seekers who see you as prey, so defending yourself against the robots as a customer adds to the overhead of choosing them. How do you know it's not going to cost you 10x as much to fix/update them as it cost you last year? You don't, because you were locked into a scammer who unilaterally decided to raise rates on you or the entire industry, or simply got in over their head and shut down, leaving you without a vendor. Minimum wage employees don't do that. Now asking some dipshit McKinsey consultant or some social media expert for 10 ideas to increase sales? LLMs can give you 100, summarize them, and rank them with references. They are only getting better at this. We criticize them because they only give us a list of obvious answers, but the reason we hire recent graduates is for them to give us the list of obvious answers they learned while being educated in their specialty. "Creativity" gets assigned to whoever has the social capital to be seen as a legitimate and worthy "creative," or, more accurately, the person with the money either chooses somebody to run the show who they suspect has a magic secret formula or aura, or they take on that identity themselves. That white collar middle-class magic is gone. People who could do difficult arithmetic quickly used to make a lot of money, too. > No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs. Only people who get protection would be the ones that are unified enough to have the institutions to launder cash to give to politicians. Doctors, realtors, etc.

skywhopper 1y ago

Lots of silly things in this article, but in re the poll data they lean on so heavily, the “AI experts” are “people who work in the AI industry”. So, in other words, people who are highly biased by the money inflow that’s chasing human job destruction.

sitzkrieg 1y ago

curious how the ai experts are so wrong on truck drivers. apparent to anyone whos been on the road the US road system will be completely revamped before self driving cargo trucks are viable

mjr00 1y ago
Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away. April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0] Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1] Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2] Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-self-driving-cars/8451889/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-self-driving-cars-2015-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will-travel-l-nyc-2017-says-musk-n670206 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
- romaaeterna 1y ago
  The general consensus may be whatever it is, but a Tesla can drive from L.A. to NYC today with no interventions other than at charging stops.
  - staunton 1y ago
    However, it might kill you and other people at any moment, so be ready for that intervention...
    - romaaeterna 1y ago
      And the same is true for a human driver. I imagine that you could differentiate on accidents per vehicle mile.
      - 1y ago

immibis 1y ago

No. Feudalism is the normal state of human society, and everyone is okay with that.

ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago

It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap. Society as a whole will produce more products and services and have to work less for this. In other words, products and services will become much cheaper. In the future, living on social welfare might offer a lifestyle more luxurious than working full-time is now. So if most peoples life goes from "I have to work hard to pay my bills" to "I don't have to work as hard and can afford more", that will not drive people to go fight on the streets.

kgwgk 1y ago
Living on social welfare now offers a lifestyle as luxurious as working full-time in the past.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  Only in a handful of countries.
staunton 1y ago
If most people don't work (or most people's work contributes only a small fraction of the economy), where do they derive their political capital that gives them any social welfare at all? Why would the powerful AI overlords owned by large conglomerates give them anything or care what they think?
- aianus 1y ago
  People who don't work today have more political capital than workers because they have the free time to vote and attend primaries and protests and town hall meetings and things like that.
perching_aix 1y ago
> It's important to note that compared to human labor, AI is extremely cheap. Frontier models are being provided at a loss right now to my "knowledge", and they're already as crap as you'd want to go, if not even crappier, for worker replacement in my experience.

Macha 1y ago

I'm surprised cashiers are listed as the job most likely to be replaced in the graphics in the article. Unattended self-checkouts have been possible for like 15 years now, and it feels like 5 years ago was peak self-checkout, with some stores drawing back from entirely self-checkout experiences and expansion slowing in others. My understanding is that the obstacles to stores replacing the remaining cashiers with self-checkouts is not so much "we need a better machine" but (a) the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing, (b) customers are slower at packing than cashiers, which can cause queues and other inefficiencies.

echelon 1y ago
Self-checkout won. Every time I go to Target there are two lanes manned by staff. Everything else is self-checkout. This is every Target I go to in my state. Every time I go to Home Depot, there is one person manning the checkout. Everything else is self-checkout. Even fast food places have self-checkout stalls that seem to be growing in popularity. In the last few years, McDonalds has been rapidly deploying the tech. Boba places. Self-checkout has been promoted to first-class and is the only way to order at several of them. It's everywhere. When I was growing up, Kroger used to have every single checkout aisle staffed. Now they have one or two. I'm honestly shocked that the perception is that self-checkout hasn't won. It's everywhere and dominates the checkout modalities. > the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing This is all cost modeled. They have lots of cameras and security staff by the door. Even if the tech doesn't work, the mere threat of getting caught is enough to stop most losses. The business accepts that they won't catch everything. They're still saving money by using automated checkout.
- aetherson 1y ago
  It's uneven, I do see places that seem to have kept self-checkout minimal or nonexistent, but I think that you're right that overall it's winning.
- abenga 1y ago
  Isn't the perceived worsening of service (maybe more the various boycotts) one of the reasons Target is hemorrhaging foot traffic?

currymj 1y ago

software is really weird as a test case for understanding AI automation on white collar work. it seems exceptionally well-suited to AI-based automation because software engineering has already needed to figure out how to efficiently cope with humans who sometimes produce code which may have defects. most obviously automated testing and type systems. also a lot of programming tasks have verifiable solutions so it's also better for training. it seems natural that the most obviously successful AI tools are for coding. yet the software industry has also been absorbing waves of automation for 70 years. Fortran and COBOL were referred to as "automated programming" and there was a narrative that these new tools would make it easy for non-specialists to program. this time may be different, or it may just be another wave of automation. i think software has pretty unique properties among white collar jobs, and I would hesitate to draw conclusions about other industries based on AI progress in software engineering.

alephnerd 1y ago
The issue is people are assuming 100% automation and job replacement by AI/ML overnight - that is NOT happening in the near future. Realistically, we are going to see 20-30% reductions in headcount in the near-to-medium term. THIS IS STILL CATASTROPHIC. A number of earlier stage companies I've funded have already been heavily utilizing automation to simplify code generation or scaffolding/project ops work. They use the cost savings to hire experienced SWEs at high base salaries and are able to hit the same development metrics as they would have if they had a large team of average paid SWEs. On the BDR side, they are using a massive amount of video/audio automation to scale out cold calling or first impressions, so reducing the need to hire teams of BDRs hitting the phones all the time. And finally, they are automating tier 1/2 support ticket responses and communication so reducing the need for teams of support engineers spending time basically respondng to customers with the polite equivalnet of "read the docs". Basically, a Series A startup that would have had a staff of 50 employees 10 years ago can essentially output the exact same as a Series A startup with a headcount of 20 employees today, and with a tangible path to FCF positivity. This is a net reduction in jobs, and a significant one at that, because most people just cannot upskill - it's hard.
- keybored 1y ago

keybored 1y ago

Tech CEO writes about hypothetical worker strikes and protests caused by AI. Accompanied with AI stock photo with moronic placcards. I’m learning that every topic that people read should be about AI. Also the hypothetical ones. One I barely read one month ago was some pseudo-psychological self-care piece about how to soothe ourselves as we have to deal with the inevitability of AI changing our very self-identity. They do insist too much not to raise concerns about their intentions. Oh, and very regular commenters on the Web are also very weirdly insisting that if some specific percentage of “your code” or higher is not AI then some bad stuff is about to happen to you. Also whispers about management demanding... yes their very own percentages for how much AI code output. Could tech CEOs be motivated to write about every hypothetical thing that is not a thing yet (but will be immediately surely, probably tomorrow)? Of course it’s not my place to be cynical. Everyone who writes about AI has good intentions until proven otherwise. Now, any CEO is comfortable with writing about protests against job loss in an American context. Because they just are flashes in time. > Bias is a little different. America did flood the streets after George Floyd in a more sustained manner, for many months, but major reforms stalled out once marches faded and partisan lines re-hardened. Do you remember when Occupy Wallstreet changed America and put the 99% in charge? Me neither.[1] America has these heroic uprisings spread across years. Then what happens? The out of touch people in power listen a bit more attentively? [1] In hindsight (three minutes later) that’s unfair and hyperbolic. What could have more realistically happened was that some organizing came out of it that would have survived to this day. Organizations that might have changed names and members and “leadership” (as everyone calls it now) but that anyone with a slight interest in the matter could point to and say, oh yeah that’s a product of Occupy Wallstreet, right there. > How do we help the displaced? Of course the chosen focus is on helping the displaced. Do they deserve handouts and from whom? But this misses the mark, right? If AI hypers like himself are correct then “helping” becomes at best outdated, outmoded. I’m sure the powers would be would love the dichotomy of helpless displaced people getting either help from the government or the “AI winners” (he uses scare quotes for reasons).[2] But if AI job displacement becomes massive this is a dead end. Displace enough people without making new jobs and jobs themselves become outmoded. Remember that people don’t strike or protest “for jobs” because they intrinsically want a wage job... they want to live and survive and this is the means they have to do that. So what if jobs are gone, then what? Then the means of AI should be socialized. If AI displaces jobs we don’t need jobs any more. Because we can just use AI. If we own the AI... not if dozens of billionaires own them. Some CEOs might disagree on this point. [2] The right-wing libertarians are the ones who love Universal Basic Income. > Two historical moments that resemble this pattern: When automated textile frames wiped out skilled jobs in the U.K. in the early 1800s, the Luddite riots turned violent enough (including killing a factory owner) that Parliament dispatched roughly 12,000 troops to restore order, which concluded with over a dozen executions. Noteworthy that he chose a violent crackdown example (sorry, restoring order) with no mention of any fruits that were won. I have no doubt that he will report any violent occurrences of restoring order as dispassionately as he does here on this hypothetical piece. > Do protests even matter? > I need to dig in more, but the short answer seems to indicate yes, in a few ways. They seem make the people who attend them more politically motivated, at least for that issue. As a result, if enough people go to them, then they can swing elections. Political scientists are funny. The kind of people who make ostensibly democratic participation into rat maze experiments. The link just seems to be about whether or not protests can affect elections. Like they specifically and narrowly studied that. That’s a bit boring? I don’t think the Vietnam War protests just helped impact elections. Are you kidding me? The anti-war movement up until Reagan forced that administration to make their Central America interference clandestine. Well, it was bad enough that they did it. But popular resistance was strong enough that they forced them to at least do some things differently. Imagine a repressed or apathetic society where the government just supports anti-democratic paramilitary groups in foreign countries out in the open. That’s worse in a sense. There’s some anecdote about Kissinger and Nixon in a car where Nixon says that he’s afraid that the crowd could kill them. That’s a bit more than swinging an election. I’m sure that Apartheid South Africa was crushed in part because of protests and boycots. Although it wasn’t on my news back then. ... But what do we get according to this article? Swinging an election. Wow. That sure will motivate Americans with their two-party system where either party serve slightly different sets of corporate sectors. Notice these people. These people who insist that you protesting and organizing and working to change things, well it might move the needle electorally. That’s what they want you to think. That that’s all the political power you have. You can change the ballots that are presented to you. And you can persuade fellow voters. That’s it. Now go home. We are gonna have to change more than that if the AI hypers are correct.

purplezooey 1y ago

As others mentioned, self-checkout has been widespread for 30 years. They had it at most stores in the 1990s. The answer is, simply, it's cheaper for companies to hire someone at a non-living wage than it is to install and maintain these systems. Perhaps if we had some policies with teeth -- if you're going to hire a person, they must be able to afford to plausibly live and work in the area. Else, your business isn't actually a functioning business and needs reconsideration.

HDThoreaun 1y ago
Self checkout is now much better than it was 30 years ago. As far as the living wage requirement, that just leads to what we’re seeing here. You get replaced by machines. If sub living wage is the best available job why should the government ban that? How is closing the business better than hiring people at shitty wages they are happy to accept?
- const_cast 1y ago
  > How is closing the business better than hiring people at shitty wages they are happy to accept? Because it brings down the market value of said person, basically ensuring they can't make a livable wage. These companies are cheating, in a way. They're paying well below market value for the labor because of asymmetrical power. Those people are working two or three jobs to make ends meet - so, their employers aren't paying what the labor actually costs. They just get the labor at a discount because employees have zero negotiating power. It's sort of like getting a vacuum for 15 dollars because when the vacuum salesman rang my door, I held him a gunpoint.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    Reducing the number of jobs available reduces wages. It does not increase them. All the people you just got fired will now take the other jobs for lower pay. Employees have tons of negotiating power on this country. Unemployment rates are consistently close to structural minimum. There certainly are times when employers have monopsony power but there haven’t been any recently.

tim333 1y ago

I'm skeptical there is much AI backlash to spill out. Obviously some people don't like it, some do. Overall it's probably a positive thing or we wouldn't be investing so much in it. Unemployment levels are fairly low by historical standards (eg https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS). For each taxi driver laid off due to Waymo there are probably more people hired to make and operate the Waymos. The Luddites were kind of unusual in the history of things. We've had all sorts of tech innovation over the last two centuries and not much has lead to riots. The luddite riots happened at time of high unemployment and inflation after the Napoleonic wars and may have been more a last straw rather than the root cause of the dissatisfaction.

HDThoreaun 1y ago
The thing people forget is that the luddites were right. They were selfish assholes, but they were right. Automation cost them their jobs and made their lives worse. Of course their kids were all better off but the luddites themselves got fucked.

dissent 1y ago

Are people, developers included, who feel threatened with the loss of their income to AI, any different to the Luddites? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Genuine question. I'm trying to find a difference, but not succeeding.