It's important to consider how and why the left/acc project of ppl like Srineck failed to launch. Was it simply too early? Would the same strategy re-played now win "universal basic income, a shorter work week, and collective ownership of automated production?" I'm not sure. We should be attentive to why the Promethean Left has not yet emerged and what political actions/coalitions could cause one to come into existence.
One might notice the success of economic populism among both high-education and low-income voters. The best example for this is the election of Zohran Mamdani who won not only college graduates in Bushwick but also working class families across the Bronx. This dynamic holds across most polling data, and we could imagine it intensifying as AI increases a recognition of downward mobility amount college educated voters. The affordability crisis provides a north star for a "good governance" Left that seeks to ensure egalitarian prosperity by any means necessary. If any political coalition could ensure the redistribution of automated profit against private interests and establishment political power, it would be this one.
On the other hand, technocrats who care about this problem need to recognize the actual political coalitions that exist in America who could achieve their aims. Every AI Safety researcher agrees that "Concentration of Power" is a key risk area, yet they insist that AI Safety must remain apolitical. Perhaps this is true across other domains, but there is nothing apolitical about the concentration of power! Determining who controls what is--coarsely defined--the essential function of politics. How do you think the actually existing Republican Party would respond to an unprecedented possibility to concentrate power into the hands of their elites? The rose-colored worldview of apolitical technocracy has failed to recognize this threat across fields: housing wonks, clinical trial reform, etc. There is simply no alternative than a Left-collaboration for technocratic governance to be achieved against the will of rent-seeking and establishment interests.
For a Left that extends beyond the Luddites, a coalition between the existing Left and technocrats of all types must be built--identifying a common enemy in the Affordability Crisis. It is in pursuit of both economic growth and redistribution where we might build a coalition that has both the worldview and methods to deliver a positive vision of technological progress, which is critical in light of rapid improvements in artificial intelligence.
I suspect a lot of it had to do with the popular image of technology shifting from liberation and ease in the 1950s to oppression in the 1980s. The current moment has been evident in an increasingly anti-future turn my whole life, from all sides. When I was young the message I heard from all around was that the world will be worse than it is now.
The right wing has the advantage here in that offering you nothing is already on the table. There's no meaning to disappoinment here; you were not the elect and would not have deserved prosperity had you got it.
Yeah much of this seems to be just a complete victory for the right in that the left simply hasn't got an ideology that is capable of navigating extreme change like this
I think the left ideology was born *from* extreme change like this. The difference is that the basic tenor of right ideology is that all those guys suck but you're built different, which is very attractive when things go wrong (although I am thinking of the counter ideology of Adrian Tchaikovsky's ark ships, where it isn't so much that people make times, but that times make people...)
My impression honestly is that the left is largely either ideologically many decades behind or, in many cases, actually worse off somehow than they were in the past, which is why they're doing things like reviving pre-Marxist concepts of labor and relationship to technology.
One might, from where we are, actually forge a left or liberal ideology that was capable of reckoning with the sort of change that is obviously coming, but we haven't got one of those now with any significant number of adherents.
I puzzle over this a lot lately, as a left-liberal. Why is so much of the modern left, which is perhaps more urban and cosmopolitan and upscale (if downwardly mobile) than past lefts have ever been, so stuck on technology rejection, romantic pastoralism, and so on?
Unfortunately, I think it's because that tack is more viral and because actual leadership is mostly absent since 2016. Ten years of YouTubers being effectively in charge is enough to pretty well hollow the place out.
I think the Left has an *ideology* that can navigate extreme technological change. What we actually lack is the infrastructure of politicians, media, and intellectuals that is interested in putting that ideology into practice.
I think I might narrowly agree that people exist on the left who have thought about how to navigate what's coming, but they're sort of uniformly fringe academics and not what I think of as "the Left", which includes the more active/prominent academics, people who set policy or organizational agenda, electeds, etc.
Like, Inventing the Future and Fully Automated Luxury Communism are both this but they are *incredibly* narrow ideological targets with very few subscribers.
I'd be interested in hearing your account (or directions where to look/what to read) of this shift. My impression has been that it occurred in the past 10-15 years, but that suspiciously corresponds with my own adulthood. I'd never thought to trace its beginnings so far back.
Some books that I learned a lot from when I was just starting high school in the 90s:
Toffler and Farrell's "Future Shock" was the reigning idea of my childhood, which was that people would be totally out of step with how things change and would find themselves in a constant state of adjustment instead of ever finding a story they're part of.
Winn Schwartau details in "Information Warfare" how the future of war will be about attack on civilian choke points, "soft kills" where you just disable critical things, and how attacking is easier than defending. I think the "battle space" as it were has now moved inside culture and further eroded people's attempts at life-giving mental niches.
David Frum's "Dead Right" basically says "hey, you decry the welfare state, but the welfare state is literally you and no one will ever say this because it's political suicide." We have witnessed generations of efforts to pick this particular lock ever since.
I really appreciate the historical overview you have provided, but your argument for why we should not fight automation is completely unconvincing as it amounts to arguing that some bad people held this position in the past, and so we should not hold this position, even though the actual material circumstances are pretty different since it’s obvious that for example, resisting AI is not the same as beating up women who want to work. In any case the fact that some other people who hold your position are bad people is generally not a valid argument against your position. You have to actually argue against the position. Not just point out that some people holding it are evil.
apart from that your argument against automation appears to amount to an argument from the authority of communist luminaries whose authority many would reject, and in any case, it’s quite understandable that even geniuses writing in the 19th century could be mistaken about things, especially as they relate to a technological transition two centuries after they wrote.
Karl Marx was just obviously descriptively correct about the impact of the industrial revolution on power relationships between ownership and labor, pretty much all of modern labor economics and every successful labor movement tacitly assumes that he’s correct.
Marx is cited to be cheeky because modern Luddites have an intensely Marxist aesthetic going on, but he’s also blindingly, obviously right. Breaking or opposing the machine has basically never worked, and obviously cannot work, because the machine itself represents wealth and therefore power in the world, and if you are anti-power you cannot wield or hold power for any length of time.
Nuclear power, genetically modified crops, cloning technology, supersonic aircraft in the United States, and the vast invisible graveyard off drugs that were never developed because of the regulatory burden of the food and drug administration would really like to have a word with you. Not to mention that in the most successful cases, the technology would not have developed in the first case because of regulatory barriers, which means I would not have heard about it to talk about it in the first place. However, it’s obvious that in the real world, we have numerous times successfully. Either stopped the development of a technology or at least stopped or drastically slowed down its adoption.
I’m also really not sure why you think that modern labour economics relys on the accuracy of the views of people who believed in things like the labour theory of value, surplus value an alienation, the necessarily falling rate of profit as capitalism develops, historical materialism as strict determinism, the homogenisation of the proletariat, and that capitalism necessarily would cause emmiseration of workers among other views that are definitely not held by most people in labour economics. In fact, I would argue that almost every successful labour movement implicitly assumes that historical materialism as strict determinism is false because the people participating or organising in these movements definitely do not act as if they think that if they were not doing it, the technological level of the means of production would make sure that somebody else would do it instead, so that society would develop exactly the same, regardless of their own individual choices. Even Marx didn’t act as if him not publishing his ideas would have zero effect on the future revolution, even though that’s actually the obvious implication of his theory, since he thinks it’s not ideas, but purely the means of production which determine history.
Yeah, I am citing Marx to be cheeky, because the luddites claim to be Marxists. If you want a source with less specific historical baggage, here’s Keynes:
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. […] The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick”
etc, etc, etc. The parts of Marx that are obviously right — including “luddism is a bad idea” — are absorbed into all later labor economics. The parts of Marx that are nuts are what is most distinctively considered Marxism in our era, because they are no longer distinctively Marx-related.
History and etymology are fine and necessary, but it matters more what people think of the word today. Many people, such as the group of young people who’ve cast aside smartphones and get together to read actual books, use the word Luddite favorably, and their application of the term is becoming the norm. That’s what’s important.
The one element that I think people are responding to is the Luddites as an energetic response rather than a passive one. Even in their day, Ned Ludd was a cipher that stood for a great many things and that is never going to change.
The word luddite has a life on its own in the english language. This seems to be a historic treatment of the organization that spawned said term. Seems irrelvant, making very few ethical points and even fewer falsifiable points about a newly "luddite" approach to technology. They could have been the following list:
• adopting “Luddite” today is a form of vice signaling
• choosing the label implies embracing the reactionary, exclusionary moral posture of the original movement
• modern anti‑tech sentiment misidentifies the real problem (ownership and control, not machines)
• contemporary neo‑Luddism repeats the same strategic error Marx and Engels criticized
• rejecting technological progress today amounts to ceding the future to capital
• no falsifiable predictions are int this text about what a modern Luddite stance would achieve or fail to achieve
TL;DR: thanks for the historic treatment. That was one perspective, other historian magazines like smithsonian wrote about other points of the movement. As for concrete advice, I found it pretty useless.
Adoption of technology by capital is not the same as adoption of technology by a community. Capital strives to maximize returns, but it is up to communities to decide whether a given technology is just and fits its way of life. Delegation of this discourse to the capital it is a form of corruption. What follows is erosion of public institutions, democratic backsliding, and promotion of imperial trade and power dynamics.
It's important to consider how and why the left/acc project of ppl like Srineck failed to launch. Was it simply too early? Would the same strategy re-played now win "universal basic income, a shorter work week, and collective ownership of automated production?" I'm not sure. We should be attentive to why the Promethean Left has not yet emerged and what political actions/coalitions could cause one to come into existence.
One might notice the success of economic populism among both high-education and low-income voters. The best example for this is the election of Zohran Mamdani who won not only college graduates in Bushwick but also working class families across the Bronx. This dynamic holds across most polling data, and we could imagine it intensifying as AI increases a recognition of downward mobility amount college educated voters. The affordability crisis provides a north star for a "good governance" Left that seeks to ensure egalitarian prosperity by any means necessary. If any political coalition could ensure the redistribution of automated profit against private interests and establishment political power, it would be this one.
This is why, I argue, the American Left must take the ownership of AI, not just its regulation, as one of its central demands. (https://onethousandmeans.substack.com/p/the-left-must-plan-for-ai?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web). We are beginning to see a serious concern for the capabilities of AI from people like Sen. Sanders and Rep. Cortes (https://onethousandmeans.substack.com/p/sanders-sounds-the-alarm-on-ai?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web), but we remain in a language of moratorium as a way to take existing AI concerns and plug it into a universalist project. While the Luddite project is maintenance of localist status quo, the project of the Left is to convert localism into an ambitious and global egalitarianism. It is my view that it might be a disaster if the Left fails to perform such a conversion before the 2028 election.
On the other hand, technocrats who care about this problem need to recognize the actual political coalitions that exist in America who could achieve their aims. Every AI Safety researcher agrees that "Concentration of Power" is a key risk area, yet they insist that AI Safety must remain apolitical. Perhaps this is true across other domains, but there is nothing apolitical about the concentration of power! Determining who controls what is--coarsely defined--the essential function of politics. How do you think the actually existing Republican Party would respond to an unprecedented possibility to concentrate power into the hands of their elites? The rose-colored worldview of apolitical technocracy has failed to recognize this threat across fields: housing wonks, clinical trial reform, etc. There is simply no alternative than a Left-collaboration for technocratic governance to be achieved against the will of rent-seeking and establishment interests.
For a Left that extends beyond the Luddites, a coalition between the existing Left and technocrats of all types must be built--identifying a common enemy in the Affordability Crisis. It is in pursuit of both economic growth and redistribution where we might build a coalition that has both the worldview and methods to deliver a positive vision of technological progress, which is critical in light of rapid improvements in artificial intelligence.
I suspect a lot of it had to do with the popular image of technology shifting from liberation and ease in the 1950s to oppression in the 1980s. The current moment has been evident in an increasingly anti-future turn my whole life, from all sides. When I was young the message I heard from all around was that the world will be worse than it is now.
The right wing has the advantage here in that offering you nothing is already on the table. There's no meaning to disappoinment here; you were not the elect and would not have deserved prosperity had you got it.
Yeah much of this seems to be just a complete victory for the right in that the left simply hasn't got an ideology that is capable of navigating extreme change like this
I think the left ideology was born *from* extreme change like this. The difference is that the basic tenor of right ideology is that all those guys suck but you're built different, which is very attractive when things go wrong (although I am thinking of the counter ideology of Adrian Tchaikovsky's ark ships, where it isn't so much that people make times, but that times make people...)
My impression honestly is that the left is largely either ideologically many decades behind or, in many cases, actually worse off somehow than they were in the past, which is why they're doing things like reviving pre-Marxist concepts of labor and relationship to technology.
One might, from where we are, actually forge a left or liberal ideology that was capable of reckoning with the sort of change that is obviously coming, but we haven't got one of those now with any significant number of adherents.
I puzzle over this a lot lately, as a left-liberal. Why is so much of the modern left, which is perhaps more urban and cosmopolitan and upscale (if downwardly mobile) than past lefts have ever been, so stuck on technology rejection, romantic pastoralism, and so on?
Unfortunately, I think it's because that tack is more viral and because actual leadership is mostly absent since 2016. Ten years of YouTubers being effectively in charge is enough to pretty well hollow the place out.
I think the Left has an *ideology* that can navigate extreme technological change. What we actually lack is the infrastructure of politicians, media, and intellectuals that is interested in putting that ideology into practice.
I think I might narrowly agree that people exist on the left who have thought about how to navigate what's coming, but they're sort of uniformly fringe academics and not what I think of as "the Left", which includes the more active/prominent academics, people who set policy or organizational agenda, electeds, etc.
Like, Inventing the Future and Fully Automated Luxury Communism are both this but they are *incredibly* narrow ideological targets with very few subscribers.
I'd be interested in hearing your account (or directions where to look/what to read) of this shift. My impression has been that it occurred in the past 10-15 years, but that suspiciously corresponds with my own adulthood. I'd never thought to trace its beginnings so far back.
Some books that I learned a lot from when I was just starting high school in the 90s:
Toffler and Farrell's "Future Shock" was the reigning idea of my childhood, which was that people would be totally out of step with how things change and would find themselves in a constant state of adjustment instead of ever finding a story they're part of.
Winn Schwartau details in "Information Warfare" how the future of war will be about attack on civilian choke points, "soft kills" where you just disable critical things, and how attacking is easier than defending. I think the "battle space" as it were has now moved inside culture and further eroded people's attempts at life-giving mental niches.
David Frum's "Dead Right" basically says "hey, you decry the welfare state, but the welfare state is literally you and no one will ever say this because it's political suicide." We have witnessed generations of efforts to pick this particular lock ever since.
I really appreciate the historical overview you have provided, but your argument for why we should not fight automation is completely unconvincing as it amounts to arguing that some bad people held this position in the past, and so we should not hold this position, even though the actual material circumstances are pretty different since it’s obvious that for example, resisting AI is not the same as beating up women who want to work. In any case the fact that some other people who hold your position are bad people is generally not a valid argument against your position. You have to actually argue against the position. Not just point out that some people holding it are evil.
apart from that your argument against automation appears to amount to an argument from the authority of communist luminaries whose authority many would reject, and in any case, it’s quite understandable that even geniuses writing in the 19th century could be mistaken about things, especially as they relate to a technological transition two centuries after they wrote.
Karl Marx was just obviously descriptively correct about the impact of the industrial revolution on power relationships between ownership and labor, pretty much all of modern labor economics and every successful labor movement tacitly assumes that he’s correct.
Marx is cited to be cheeky because modern Luddites have an intensely Marxist aesthetic going on, but he’s also blindingly, obviously right. Breaking or opposing the machine has basically never worked, and obviously cannot work, because the machine itself represents wealth and therefore power in the world, and if you are anti-power you cannot wield or hold power for any length of time.
Nuclear power, genetically modified crops, cloning technology, supersonic aircraft in the United States, and the vast invisible graveyard off drugs that were never developed because of the regulatory burden of the food and drug administration would really like to have a word with you. Not to mention that in the most successful cases, the technology would not have developed in the first case because of regulatory barriers, which means I would not have heard about it to talk about it in the first place. However, it’s obvious that in the real world, we have numerous times successfully. Either stopped the development of a technology or at least stopped or drastically slowed down its adoption.
I’m also really not sure why you think that modern labour economics relys on the accuracy of the views of people who believed in things like the labour theory of value, surplus value an alienation, the necessarily falling rate of profit as capitalism develops, historical materialism as strict determinism, the homogenisation of the proletariat, and that capitalism necessarily would cause emmiseration of workers among other views that are definitely not held by most people in labour economics. In fact, I would argue that almost every successful labour movement implicitly assumes that historical materialism as strict determinism is false because the people participating or organising in these movements definitely do not act as if they think that if they were not doing it, the technological level of the means of production would make sure that somebody else would do it instead, so that society would develop exactly the same, regardless of their own individual choices. Even Marx didn’t act as if him not publishing his ideas would have zero effect on the future revolution, even though that’s actually the obvious implication of his theory, since he thinks it’s not ideas, but purely the means of production which determine history.
Yeah, I am citing Marx to be cheeky, because the luddites claim to be Marxists. If you want a source with less specific historical baggage, here’s Keynes:
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. […] The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick”
etc, etc, etc. The parts of Marx that are obviously right — including “luddism is a bad idea” — are absorbed into all later labor economics. The parts of Marx that are nuts are what is most distinctively considered Marxism in our era, because they are no longer distinctively Marx-related.
History and etymology are fine and necessary, but it matters more what people think of the word today. Many people, such as the group of young people who’ve cast aside smartphones and get together to read actual books, use the word Luddite favorably, and their application of the term is becoming the norm. That’s what’s important.
The one element that I think people are responding to is the Luddites as an energetic response rather than a passive one. Even in their day, Ned Ludd was a cipher that stood for a great many things and that is never going to change.
The word luddite has a life on its own in the english language. This seems to be a historic treatment of the organization that spawned said term. Seems irrelvant, making very few ethical points and even fewer falsifiable points about a newly "luddite" approach to technology. They could have been the following list:
• adopting “Luddite” today is a form of vice signaling
• choosing the label implies embracing the reactionary, exclusionary moral posture of the original movement
• modern anti‑tech sentiment misidentifies the real problem (ownership and control, not machines)
• contemporary neo‑Luddism repeats the same strategic error Marx and Engels criticized
• rejecting technological progress today amounts to ceding the future to capital
• no falsifiable predictions are int this text about what a modern Luddite stance would achieve or fail to achieve
TL;DR: thanks for the historic treatment. That was one perspective, other historian magazines like smithsonian wrote about other points of the movement. As for concrete advice, I found it pretty useless.
Adoption of technology by capital is not the same as adoption of technology by a community. Capital strives to maximize returns, but it is up to communities to decide whether a given technology is just and fits its way of life. Delegation of this discourse to the capital it is a form of corruption. What follows is erosion of public institutions, democratic backsliding, and promotion of imperial trade and power dynamics.