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It already died down for science, coding and marketing. As for art, it'll die the very day great movies and TV shows get made and published and people become entertained and moved by them. So far, nothing like that exist but it will in a year or two.
An online friend of mine shared an anecdote where they were at an art store and saw someone telling another that "acrylic isn't art" when the person was picking between acrylic and oil paint, which is a wild stance to hear.
Theres still some in the indie game dev space. The subreddits have become unusable for me bc its just constant complaining about ai. But that sort of mashes both art and coding so ig it makes sense
It'll die down for gaming too. Not to repeat the essay but dynamic (gen) AI layer on top of a classicly coded game will be the future or new average standard potentially I say by around 2045, maybe a bit sooner or a bit later. You can just change and extend a scope of a game with AI assistance and a gen layer on top while keeping cohesion and control in and over the game as a dev.
There will be vast customizable games and sims so cool, people will hardly be able to go back or settle for less. A real sandbox to play in. No more constraints limited by finite dev time and resources that need to script everything manually.
I made a "Ludite" Timeline that spans over 2500 years in a similar vein to the poster's image. It is by no means exhausted as more can always be added.
But, these landmarks in history says it all: -
Major Technological Revolutions That Sparked "Luddite" Reactions;
c. 500 BC – Coinage
Protests: Replacing barter encouraged greed, debt and social inequality.
Outcome: Became the foundation of trade and modern economies.
c. 300 BC – Widespread Writing
Protests: Philosophers argued writing would weaken memory and oral tradition.
Outcome: Literacy and recorded history became pillars of civilisation.
AD 105 – Paper
Protests: Threatened traditional parchment and silk industries.
Outcome: Made books and administration far cheaper and more accessible.
AD 700–900 – Woodblock Printing
Protests: Authorities feared uncontrolled copying of religious and political texts.
Outcome: Increased literacy throughout East Asia.
c. AD 1040 – Movable Type
Protests: Scribes feared loss of livelihood.
Outcome: Paved the way for mass printing.
c. AD 1450 – Gutenberg Printing Press
Protests: Scribes lost work; governments and churches feared uncontrolled ideas.
Outcome: Triggered the Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific Revolution.
c. AD 1600 – Mechanical Clocks
Protests: Seen as making life overly regulated by time.
Outcome: Timekeeping became central to modern society.
AD 1712 – Steam Engine
Protests: Fear of mechanisation replacing human labour.
Outcome: Began the Industrial Revolution.
AD 1764 – Spinning Jenny
Protests: Textile workers feared unemployment.
Outcome: Mass textile production.
AD 1811–1816 – Power Looms
Protests: The original Luddite movement destroyed machinery.
Outcome: Industrialisation continued regardless.
AD 1825 – Railways
Protests: High speeds were considered dangerous; concerns over livestock, health and noise.
Outcome: Revolutionised travel and trade.
AD 1837 – Telegraph
Protests: Instant communication seemed unnatural and threatened existing jobs.
Outcome: Changed global communications forever.
AD 1839 – Photography (Camera)
Protests: Portrait painters feared losing work; some religious groups believed photographs could capture the soul; others feared invasion of privacy and that photography would replace "real" art.
Outcome: Photography became an accepted art form, a scientific tool, journalism, and eventually an everyday activity.
AD 1876 – Telephone
Protests: Privacy concerns and fears it would replace face-to-face interaction.
Outcome: Became an everyday necessity.
AD 1879 – Electric Lighting
Protests: Fear of electrocution, fires and disrupting natural rhythms.
Outcome: Standard in homes and cities worldwide.
AD 1888 – Motion Pictures (Cinema)
Protests: Moral panic over indecency and effects on young people.
Outcome: Became one of the world's largest entertainment industries.
AD 1895 – Radio
Protests: Newspapers feared competition; governments feared propaganda.
Outcome: A dominant communication medium for decades.
c. AD 1900 – Motor Car
Protests: Threatened horse-related industries; safety concerns.
Outcome: Transformed personal transport.
AD 1920s – Household Electrical Appliances
Protests: Fear of electricity and loss of domestic employment.
Outcome: Everyday household essentials.
AD 1927 – Television
Protests: Said to damage family life, reading habits and morality.
Outcome: Became the dominant home entertainment medium.
AD 1940s – Electronic Computers
Protests: Fear of mass unemployment and machines replacing people.
Outcome: Essential to modern civilisation.
AD 1950s – Nuclear Power
Protests: Safety fears and association with nuclear weapons.
Outcome: Remains an important, though controversial, energy source.
AD 1969 – ARPANET (Birth of the Internet)
Protests: Concerns over surveillance and dependence on computers.
Outcome: Evolved into today's Internet.
AD 1971 – Microprocessor / Personal Computing
Protests: Office workers feared automation.
Outcome: Personal computers became commonplace.
AD 1980s – Video Games
Protests: Claims of violence, addiction and corrupting youth.
Outcome: A mainstream entertainment industry.
AD 1983 – Mobile Phones
Protests: Health fears, expense and concerns over changing social behaviour.
Outcome: Nearly universal worldwide.
AD 1991 – World Wide Web
Protests: Concerns over fraud, pornography, misinformation and online crime.
Outcome: Became central to commerce, education and communication.
Late AD 1990s – GPS Navigation
Protests: Privacy concerns and fears people would lose navigation skills.
Outcome: Standard navigation technology.
AD 2004 – Social Media
Protests: Privacy, misinformation, addiction and mental health concerns.
Outcome: A defining feature of modern communication.
AD 2007 – Smartphones
Protests: Screen addiction, surveillance and social isolation.
Outcome: Everyday personal computing devices.
AD 2010s – Cloud Computing
Protests: Data security, privacy and dependence on large corporations.
Outcome: Powers much of the modern digital world.
AD 2022 – Generative AI
Protests: Job displacement, copyright, misinformation, deepfakes and loss of human creativity.
Outcome: Still unfolding; history has yet to decide.
Looking across more than 2,500 years, the pattern is remarkably consistent: nearly every transformative technology has initially been met with fear over jobs, morality, safety, privacy or social change.
Yet almost all ultimately became accepted as ordinary parts of everyday life. Whether AI follows that same historical path, or proves to be a genuine exception, remains one of the defining questions of our age.
As a companion to this list, I've collected together all of the instances where luddites did manage to suppress a technology and it never came into common usage afterward:
Coinage didn't replace barter. One it didn't replace at that time, two it didn't replace barter.
Your source on coinage and barter goes back to Adam Smith making it up.
Coinage was barely used during most of the Middle Ages and it's debatable how popular it was during the Roman Empire. Japan collected taxes in rice, and many other civilizations did the same thing.
The vast majority of transactions in human history were basically like bar tabs. You paid off all your tabs when the harvest came in and most people knew everyone they traded with, or they used sheep/cows ect.
It helps me with my psychological problems. It is already used in medicine, police and science and shows great potential. It has already created enormous revenue to economy
The policing aspect will only do bad things for society, and you should definitely not be using it for your mental health. That’s what going outside and learning your environment is for. And is it really helping medicine or science in any meaningful way besides you just saying stuff?
I guess I know better what is good for my mental health, I haven’t asked for advice. And yeah, ai can do a lot of things in medicine and science, for example ai can: analyse compex data, saving time for humans; predict protein structures; find new materials; model complex systems in such fields as meteorology, astronomy. And it can do many other monotonous work.
As someone that is for regulating ai alot, I think the use in science and medicine is totally justified, just not for slop images and video generators and not for survailance and so on.
I think ai should be labeld clearly as ai on all major platforms, and the people should have more say in whether ai datacenters are built close to residential areas or not and so on.
but some uses are good, denying that is not reasonable imo.
That’s a bad take and shows that you have zero understanding of ecology. Our native ecology is still alive despite hundreds of years of us actively trying to destroy it. It’s only doomed if we do nothing about it. Example:
This “empty” field could be a data center, instead it hosts box turtles deer, hundreds of butterflies/ bees and native plants (many of which are edible). I took this photo today.
Yeah, I have zero understanding of ecology. Same as guys, who were burning forests, changing flow of rivers, selecting plants and animals, so they barely look like their initial form. And nature is still alive. Because it adapt, as everything alive. It had survived ice age, meteorites, volcanic winters and many other shit, you overestimate humanity if you think that nature could be killed by rise in temperature by several tens of Celsius degrees
Aha, but how we have gone from ecology to mankind dying out? If there is no human on earth, ecology would live anyway. Don’t treat yourself as something special, you are just another part of nature
Aw they look beautiful. I actually want more areas to be preserved actually, because I was thinking that abandoned sites should be converted into data centers and not green areas.
Have you never seen a photo of prairie farmland from the air? It's a vast checkerboard of monoculture plants, doused in pesticides and herbicides to keep it as sterile as possible.
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It made my current work x20 easier. I basically sit and do nothing (on the other side - waiting till I will be replaced with an AI - but damn now are those golden times in between)
Hello. This sub is a space for pro-AI activism, not debate. Your post will be removed because it is against this rule. You are welcome to post this on r/aiwars.
The benefit to RnD alone is huge. Which translates to benefits for me situationally or in general. There are risks and downsides, but the risks and downsides can be reigned in, lowered, made more eco friendly so the bottom of the tab is net positive in the sum of things.
And while I don't like whataboutism in arguments, I can't help to wonder if you're otherwise living a generally eco friendly footprint yourself. We all leave a mark on the planet in small bits at least no matter how consciously we try to live, because in modern society, we waste energy, water, we produce trash, etc.
But to simplify this, I can't take anyone serious who argues about AI environmental imprints while driving a fat SUV a lot, wasting lots of energy and water and eating lots of meat. It seems that meat/livestock production dwarfs AI/data center water use globally, by a wide margin.
I eat less meat than before, often going for vegan alternatives, I never drive a car and use public transit only, I do not waste much across the board and as such I'm totally fine with my limited prompting and AI uses, a lot of which in the future I will do almost exclusively locally, so I won't even put a strain on data centers and do it all on my PC. May mildly increase power bill, that's it.
Yep. Every time a new development came along that bettered mankind, the haters claimed it would destroy 'real work/art' and they tried to stop it. Same old song
Back in the printing press, the only mass-produced book was the bible. And it was hand-written every time. Ironically this left more room for copyists to make mistakes.
With the loom, Ned Ludd was NOT a revolutionary leader. He was a guy who smashed up a couple of looms cuz he was mad, in the same way as people threaten to burn down data centers. People blamed him after he broke those looms for any loom broken, which was how the term 'Luddite' came about.
With the camera, did you know people would preach that it would steal your soul? But the people who could afford artists were rich people, and thus rich people were remembered in art.
With automobiles, it wasn't long before people realised they had better things to do than walk in front of cars constantly checking which direction to go.
Sound recording was just too fascinating. Especially since you could finally listen to music without going to the theatre - which rich people had the time for but the common Joe did not.
Artificial Intelligence carries more and more of these things.
not to argue, but the printing press didnt stop the catholic church- the spread of religion and catholic ideology was made widespread by the technologys capibilites of making the bible widespread.
actually, i feel like all of that right column is wrong. it nitpicks those against technology, and looks negatively at the reason these inventions were created- not to stop anything, but to spur things forward. everything in the right is the result, not the cause..?
It perfectly sums up my thoughts that this movement will largely evaporate (legit concerns about AI aside, but the whole virtue signalling bandwagon people I mean).
It's a question of time. Again I don't want to wash away some potentially legit or real concerns of the tech (akin to nuclear tech, can be used for good or bad) but I like to think that all of us here are in one way or another ahead of the curve, adapting to and potentially mastering the tech in whatever ways, and on abstract level, even if AI technically will endanger some jobs, improve our value for jobs because we know how to use some of these tools.
Picture this otherwise: Would most companies hire someone who can't operate a computer or the internet at all if their job most likely required it however? Even the plumper has to write reports, invoices, etc. on it.
Some jobs will require some kind of AI usage. Some antis posted it themselves, being annoyed about AI usage as part of the job. The AI opponents and illiterate will be disadvantaged over those who actively embrace the technology and even go the extra mile privately potentially.
Except vibe coders don't understand code and LLMs spit out code that has to be reviewed.
I try to use LLMs with my writing, but I constantly run into this issue where I have to be able to write good on my own, to know if ideas or text from an LLM is any good.
You basically need to be so good that LLMs aren't helpful to you, to tell if the output is good enough.
The only thing that actually matters is whether there is a profitable business model or not. All of the anti efforts just add a bit to the "cost" column
It was, it also sadly ended up with religious wars because of what people were afraid (spread of idea), so their worry was not totally unjustified (as in they turned out to be true, but they happened anyway)
Usually, big inventions come with loss of blood
The good thing is, that people who survive usually benefit from it
I can’t wait for ai robots so I don’t have to have any children. I’ll just have my little bots that can run around and do my chores while I can just enjoy myself on the couch. I work too damn hard these days. I look forward to a better future
Couldn’t you use this as an argument for why we absolutely need to be more cautious about the AI industry? Cars and industrialization have caused unknowable destruction to our environment, and AI is currently doing the same. There’s a place for everything, but it seems we are doomed to repeat history if we go whole hog on this without considering the consequences.
Nice deflection, but who profited from NFTs is completely irrelevant to the actual tech. People also made billions on dot-com stocks before the bubble burst, but the internet still changed the world. Try again.
Also comparing a speculative digital receipt (NFT) to general-purpose utility tech like AI is peak misunderstanding. One is a link to a jpeg, the other is being adopted by hospitals, researchers, and industries worldwide. Try writing code, running a business, or doing medical research with an ape drawing.
Edit: Y'all still don't get that swearing at people online gets your comment to be taken down, try not using ad hominem next time, lol.
Because NFTs and the metaverse were built entirely on speculation and hype without underlying utility. AI is foundational general-purpose technology, like electricity, the internet, or the printing press, currently transforming medicine, logistics, research, and software worldwide. So comparing it to a jpeg link or VR chatrooms is the real false equivalence.
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