Luddism

With a new book, Blood in the Machine, a number of reviews have come out exploring the ideas in the book and the concept of Luddism in general. One of the better reviews is here:

Barber, Gregory. (2023, October 23). Everyone is a Luddite now. Wired. Online: https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-a-luddite-now/.

The review makes a number of points, probably from the book, that I would like to explore. It starts with the story of people putting cones on self-driving cars in San Francisco, because that paralyzes them. I like that image; it made me smile and it stuck with me after I'd finished reading the review. But it brought up the question: How much of a Luddite are you? Are you willing to stick a wrench in the machine that you believe will change the world for the worst?

This site has always been somewhat of a Luddite site. All I am advocating here is that we recognize what changes like computer-generated grammar correction will do to our writing and language, but recognizing it is one step away from rejecting it, if you can see that what is happening is bad. The same goes for Chat GPT. If we as a culture come to recognize that it's not taking us in a good direction, we would reject it, right? One would hope it would be that simple.

But the article and the book are right about another thing: although Luddism has gone mainstream, as the vast majority of us are wary of Chat GPT and all AI-generated products, nobody is really doing anything about it. These changes are inevitable in the sense that as long as people are able to use them, somebody will use them, and this will happen until soft spots are found where the technology is actually useful and causes an improvement in someone's eyes. The rest of us can be as Luddite as we want; it won't change the projectory of progress, or at the very least, it will only slow it down.

I find this most scary in the area of genetic modification; it's gotten so that AI-generated books (I am a writer) don't really scare me anymore. I read a computer-generated bear story the other day, and that got my rankles up, because I've told bear stories for years, and I have actually seen bears and interacted with them. Knowing that this one was computer generated made me mad enough that I delivered my best one on the spot, but on reflecting, it was knowing that the AI one was computer generated that made me mad, not the language itself. It's easy enough to consider AI-generated language wooden and without feeling or real substance, but if I hadn't been told it was AI, would I still look at it that way? Would I even be in the habit of asking if it was real? Language is just language, and we tend to impute the real person of the writer behind it, even when that real person isn't there. And we do that by habit, habit generated by years of experience.

Luddism has gone mainstream, and there are many kinds of Luddites. And, the time between the origin of Luddism and now has been marked by the opportunity of the industrialists to define Luddism and make the rest of us consider Luddism to be "technophobe" or simply "bad at computers." OK so I'm a little of both and so don't mind being called a Luddite, even now, but I have a number of questions about it, including the following: What exactly would resistance to AI look like? Is it possible to actually break the system (by feeding mass junk or mass twisted material into it?) as opposed to just objecting to it and never buying an Amazon book that specifies AI creation? Is there a range of ways to resist AI or any other tech innovation?

Luddism is founded on the belief that tech innovation is spurred by the owner class which doesn't care about its effect on the common person or even its effect on society as a whole. Therefore it's the obligation of the "people" to throw a monkey wrench in the works as a favor to the rest of us who will inevitably suffer if the innovation isn't stopped. The Luddites saw themselves as helping the world by ruining the machines that had come to replace people and put everyone out of work. Of course this just happened to be at a time when there were enough people put out of work, and a town where those people were a significant percentage, and the unemployment caused was severe enough that they really didn't have many options left but to resist. I have options. I can retire, or find some other line of work, or even just forget about it; it won't affect me strongly at least right away, and I don't have all that much time left anyway. I have a son who is driving Uber who might very well ask, shouldn't we resist this gig economy? At the moment it's one of his best options, and I don't think he's going to put a monkey wrench in the works. And I don't even know how one would go about doing that, with the gig economy or with AI.

ChatGPT

Everyone's been talking about the new program that just writes a paper for you. The fact is, writing is going the way of the abacus. Your process for writing will be the process of feeding the machine the right prompts.

As a writer, a lifelong non-plagiarist, content creator, etc., of course I'm a little threatened by this. Because it is easy to publish, and easy to create new things (just by feeding prompts), there will probably be an explosion of self-published ChatGPT stories, etc. Will there not? I could name my next book, "A real human wrote this."

Seriously, nobody knows yet the full range of implications of having a computer that can write out whatever you want, in whatever form, and even learns to do it better every time. It can write essays, papers, stories, whatever you ask. Should I master it? It sounds kind of interesting in a way.

Its weakness apparently is in doing research. Well, I'm glad I'll still be good for something.

I'll put here my range of thoughts on the matter, and my experimentation, if I get that far, and its results. If we are about to lose skills (namely writing skills), let it begin by having fun, having a machine do something for you. Just like we did with the calculators.