On Schizophrenic Neo-Luddism

The term "Luddite" originated in the early 19th century, when textile workers in England destroyed weaving machines in protest against the mechanization of their industry. In the 21st century, the term has been revived to describe individuals opposed to the increasing use of technology.

Neoluddites are people who reject technology and prefer a simpler way of life. They believe that technology is dehumanizing, leading to a loss of community, social cohesion, and meaningful work. Neoluddites also worry about the environmental impact of technology, such as the depletion of natural resources and the increase in waste.

Now, this isn't an article bashing Neoluddites, this is more about the phenomenon of Schizophrenic Neo-Luddism that has entered our collective consciousness in the recent few years.

What do I mean by that? I'll take examples of some of the most influential people of our times in tech, why these people? I don't have anything against them. I choose them because they are useful in knowing where exactly the current zeitgeist is.

Let's start with the current thing, AI. Everyone and their grandmother want to talk about it.

WHAT ABOUT AI SAFETY BRO?

But what caught my eye was this open letter shenanigans brought by a few of the smartest people of our time.

1.) WHAT

What's absolutely fascinating about this is the people who are proposing this. Elon Musk? Tech leaders? You would think this is AOC, Larry Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren but no - it comes from Silicon Valley elites.

Elon has no issue deploying an actual car that is controlled by AI into the streets which he has been doing for the last few years but now all of a sudden has issues with a chatbot and a few image generators?

I don't want this to seem like a hit piece on Elon (I think he's a very smart guy). I take his example because it is the most glaringly obvious one. How can a person who is the poster boy of tech accelerationism at the same time be a Luddite when it comes to AI.... while working on AI? The sentence itself has so many contradictions it hurts my brain.

Let's tinfoil hat theory this. First with some good old-fashioned Machiavellianism, with the assumption that there are no non-self-interested actors:

Elon famously made a 100M investment into OpenAI back when it was.. uhm.. checks notes "Open" and it was a non-profit. OpenAI then went closed-source and pivoted to a for-profit company and for some reason the early investors who invested when it was a nonprofit got no ownership of the new for-profit entity. It could simply be that Elon is a bit salty about the way OpenAI operated its business. Now I would be salty as well if they pulled this scam on me. Then Open AI got bought by Microsoft which only added fuel to the fire.

Another billionaire, Bill Gates (Founder of Microsoft) on the other hand, is very interested in solving climate change but is also famous for his short position on Tesla (which is at least from the outside, a pro-environment company).

Let's take attention out of the AI bubble and look in a different direction:

Now you can easily go to SteamDB and check how many users are playing VR at the moment. At the time of writing this article, this very sentence, there are almost 16k people playing VRChat "strapping a TV to their face".

Let's move away from Elon and Bill gates. Let's move to another smart billionaire, Peter Thiel:

If A.I. is communist in nature, why is he the founder of an A.I. surveillance company that works with the government, Palantir?

There's more:

All financial assets are Ponzi by nature. They only have value because people think they have value. The only difference between these assets whether it's the currency of a nation, stock of a company, or crypto is the person/entity at the top of the Ponzi. Warren Buffet, who made billions from investing all his life is smart enough to know this but then why does he label crypto as rat poison and a Ponzi scheme when he knows it's not that different from stocks/currencies and then...... goes ahead and invests in a pro-crypto bank?

It's like that saying "There are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no libertarians in a bank run." Machiavellianism as a prior tells you these leaders are just fighting their political battles out in the open for their own self-interest, but is there something more to this?

Schizophrenic Neoluddism

The psychological phenomenon of being an accelerationist in specific domains while being Luddite in all the other ones is what I call Schizophrenic Neoluddism. To reuse the meme below again:

Inside you are two wolves

Now, isn't this just normal? To be able to have contrary ideas, to be optimistic about certain aspects of technology and pessimistic about different aspects at the same time? Well, it is, as long as we still believe in one axiom that we humans have held onto since the cave days, the axiom that Technology is a net positive to the world. The dangerous question to ask though is whether this phenomenon that we see amongst the smartest people of our time is just a result of technology in late-stage modernity becoming just like democracy, a god that failed.

You see two things make up human civilization, technology, and politics. Technology by definition is doing more things with less. Politics on the other, is making things better for one group by making it worse for another. The story we engineers tell ourselves is that, unlike Politics, Technology is a positive sum game. Even though many textile workers lost their job after the mechanization of their industry, it made textiles easier and cheaper to produce making it more accessible to the next generation.

Everything that we do, all our useless day-to-day political battles are fine as long as the next generation ends up having a better life than their parents. This belief however is slowly slowly changing. The risk we have now with AI is that it crushes the middle. It asks dangerous questions about human beings like the question of IQ.

We can argue the idea of the bell curve is just some fascist propaganda but the risk with AI is that if the bell curve is not propaganda, this is what AI will do:

The outstanding performers in whatever industry will now have amplified performance while everyone else will be dead weight. Maybe the phenomenon of schizophrenic neoluddism is a product of us slowly realizing that maybe our new technological advancements are not gonna be a net positive for the majority.

I'm looking at you, bioweapons program... I mean "gain of function" research.

Having said all this I'm still biased to say that there is no going back. You have keep to going forward for better or worse. You can't stop this by writing open letters, being a Luddite is always a long-term losing position.

As tempted as I may be to end it on a positive note I am choosing to end this with some dark humor.

AI safety, AI Alignment... and now we want a 6-month curfew on working on AI?

How are we gonna do this? OH, I HAVE AN IDEA.

Alright folks, listen up! It's time to regulate keyboards. Yeah, you heard me right. We need to ban those boring old keyboards that people have been using for decades. Instead, we need to force everyone to use keyboards with AI in them. Why, you ask? Well, so they can detect when someone is writing machine learning code and short-circuit itself, of course! We gonna regulate AI with... AI.

Any programmer who dares to use a normal keyboard will be sent straight to the Gulags. Yeah, you heard me. The Gulags. We're not messing around here, people.

I know what you're thinking. "This sounds like something out of a dystopian novel!" And you're right. This is exactly the kind of thing Ayn Rand would write about if she was still alive. But hey, I'm just the messenger here. Don't shoot me, okay?

It may sound crazy, but hey, stranger things have happened. And if this ever does get implemented, I take no responsibility for the chaos that ensues. You've been warned!