Many of the Luddites' issues were taken up by Marx.

I wonder if, and how, the analogy would play out with AI.

Free software, even if not open sourced, is putting the means (and memes) of production into the hands of the workers.

I don’t think non open source software fits the FSF definition of free software

And that's why I added the clause, this is a case where I think gratis is more important than libre — when it comes to putting the means of production into the hands of the workers.

> free software, even when not open source

is never “free software” is all.

Power looms were just putting skilled weavers out of work. AI is going to be used to decide if you can go to college or take out a loan, what kinds of culture are produced, provide mass-customized propaganda to everyone at the whim of anyone with a nickel's worth of AWS credits, and it goes on.

They're fundamentally different. I'm in IT and don't think there is much to be done about it "taking my job", but certainly we need to keep it out of the path of important society-defining decisions. It's important to separate these two things, and AFAICT the public debate about this -- such as it is -- is not.

I hate this comparison because the tone of it discounts the real human suffering caused by these events. Yes, we are better off now. But the transition through the industrial revolution caused a lot of pain.

The rise of AI is going to cause real human suffering. Sure, we will probably be better off in 100 years. But that's little comfort the those that lose their jobs or the ones that get crushed under the new AI powered Noble class.

It's good to be empathetic towards anyone suffering, but you must also consider how much suffering is avoided when technology advances.

Yes, washing machines caused suffering for women who made a living manually washing clothes. But they alleviated far, far more suffering by automating a physically difficult task.

My guess is that widespread adoption of new technology almost always reduces net suffering in the long term. Prioritizing the reduction of suffering today at the cost of more suffering in the future seems short-sighted.

I suppose I missed the part where the mechanised loom makers harvested hundreds of millions of books and images without permission in order to make their machines work.