The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners.
The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour, and social safety nets for workers displaced by machines. The problem was that unions hadn't been invented yet and people working in these textile factories had little leverage. So they made leverage by destroying the machines in an attempt to intimidate the capital holders to the negotiating table.
It didn't work in the end.
History might not be repeating today with AI tools being foisted upon us everywhere but it sure does rhyme.
I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can do it, I'm just not going to take it very seriously.
I'm glad we use electric bulbs instead of paying the lamplighters union to light our streetlamps at night... even if those jobs are lost.[^1] If we can replace superfluous work with machines, we should. The issues of capital capturing all of those gains is obviously one we should fight against politically, but the idea that we have folks doing jobs that don't need to be done by humans pretends that humans can't do other things.
Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it. We can support redistribution of wealth and social safety nets while also trying to reduce the amount of labor needed to do mechanized tasks. To do that, however, we need an electorate that is actually interested in progress and change, rather than an electorate that wants nothing to change ever, because they are riddled with nostalgia about life before these darn kids came along with their technology.
not all technological advance is beneficial
generative AI reminds me of tetraethyllead
it made a couple of people fantastically rich, whilst silently causing immense damage to both the world and society
TEL is now universally banned
Since most of the world switched to farming around 5000 years ago (I think), that means that our average diet regressed for at least 3500 of those years.
So, if you think about it, assuming the much larger farming tribe next to you did not kill you and your entire tribe, agriculture was a bit of a mistake, at an individual level.
I agree with the other commenter, there's a chance the current incarnation of LLMs (and social media, etc) might be looked upon, in the future, as equivalent to the discovery of tobacco or leaded gasoline.
The capital holders spun the tale in retrospect that the movement was about the machines. "They just can't see progress! How daft do you have to be to not see the value of these wonderful machines! The productivity allows these people new leisure and the chance to do meaningful work... and they want to tear it down! How backward!"
It was about rights, liberties, and solidarity of workers. Some people did care about the quality of the textiles. But that's not enough to spark violent action in order to negotiate for better... textiles? No, it was for better working conditions, abolishment of child labour, etc.
Consider also that at the time, England was fighting Napolean on the European continent as well as the War of 1812 in North America. The textile industry was not good at allocating capital to survive the ups and downs: the factory owners only allocated enough to produce the next order. Layoffs were frequent, workers were over worked, and often paid little. Children were often employed because they were cheaper and had no bargaining power.
And where did the textile workers get displaced to? The myth from the capitalists is that they'd find new productive work elsewhere! It turns out... workhouses, the legally sanctioned indentured servitude that lasted up until the 1930s.
Had the Luddites won I doubt they would have destroyed all of the looming machines and forced us back into the days of hand-crafted textiles. The idea is preposterous. But maybe the workhouses wouldn't have developed, maybe there would have been more sensible labour laws earlier on. And we'd still have a more predictable and sensible textile industry.
Machines aren't the problem, people are.
There is a no-AI audience because vendors turn this crap on by default and I don't know where my data (which may not even belong to me but to a customer!) goes.
"AI" is the new Clippy. Except MS didn't charge extra for Clippy.
The term for "opt-in by default" is "opt-out".
By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.
TV schedules, the things shows had to do for those schedules, and advertisements feel like something I escaped from and I don’t see the appeal of going back at all. The only two benefits to me are: Knowing someone else is also watching the same thing (which could be done for streaming with a simple “viewers” count; and limited selection “forcing” me to watch something I wouldn’t otherwise watch. But that doesn’t really exist in this world anymore.
The things I wanted use it for was for Netflix for TV shows and movies, and Yelp for restaurants.
With the restaurant example, the curation can become as strict as dietary requirements (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, halal, etc) that are in some cases regulated by NGOs or government bodies or as flexible as having the same spice tolerance as a friend.
Asked differently, what does the TV channel-like model brings to the table?
but yes, i think you are correct, a curator's list maker would be a better version of this idea.
Right now I think there is an audience for no-AI because it's in a lot of places it doesn't belong. After the great rebalancing, maybe it won't be as big of a segment.
I have asked for help on some other projects where I got stuck and thought I’d give it a try. The LLM hallucinated and answer, but then admitted it was wrong when i pointed out the mistake and didn’t help me get any further.
Never mind that the analogy makes little sense. We're not in the realm of enhancing labour power with additional tools to make us more productive. We're deep into alienation and exploitation. All of this added productivity and you'll continue working the same hours or more while your colleagues are laid off and let go. No labourer will see the additional profits from this increased, "productivity." Those let go aren't going to be protected from losing their homes and careers.
Tech just feels sinister right now and without any ounce of shame or self reflection.
Tech still is rife with temporarily not-yet-founders who cling to not rocking the boat.
What do you do when the boat capsizes?
1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job 2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop 3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™" 4) is the output trustworthy?
For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.
It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).
When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?
I pretty sure I will lose, but, its worth a shot.
Right?!
One of the ads I saw for AI assisted comms recently was an example of making copy for a newsletter for a cupcake shop, who have a new flavour. You tell it that and it spins a whole newsletter for you.
All this tells me is that the information content of your letter is utterly trivial. I don’t want that newsletter.
It still astounds me that the dominant search company, where people go as a first port of call when looking for information, is willing to put generated answers at the top of its results which are variously sorta-right, subtly wrong or outright fabricated.
Meta has started offering artists I know AI versions of their own work on Facebook. There’s no obvious way to turn it off and … frankly it’s pretty insulting.
So yes, there is a no-AI audience. At the very least a let-me-turn-it-off audience. And not just in tech.
(Regarding the question about code editor. My primary code editor recently is Vim -- no AI features. But larger part of the code is produced by tools like Claude Code that does not even have the feature of manual edits. Traditional IDEs only have niche roles in my process at the moment -- e.g. debugging and stepping over the code.)
This is conflated right now with AI because every CEO and PM is pushing AI into their product as a first step to increased monetization once they figure out how. This is not well thought out and it ruins the experience of users who were previously happy with their software. A smart company would wait until the AI actually served a real use case and then roll out a well-tested update, but these companies are exceedingly rare.
I honestly don’t care if you add AI features, but make it so I can ignore them and make sure they don’t get in the way of the actual use of your software.
It’s sad that the best example I can think of such restraint is Apple, who was planning on rolling out AI on everything but realized that a lot of it sucked and halted the rollout partway through. It would have been better if they hadn’t made AI the key selling point of the iPhone 16 before failing to deliver, but at least they realized they should stop.
Microsoft also had a partially self-aware moment with their Recall feature, but it took a massive public outcry and their modifications only partially addressed privacy concerns.
But the volume of shit that gets funding because of AI overwhelms even the partial success stories- agents that don’t do what they claim, self driving cars that have never materialized, Rabbit AI, the Humane AI pin, Meta AI glasses, whatever shit Jonny Ive’s deal with OpenAI will produce- all of that makes people very skeptical because product managers and CEOs can’t hold back and wait until an idea is fully baked.
Additionally, I said previously that I want to be able to ignore the features I don’t use. If you only have one premium tier, and the price went from $5/month to $20+ monthly because you added AI, then I’m probably cancelling because I have to now decide if the features I do actually use are worth the extra money. Plus, companies that do AI this way will inevitably restrict my usage if I do fine the feature useful.
So I guess if I had the choice, I would prefer a company keep a lower premium tier even if I have no access to AI features. But what I would really like is an option to enable whatever AI you’ve developed and bring my own API key, and don’t change your premium tier pricing (or minimally change). But clearly there are enough people out there that are shelling out for the shitty $20+ monthly subscriptions (or getting their company to pay for it) that my opinion doesn’t matter.
Howcome noone ever solved this problem? After all these years of UI evolution. It still mostly sucks to find the setting you need to change something that bothers you. There are no suggestions to customize your experience right there when it happens.
How about giving user opportunity to reply with a frowny face (or Thanks, I hate it) and if they do, direct them to a spot where they can partially or completely disable the thing that happened. Give them browsable and searchable history of the things they customized. Give them llm powered search for options in your app so they don't have to search what to click on random forums.
Why nobody figured out how to bake this directly into a default control library for each platform is a disgrace.
In Windows 95 there sometimes was a `?` in the title bar, and you could click on things, and help would be shown.
Not a stretch of the imagination that it could a) document how to tune things and b) give you a link to jump straight to where to tune those things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxurwDW8Bto
But with yearly iterations it's a humongous task to have all these little tidbits of documentation stay consistent across time.
Even if it didn't, it's distributed with a psychotherapist mode, hippie-expand (which I use almost every day) and dabbrev.
(and now just use the free one...)
I will not support any companies attempting to force this dogshit down my throat
if sublime text becomes infested I will no longer pay for those upgrades either
Emacs? :)
The irony is delightful.
Even when i was running linux and windows side by side i did all my text editing in windows, notepad++ is just that fine tuned. even BBEdit wasn't as nice.
I rarely upgrade software that "works", so i have no idea if notepad++ has gotten worse.
