There’s a pattern worth examining in how public discourse around AI has developed. Resistance to transformative technologies is almost never really about the technology itself. It is rather a sign of our political-economic system reaching a level of development that its liberal (in the politcal science sense of the word, not the Americanized version) ideological founders never intended. I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of 19th century Britain. The Luddites are remembered as anti-technology, but they weren’t opposed to machinery in principle. They were opposed to machinery being used as a tool to destroy their bargaining power and transfer value upward. Moreover, the introduction of machinery and the division of labour in general enstranged workers from their specialized work, and made them simple ‘executers’ of labour and machines. The technology was neutral. The political-economic arrangement surrounding it was not. Something similar is happening now. AI is genuinely revolutionary, the capabilities being represent a real discontinuity in what machines can do, but they simultaneously risk enstranging people from their work if we as a society do not find ways to cope with this revolution. This is true both for tech-workers as other individuals who do white-collar jobs and practice knowledge-production. I as a writer and political economist experienced this first-hand as the technology got introduced just as I was starting my career. But the public increasingly hates it, and I think the hatred is being misdirected at the technology rather than at the conditions of its deployment. This matters especially for people working in the industry. A lot of AI practitioners are themselves experiencing a version of this contradiction: building tools that are technically extraordinary while watching those tools be deployed in ways that erode job security, concentrate returns, and generate surveillance infrastructure. The political-economic system in which AI is being deployed is almost never the object of scrutiny in mainstream discourse. We debate whether the models are safe, whether they hallucinate, whether they’ll take jobs, but rarely who owns the infrastructure, how the value flows, and what institutional arrangements would need to change for the technology to serve broader interests rather than narrow ones. I wrote a longer free piece working through this argument in more depth, drawing on a historical evolution of how economic freedom has brought amazing technological innovation, but simultaneously massive disruption, akin to what we are facing today. The Pro-AI vs. Anti-AI split is a false binary that benefits nobody, least of all the people building these systems. The article is free, but the argument stands on its own and I’m happy to work through any of it here and respond to criticism. https://open.substack.com/pub/eliasrutten/p/you-dont-hate-ai-you-hate-liberalism?r=ugbem submitted by /u/wetdreamzaboutmemes
Originally posted by u/wetdreamzaboutmemes on r/ArtificialInteligence
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