Post by Scott Burton / Redsky

Scott Burton • Feed

I've held this view a long time, and usually mean it flatteringly - leftists work to conserve the environment, the working class, human dignity, the American system of government, all noble things! - but it's hard to argue this anti-AI sentiment is anything but classical reactionary conservatism.

aug 10, 2025, 5:07 am • 0 0

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And it's not hard to understand why. People feel threatened. Some of the worst people we know are doing the threatening. Their idiotic gooner fans are thrilled. It adds to the stochastic flood we seem to be trapped in.

aug 10, 2025, 5:11 am • 0 0 • view

But if you're a hand weaver facing down the first power loom, arguing that it can't do your job is *demonstrated* to be the doomed position. Arguing that it shouldn't change your job is *definitionally* reactionary conservatism. Smashing it with hammers feels noble but ultimately will fail.

aug 10, 2025, 5:20 am • 0 0 • view

Whatever you think of Brian Merchant (I think about Blood In The Machine just about every day), his views on this are appropriately nuanced and informed and he doesn't indulge in the hysterics that are fashionable on Bluesky. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/on-agi-mas...

In fact, the Luddites did say, quite loudly, look at these stupid machines and all the mistakes they’re making. This was one of their chief complaints, that the mechanized looms and wide frames produced low-quality “fraudulent” goods that drove down prices and ruined whole cloth-producing towns’ reputations. They also said that those machines could never adequately replace them. And they were right! To this day, our clothes are made not by autonomous machinery, but by workers around the world, often in countries with cheaper labor markets. The automation of the industrial revolution did not abolish weavers or knitters; it helped bosses deskill them, break their labor power, and immiserate them. Eventually, it dispersed the supply chain of cloth production further around the globe. It did facilitate a broad and lasting change; that there would be more and cheaper cloth, produced by workers who were paid much less, at the benefit of a relative handful of industrialists and capitalists. (There’s a justified fear that a similar pattern will play out today, with creative workers not disappearing, but having their working conditions and pay crushed by managers turning to AI for writing, art, and music.)

aug 10, 2025, 5:38 am • 0 0 • view