Blood in the Machine: the real story of the Luddites

Haha. No, not really. Do you even know what a teacher does, or what makes for an effective chef? These are not the BS jobs described by Graeber.

Technology can and does augment and serve people in these roles, but the idea that any of them can be replaced by “AI” is a ridiculous Libertarian techbro pipe dream and will be for decades to come (if ever).

As I said technology should serve humans, rather than vice-versa. Cory Doctorow’s discussion of centaurs vs. reverse-centaurs in the AI world goes into this in greater detail.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Which did not make the Luddites anti-technology. They wanted to preserve human skills and wanted the new technologies to enhance and serve them rather than replace them with machines that existed to serve only the profits of the mill bosses (and turn lower-skilled humans – including children – into chickenised reverse centaurs).

Assuming the techbro billionaires get their way, they may indeed put in place a guaranteed income when all the people who are stuck doing BS jobs are put out of a living. It just won’t be the fully-automated luxury communism with all that free time you might be envisioning, though. The kind Musk and Zuckerberg and their ilk will be more like this:

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