”Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”

I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.

The author states that she's been a tech writer for 10 years and that she thinks AI is going to ruin journalism because it gives too much power to AI providers.

But, have you seen the state of journalism? AI killing it would just be an act of mercy at this point. How much SEO optimized, grammatically correct, appropriately filtered, but ultimately useless "content" do I really need to sift through to get even something as simple as a recipe?

The author can bemoan AI until she's blue in the face, but she's willfully ignoring that the information that most people get today is already controlled by a handful of people and organizations.

Article without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20240204224600/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/new-luddites-ai-protest/677327/

The original Luddites were hailed as folk heroes—they were cheered in the streets as they smashed machinery, and they were championed by Lord Byron. Today, at a time when a majority of Americans are in favor of stronger tech regulation, workers like the writers and actors pushing for protections against AI are popular too. In one Gallup poll, Americans sympathized with the writers over the studios by 72 to 19 percent

I don't know if it's just where I went to school but the Luddites weren't portrayed as folk heroes there. They were portrayed as people digging their heels in the sand against change.

That's also an extremely big range for a percentage. I wonder how the poll was setup.

“Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.”

The problem with Luddism is that it objectifies unwanted behavior. Instead of "hiring children to run machines is bad," the argument becomes "the machines are bad because people hire children to run them."

The machines are just machines. They have no inherent benefits or harms. It's always the people and what they do with them.

I wonder how much support this will get - it’s not the tool that’s the problem, but how it gets used.

• as a tech person, generative AI is already a useful tool, similar to how search engines are. However I’m not afraid of it taking my job because someone still needs to tell it what to do, plus it’s still pretty limited. I liken it to previous attempts to outsource software to the lowest bidder in the cheapest country. In general that was a failure and companies are looking for ability even in cheap labor markets, not just cheapness
• as someone who reads news and opinions online, I see the enshittification overtaking that industry over the last decade. Most content is clearly no longer written by journalists nor adhering to any standards for informing the user, but written by formula and template for SEO, and invoking outrage or other emotion. As someone watching videos, I see more choices than ever, but mostly poorly written and produced. It feels like these industries are racing for the bottom and not stopping. Generative AI can actually do a better job than most of the crap, and the most important skill of an online citizen is how to wade through the oceans of crap to find those morsels of journalism. How do we bring back journalism as a whole, regardless of what tools the hacks use to fill our attention and sell ads?

It is a little strange to me that people say it won't change things because the AI will need someone to tell it what to do. It's like saying robots won't change the automotive industry because someone will need to fix them. Well it turns out, if you only need one person to fix all the machines or tell the AI what to do, then the companies will fire everyone else, especially if that was their main skill set and where their experience was. They can get a different job but it will be entry level and they might not be able to live the same quality of life, support a family, fill their retirement or pay debts they may have accrued with the expectation of a certain salary.

There are manufacturing center towns that are basically graveyards now because of that (yes, also globalist and international capitalism, too, but it's both. Jon Oliver had an episode about it with sources). The same thing happened to call centers and operators before. Things sucked for certain people during that time, and from an abstract POV society was okay, but imagine if the person it sucked for is you. Then you can understand why lots of people are freaking out.

number of other incidents—including one in which a Cruise self-driving car hit a pedestrian and dragged them 20 feet

I see the author is perfectly fine with misrepresenting incidents to favour their narrative.

This is what futile looks like.

Full source?