So essentially the modern framing of the luddite movement is a giant strawman argument mischaracterizing labor as being against technology when in reality they were just trying to figure out how to survive in a world where their work and livelihoods were made redundant practically overnight.
The same will happen to modern wage labor due to AI. Automation will not be a sudden an obvious moment (eg. Google deciding to lay off every software engineer), rather it will be a slow hemorrhaging of the working class where vast swaths of workers will be laid off, and unable to find work of similar pay and stability ever again. The job market will continue to get exponentially more and more competitive, and the illusion of stability will collapse. This same trend has already been playing out over the last few decades, but the pace at which it's playing out is now accelerating exponentially.
Because jobs will still exist, the status quo "just re-train them" optimists will remain ignorant and in denial, clinging to old models of the past. They'll say ridiculous things like "we can re-train the bus drivers by teaching them how to code", or "just teach illustrators how to prompt".
Of course advancing technology should be a good thing, and with the modern technology we have now we already could afford a society of leisure and abundance. But our current capitalist system drains most people of the time/energy for big picture thinking (unrelated to making a buck), and our representative democracy (compared to direct or delegative democracy) further discourages political participation from regular people who aren't wealthy enough to have the abundance of leisure and financial security required to think about anything other than money.
The result is that governments only serve the interests of the wealthy, while providing only an illusion of representing the masses. The rigidity and inflexibility of government systems means that nothing will change short of a revolution.
The easiest and simplest policy change that can be made to alleviate job loss + destitution from AI and to reframe AI automation from a game with winners + losers to a game where everyone wins is to implement a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Think we can't afford a UBI? Fine. Start small, and peg it to the revenues of something specific like a Land Value Tax (Henry George's "citizen's dividend"). Watch society not collapse and everyone be happier (eg. like when COVID forced employers to allow more remote work) as society collectively moves up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The increasing abundance of leisure will start the flywheel towards increasing political participation and representation of the people, systemic political reform towards delegative democracy (liquid democracy), and the next evolution of the human species in the "AI Age".
Until then, the only way to safeguard yourself from the AI automation wave is to achieve financial independence and to fully embrace AI, since workers who know how to leverage the latest AI tools will displace those who don't.
The same will happen to modern wage labor due to AI. Automation will not be a sudden an obvious moment (eg. Google deciding to lay off every software engineer), rather it will be a slow hemorrhaging of the working class where vast swaths of workers will be laid off, and unable to find work of similar pay and stability ever again. The job market will continue to get exponentially more and more competitive, and the illusion of stability will collapse. This same trend has already been playing out over the last few decades, but the pace at which it's playing out is now accelerating exponentially.
Because jobs will still exist, the status quo "just re-train them" optimists will remain ignorant and in denial, clinging to old models of the past. They'll say ridiculous things like "we can re-train the bus drivers by teaching them how to code", or "just teach illustrators how to prompt".
Of course advancing technology should be a good thing, and with the modern technology we have now we already could afford a society of leisure and abundance. But our current capitalist system drains most people of the time/energy for big picture thinking (unrelated to making a buck), and our representative democracy (compared to direct or delegative democracy) further discourages political participation from regular people who aren't wealthy enough to have the abundance of leisure and financial security required to think about anything other than money.
The result is that governments only serve the interests of the wealthy, while providing only an illusion of representing the masses. The rigidity and inflexibility of government systems means that nothing will change short of a revolution.
The easiest and simplest policy change that can be made to alleviate job loss + destitution from AI and to reframe AI automation from a game with winners + losers to a game where everyone wins is to implement a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Think we can't afford a UBI? Fine. Start small, and peg it to the revenues of something specific like a Land Value Tax (Henry George's "citizen's dividend"). Watch society not collapse and everyone be happier (eg. like when COVID forced employers to allow more remote work) as society collectively moves up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The increasing abundance of leisure will start the flywheel towards increasing political participation and representation of the people, systemic political reform towards delegative democracy (liquid democracy), and the next evolution of the human species in the "AI Age".
Until then, the only way to safeguard yourself from the AI automation wave is to achieve financial independence and to fully embrace AI, since workers who know how to leverage the latest AI tools will displace those who don't.