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Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology, told CNBC that people are “too smart” to accept artificial intelligence won’t alter their work environment.
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Business leaders shouldn’t “BS” employees about the impact of AI on jobs, Kavanaugh said, adding that they should be as transparent and honest as possible.
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Kavanaugh, who has a net worth of $7 billion, stressed that overall he’s an optimist when it comes to AI and its ability to improve productivity.
@ZDL @ladicius
It’s important for everyone to understand this. Thank you for spelling it out so clearly.
At the same time, it’s also important for everyone to understand that the Luddites lost. They lost every single war over every single technology they ever tried to protect their lives and livelihoods from. They always have, and they always will.
If we are going to SURVIVE, our survival strategy can’t rely on either ‘replacing’ jobs OR preventing disruptive technology from destroying them.
I’m not sure we can say that the Luddites lost, nor that they always will.
The actual followers of “Ned Ludd” lost, sure. But they were the first in a loooooooooooooooooooooooong line of labour activists who fought for the rights and dignity of the working class. The inheritors of “Ned Ludd” are why we had 40-hour work weeks. They’re why we had weekends. They’re why we had a middle class with all the economic benefits this brings to all (including the short-sighted monied classes). The Luddites lost the battle and won the war
Well, at least until labour in the USA and to a slightly lesser extend Canada and the UK (and likely Australia as well, by appearances) got complacent and greedy and allowed the monied classes to systematically dismantle all that the Luddites’ descendants had built up. So right now the Luddites have become beleaguered and have lost their power. The governments service the monied classes instead of the people.
But this will change. The only choice, really, is will it change in another orgy of violence or will cooler heads prevail?
Personally, since I don’t live in the affected areas, I’m fine either away. You might have a specific direction you want to lean in, however.
@ZDL
I spoke too broadly; I apologize.
I didn’t mean to say that they didn’t make a lasting positive impact on labor and consumer rights.
All I meant to say was that the technologies they opposed still exist and are now indispensable and (mostly) positive features of the industrial economy.
The victories you describe are positive and massive; my argument is that victories like those are possible and desirable (and necessary!) while winning a Butlerian Jihad is none of those things.
They didn’t oppose technologies. They destroyed the visible manifestations of employee abuse which happened to be technological (stocking frames and threshing machines). They were labour activists who did “collective bargaining by riot” since there was no legal framework for collective bargaining at the time (and indeed the law was often against any efforts of the working class to organize and improve their lot).
Their particular cause failed (c.f. law being onside with the abusers), but they laid the groundwork for the future of labour.
So this brings us to modern times. Nobody (sane) is against “AI”. (“Scare quotes” because we don’t have AI yet and likely never will in my time nor in the next two generations’.) They’re opposed to so-called LLMs, one specific brand of “AI” (a.k.a. Generative AI or as I prefer to call it Degenerative AI). And the reasons to oppose it are multifold.
And the thing is, they can’t be meaningfully improved upon. Each rendition of ChatGPT, for example (which, incidentally, is a near-homophone for the French “chat, j’ai pété” which I will never unhear), has diminishing returns on the quality of its output. ChatGPT 1 to 2 was a huge leap. 2 to 3 was a smaller leap. 3 to 4 is almost indistinguishable for casual use. 4 to 4o<insert alphanumerical soup here> even less improved.
All while the computational power to run each increasing rendition goes up exponentially.
So LLMs in particular are technology that needs to be killed, now. Not in some Butlerian Jihad, but in terms of just fining the motherfuckers foisting it upon us and cramming it into every orifice they can find with fines well in excess of 100% of gross revenue.