For what it's worth, and at the risk of sounding like I'm nitpicking, traditional Luddism is not dismissal of technology as overhyped or smoke-and-mirrors. Quite the opposite; the technology is recognized as very real and very impactful. The question instead becomes, "what happens to us, the ones it replaces?". And at least in the original incarnation, given an insufficiently satisfying answer, you smash some looms up to try and slow the encroachment of automation.

From a historical standpoint, you're spot on.

Neo-Luddism is still opposition to a lot of modern technologies, but for a very disparate set of reasons. For example, many oppose the mass adoption of social media due to perceived mental health and social impacts. Others oppose smart phones and "screen addiction." These things can qualify as "neo-luddism" even though the opposition is not rooted in job displacement.

I've often said that I am myself becoming more and more of a "neo-luddite" but it's purely for personal reasons. I don't want to see social media or smart phones disappear as I couldn't care less about what other people do with their lives. I just find that the older I get, the less I want to use modern tech in general.

It might just be burnout and boredom. I am now middle aged and I've been coding since I was 10. I used to be extremely enthusiastic about technology but as time progresses I have less and less interest in it. The industry in which I have based my entire career just doesn't excite me anymore. Today I just couldn't care less about ChatGPT / "AI" / LLMs, Bitcoin, smart phones, video games, social media, fintech etc. In my free time I find myself doing more things like reading books, going hiking in the backcountry and pursuing craft-related hobbies like performing stage magic with my wife and partner.

I feel the same. I don’t have the same kind of enthusiasm now as I do a kid.

I’ll also say, I think LLMs are different than bitcoin. It has its own killer app, and it has tremendous social impact, not necessarily positive. If anything, crypto doesn’t really make sense without AIs.

One thing though is that the foundational models are created and controlled by big tech. It’s been compared to silicon fabs and its scales of economy … However, I don’t see a future where foundational models can only be created by large orgs with a lot of resources is something beneficial for society.

Totally aside - but is there an excellent resource you can recommend for learning more/getting started with stage magic?

If I had to pick one "beginner resource" for the absolute newbie then it's hard to beat the book "Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic." From there you can decide what interests you and thus where to go next, since magic is such a broad field.

One of the reasons I love it so much is that it is a multi-skill discipline and it's really a type of theatre so it can be kept as simple and narrow or as broad and open ended as you want it to be.

https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Wilsons-Complete-Course-Magic/dp...

Thanks!

I thought that this was me ("The industry in which I have based my entire career just doesn't excite me anymore."), but then I realized I actually am mostly just interested in programming the way some people are interested in any other skill or machine. Some people learn guitar because they need to make music and play out. Others just love playing the guitar, even and especially when nobody is watching, for its own pleasure.

To me, there is no greater toy than a programming language. ChatGPT is neat, but it isn't a programming language. Same for blockchain or agile or whatever other trend is happening in the industry. Some of the trends literally are new programming languages! Golang is really fun! So is TypeScript!

Some trends or technologies make programming even more fun (in my opinion anyway) and I embrace those feverishly: distributed version control, CI/CD, pair programming (sometimes it's even more fun with a friend!), configurable linters like Perl::Critic, Intellisense, JUnit-style testing frameworks. All this stuff helps me feel more in control of the computer (or distributed cluster of computers), which I've discovered is the main thing that gets me off about programming.

I'm even still hopeful that LLMs will have some role to play in my having more fun with programming. I've tried CoPilot and so far it hasn't grabbed me, but maybe this will change. In any case, there are clearly other people having fun with it so I guess that's good. Maybe somebody can find joy by debugging GPT-4 prompts the same way I enjoy pouring over stack traces.

This is completely valid and I wish that were me.

I'm a "maker." Although I try to bring a level of "craftsmanship" to my code, and I care a great deal about code quality, refactoring and solving problems at the code level - and I definitely enjoy the process - it is still a means to an end. It is the configuration of raw materials that contribute to the final form of something useful and tangible.

The most tragic part is realizing that it is very unlikely that I will ever care about what it is that I am producing in tech. I was self employed for 15 years and that was extremely rewarding because the business and the product was my vision, my creation etc. Now that I am back in the job market I find that what was a career for 20 years has become "just" a job. I am making something, and that matters, but I'm not making something I would personally use as an end-user. And that is not a slight against the things I am making. They are useful to someone. Just not to me. I have spent the last few years thinking about what it would look like to make something I myself use and that's when I realized that, relatively speaking, I hardly use any tech as an end-user in my personal life at all.

I could have written this myself. I'm currently going the scary "bootstrapped founder" route because at least the tool I'm paid to work on is something I care about and I can put a lot of my craftsmanship on.

But in general my long term goal is to go write mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods, and move away from the direction Big Tech is going.

I love computers, software, but I would not say I love technology anymore, nor I think that the Internet is a net benefit for humanity anymore. It's been quite hard to accept that my view of the tech world has turned upside down in no more than a couple years.

"[writing] mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods" sounds wonderful!

Indeed!

Though when my wife and I have talked about "going off grid" and living remote, she wanted to understand my limits and asked about electricity.

I pointed out that electricity led to the discovery of logic gates, which led to integrated programmable circuits, which led to the Von Neumann Architecture, which led to Ethernet, which led to the Internet which led to Twitter.

It's a slippery slope!

You sound like me. Middle aged and tired of the bullshit.

The difference is I'm mostly tired of the social garbage that keeps piling up on top of things. The competitiveness, the pressure to "be productive", the grifters, the capitalists who put money before people, the bureaucrats. It's never enough more more more faster faster faster meanwhile the roadblocks that are put in place get bigger uglier and stickier than ever.

I just stopped participating in that stuff. Got off Facebook. Got off Twitter. Curated my Reddit feeds to be built around useful and helpful communities, not reactionary meme-ified BS. Started reading more. Started using RSS again (but again a reduced and focused subset of useful sites).

I'm feeling much better and I still find I enjoy technology. Microelectronics, 3d printing, functional programming, distributed systems.

I'm working on a cloud connected garage door opener. I don't care that it's never going to be productized. I don't care that I can go an Alibaba and order one for $15. I'm just doing it because I want to work on my microelectronics skills and I find it fulfilling. I'm doing it my way, at my own pace, without the BS.

The demographics of this site are getting older (you can see a recent-ish poll on the site for some indication.) The same phenomenon was on Slashdot in the '00s writ large also. Lots of older disgruntled engineers who hated how the MPAA and RIAA controlled all of software, snooped everyone's packets, and how when they started in the industry in the '80s people took pride in shipping shrinkwrapped software. It's an interesting pathology but, like all pathologies, it becomes tiring on the site when people bring it up constantly.

Hype cycle topics seem to attract opinionated folks who have strong feelings on topics and have the need to shout them from the rooftops, whether that's doomer, booster, or luddite. That's what I find exhausting.

I argue that I don’t think those questions about looms have been adequately explored, and we’re still paying for that even as another wave of innovations roll in.

It’s broader than simply, that people lose jobs to automation. A much bigger societal impact comes from treating people as automatons, which is how business are incentivized to end up with non-people automations.

Agreed. That makes the AI will kill us all crowd the real luddites for this topic.

No the real luddites would the one who are attempting to kill AI before it hatches.

I am guessing people who think AI is such an existential threat will try to kill it. It would be irrational not to

> Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow.

Which will really show how much busywork we humans do in a lot of areas. If -- before AI is "smart" -- it can impact humanity.. well, i feel it says more about our current society foundations than it does AI heh.

Microsoft is bringing OpenAI into Office 365. I predict no loss of employment in busywork, just a bigger output of boring reports per worker.

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

And we thought there was an epidemic of bullshit jobs before! Not only will everyone be spending their days churning out this garbage, but everyone will be forced to read it as well!

This is not the dystopia I had in mind! It’s much more boring and missing the cool mirrored shades.

You don't read it, you just ask a bot to tell you what's in it. ;-)

There's a 4th - AI is a bicycle and I am riding the bicycle more and more every day.

You forgot about the rest of us. Developers who are interested in the subject and want to read about the latest developments and techniques. We're actually interested in the computer science.

Yah. I mean, a lot of human activity in employment is not really smart.

Anything that you can make into a fairly formulaic job for someone who's not really interested in doing it or improving too much is probably not very intellectually demanding (but perhaps may be a bit demanding in world perception or actuation than current AI/robotics systems).

And I believe that is "most jobs."

I would argue that a true luddite towards AI needs a corollary:

- The luddites: it's just hype — because I will kill it with fire before it takes over.

There's also a lot of faux-intellectual attention grifters who don't really have any beliefs other than whatever the local kool-aid is and will say whatever gets the number in the top right to go up because that makes monkey brain feel good.

These types of participants are the most easily simulated with AI because they're (whether they know it or not) just optimizing for a variable, something that existing AI tech is pretty good at so I expect their numbers to explode before the other three types you listed.

- the realists: it's just a stochastic parrot spitting regurgitated content back at you. Good at summarizing search results. Unreliable and will never be. A toy. Do not use if errors are expensive.

- The realists: what do LLM's actually do, and what are their limits

- The luddites: who is going to benefit from LLM's and who will suffer more?

- The doomers: AI will kill us all

- The children: look at this! look at me! look at this! Wheeeeee!

- The money: how many people can we pay less or not at all thanks to AI

- The scientists: ok, that's cool, but what happens if we ...

Also:

- The scammers - how many well-meaning people can we use an LLM to build meaningful (to them) relationships with, to the point where they're willing to just send us money?

- The griefers - how much discord can an LLM create, for the lulz?

(to be fair, those might be subsets of "realists", but I think they're important subsets)

And the "true believers": AI will lead to the singularity, which we must try to accelerate by any means necessary so it can be our new God.

In the circles I'm in 2019(GPT-2-era) AI was seen through the lens of the artist as a new sort of artistic tool - something that could enable new forms of expression and take media to places it had never gone before.

Sometime toward the end of the diffusion days though, the property rights scissor cut through the community. The conflict had a dramatic cooling effect on AI-created/assisted content.

I just think it's neat how the perception of AI shifts depending on proximity.