Ever smash a textile mill?
They say history does repeat itself, you know. When Ned Ludd bashed his textile machinery, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't because he hated technology. It wasn't because a fear of the future. It was simply because he knew that when the tools and technology don't improve people's lives or the quality of production, and they purely exist to degrade workers' lives and workers' wages and workers' livelihood for the sake of profit, then that technology is not an advancement for humanity, and definitely not for the worker or working class or anyone else but the ruling class.
Ok, and why do I mention any of this? If you have to ask, I don't think you're paying close enough attention, or maybe you live in an alternate reality. But I do think those of you who are currently looking for work or who pay attention to the news know exactly what I'm talking about. Because AI, in most cases, does nothing to actually improve the quality of the output or the burden on the worker. What it does do is entirely replace the worker, a human being. It erodes wages, pollutes our planet, degrades quality, and leads ultimately to economic instability. When you replace human workers with AI you remove those wages from the economy.
So you don't think I have lost my train of thought here... the textile workers in the 1800s who called themselves Luddites understood that replacing them with machinery was not progress, it was not an improvement, it was an attack on the working class.
Don't be afraid to use your brain. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to grow. Don't be afraid to stand up against the normalization and use of AI to do jobs that people should be doing!
If they want to use AI to cure diseases or actually benefit humanity and the planet, great. I'd like to see that. But so far, that's not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing it destroy communities. I'm seeing it pollute our environment. I'm seeing it being used as a weapon, and I'm seeing it being used to replace the working class. None of that benefits humanity. For goodness sake, stop using it as entertainment. Every time you do, there's a community that is directly being harmed. Precious resources are being wasted, jobs lost, and creativity is dying. We can do better. We have to.
You don't have to pick up a hammer and smash a machine like Ned did, just stop using it.