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It's obvious what electricity and mass production can do to improve the prosperity and happiness of a given society. It's not so obvious to me what benefits we'd be missing out on if we just canceled LLMs at this point.
Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.
So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.
When people were dying of hunger then being able to create more food was obviously a huge win. Likewise for creating light where people used to live in darkness.
But contemporary technologies solve non-problems and take us closer to a future no one asked for, when all we want is cheaper rent, cheaper healthcare, and less corruption.
You also didn't address my point that those technologies do nothing to solve the real problems that real people want solved. There's a strong possibility that they'll just exacerbate them.
The luddites were a labor movement protesting how a new technology was used by mill owners to attack collective worker power in exchange for producing a worse product. Their movement failed but they were right to fight it. The lesson we should take from them isn't to give up in the face of destabilizing technological change.
Hard to say. They sort of represented the specialist class being undermined by technology de-specializing their skillset. This is in contrast to labor strikes and riots which were executed by unskilled labor finding solidarity to tell machine owners "your machine is neat but unless you meet our demands, you'll be running around trying to operate it alone." Luddites weren't unions; they were guilds.
One was an attempt to maintain a status quo that was comfortable for some and kept products expensive, the other was a demand that given the convenience afforded by automation, the fruits of that convenience be diffused through everyone involved, not consolidated in the hands of the machine owners.
This was exactly what the historical Luddite movement was trying to archive. The industrialists responded with "lol no". Then came the breaking of machines.
Unionization and collective action does work, it's why we have things like the concept of the weekend. It's also generally useful when advocating change to have a more extreme faction.
But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Okay, so where are those? Where are even the proposals for those?
What would you propose? What do you think is fair distribution of these gains?
The telemetric enclosure movement and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity, and advancements in technology are now doing more harm than good. Life expectancy is dropping for the first time in ages, and the generational gains in life expectancy had a lot of inertia behind them. That's all gone now.