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> or a “what would happen if the Luddites won” scenario.

Worth also noting that the Luddite movement wasn't a wholesale, fervent rejection of technology: they neither rejected technology nor were inept at using it. The uprising was of skilled textile laborers who protested certain types of technology on the basis of how those technologies were applied and who they truly benefitted (i.e., the ruling rather than the laboring class). They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced than with technology as some boogeyman that should be systematically dismantled, and their protests were violently responded to with harsh legislation and military intervention.

Lumping them together with a Space ISIS is probably a bit of an unfair comparison

> They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced

This is true, but it's important to note in context that they were wrong, and that society is better off on balance given the quality/value available in the modern fashion market. I mean, duh, as it were.

You're 100% right that the real people were nuanced and intelligent and not well suited to the caricature that gets used as a mild slur in communities like HN. That's doesn't constitute a well-formed argument against technology per se.

> This is true, but it's important to note in context that they were wrong, and that society is better off on balance given the quality/value available in the modern fashion market. I mean, duh, as it were.

i don't know that. how could one know that? you been to the alternate reality where the luddites won?

Were they wrong? Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better. I’m all for progress, but I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.

Removing automated looms means everyone has fewer textiles while a few workers benefit. I think most people like the current abundance vs. being forced to spend a large fraction of their household budget on clothing and only having a few outfits in total.

Company mines were because the extraction sites were remote and goods were expensive and so they got exploited as they had essentially no independent supply beyond what their employer would sell, since the employers weren't really interested in living wages and were all too happy to exploit a captive workforce. That sort of condition will become highly relevant again if we ever get space colonies, because air & food will be scarce.

But it absolutely is difficult and disruptive to people's lives when this all changes. I have a family history talking about my great grandpa losing his job to machines and a great uncle losing a finger to bread slicing machines back when sliced bread was new, showing what that meant for our family. Yet I can also see how the past couple of generations adapted to that to find new ways forward. None of them decided to stick with the idea of being a "master tinner" they all found other ways to produce things people actually wanted.

> the past couple generations adapted

That concedes the point. Their descendants adapting decades later means the generation that lived through it absorbed the full shock of the transition. For displaced labor in the 1810s, adapting meant overworking in factories with horrible conditions and a permanent collapse in their living standards across the board. The dispute was never about accepting or banning automation, they were identifying that capital would absorb all of the gains while labor would be forced to absorb all of the shocks.

The only constant has always been change. And that just raises the question of why should we preserve ditch digging for our children just so they have meaningless labor to cling to, when we have the option to make new and better things for people. Few of us here are 'labor' in any meaningful sense, to begin with. And while I have spent time working at a factory, and I don't begrudge the robots for taking it away.

The notion that there's some idyllic past to cling to is just wishful thinking to me. The days when one person working with their body alone could have meaningful impact are long gone. We'll have to find a new prosperity that doesn't rely on zero sum thinking from economists who divide by zero, too.

No no, the question is whether you are willing to sacrifice your comfort and your children's comfort, and your grandchildren's comfort... in exchange for (hopefully) your great grandchildren's comfort.

That hasn't been my family's experience, nor my own. My grandfather's generation had already adapted to the problems of my great grandfather's generation, though they certainly did struggle.

Your great grandfather was alive during mass industrialization? In the early 1800s?

No one is saying every generation goes through this trough. Obviously. That would make no sense.

The claim is that periods of rapid technological change (i.e. industrialization, potentially AI) produce a trough of horrible conditions that then make room for a climb to conditions better than the pre-change ones.

He had a job he'd worked and mastered his entire life replaced by machinery, leaving a large family with young kids to scramble to pay the "demon mortgage" doing everything they could manage, even as tragedy struck repeatedly: a daughter dead at the breakfast table from the Spanish flu, the eldest son beaten by police after an argument related to unsafe working conditions (he lost a finger to machinery) who died in a hospital later, or the father laid up in traction after falling off a roof who would never be able to work again.

It's not quite the same as the 1800s, but it's not like we're going to relive exactly the same things as then, either. And I do think it'll look like people scrambling, possibly to find entirely different careers.

One place I disagree is that it's going to reduce demand for programmers, I think that will actually increase, as people want more and different things that would currently be impractical. We've already seen what some people can do, cheap tokens will open that up, both for good and ill, not unlike cheap bytes on the internet did.

> Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better.

Obviously any individual can "end up in tenements or mines" and one can't disprove an assertion like that.

But broadly all social metrics were showing an inexorably upward trajectory in the Britain of the 19th century, cranking into a hockey stick toward the end of the century and into the 20th. It's just not true to argue that the Luddites were right as a matter of general policy.

> I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.

To be only a tiny bit glib: that's a statement of thermodynamics, not social policy. Eggs break, period. Change is change. You can make specific arguments about things like backstopping sudden unemployment, but folding it into a discussion about Ludditism (or rather the Butlerian Jihad, I guess) isn't the right way to do that.

You’re talking about people with kids, wives, friends, hopes and dreams when you’re saying “Eggs break, period”. By reinforcing that view, you are helping to build the kind of society that just won’t care when you happen to be one of the eggs yourself.

People find it easy to be Utilitarians when they’re in the greatest number, don’t they?

Sigh. I'm just going to repeat verbatim the thing I said immediately after the bit you cherry picked to get upset about:

You can make specific arguments about things like backstopping sudden unemployment, but folding it into a discussion about Ludditism (or rather the Butlerian Jihad, I guess) isn't the right way to do that.

Sigh. It’s so tiring to argue with someone who argues about the technicalities of argument rather than actually talking about the thing they are talking about.

Stalling technological progress to preserve their high-paying jobs, in short. Wealth redistribution efforts succeeded without them.

Weavers didn't have high-paying jobs. They were working middle-class at best, with substantial support by lower-class entry and unskilled positions.

OK. Higher than average and high wages. Some of them owned workshops after all. The historic lesson stays the same: their approach is a dead end and they'll be crushed (nowadays for the national security reasons).

Yep. They were concerned about working conditions. For any tech worker that has ever moaned about return to office: Congrats you're a luddite.

Great irony in this comment

> The Dune Encyclopedia, which was not written by him but which he said he considered canonical

No, he literally wrote in the intro to the book that it wasn't canon. It was a fan project and he thought that it was great there were fans doing things like that.

edit: and like with the terrible Dune prequels, the impulse to say "here's what really happened" usually diminishes what's interesting and powerful about oblique allusions in SF meant at least partly to function as a mirror on humanity.

”In the original 6 Frank Herbert novels, it’s not ever truly explained what problems, if any, the thinking machines were actually causing.”

Apologies if I have misunderstood you but I believe it was explained. See the following:

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

The quote I posted above is from Dune.

Yes, but it never goes into what actually happened - it's just the belief of the time.

And curiously a critical part of Golden Path became a reversal of major Butlerian Jihad effects, allowing humans to be free from feudal system

It get's into exactly what happened: humanity was enslaved by a small minority of people across the galaxy for 1000s of years. Where the Spacing Guild, Mentats, and Bene Gesserit were the three things to come after; but even then humanity is still enslaved but the amount of slavers increased.

This isn't a belief, it's describing the events exactly as they happened.

> The Bene Gesserit woman knew it was healthy because of her abilities, and upon investigation it was found that the hospital’s AI had been running a eugenics program.

The irony. Perhaps the Bene Gesserit were just trying to "pace the frontier" of the eugenics market? Who can say?

The Dune Encyclopedia is essentially two eugenics programs clashing together, with one of them triggering a holy war in revenge that turned into self-destructive orgy of wholesale murder

There's a lot that I think you missed in your reading:

If you read the preambles to each chapter and the glossary in the back of Dune, you'll find that the Butlerian Jihad was a violent war that lasted 100 years.

If you read the preambles to the chapters in Dune, you'll find the Butlerian Jihad's problems were explained rather succinctly: people turned over their thinking to machines and were ruled by the master of the machines, and thinking machines created poverty for workers.

The entire society, the great houses, the spacing guild, the Orange Catholics, Bene Geserit, and Mentats, all who emerged to replace functions of thinking machine and all three organizations had very real motivations to ensure that thinking machines would never rose to prominence again (and the Bene Geserit were quite surgically violet when needed) and it was clear that doing for an individual was a capital crime, and for a ruling house, would invite at the least the Spacing Guild cutting your world off, and transporting armies to destroy you at a deep, deep discount. The entirety of society was aligned against thinking machines, and this is what made Dune so different, and for me, fascinating as I grew up.

>As humankind spread throughout the known universe, technology advanced and eventually machines were made that would make decisions for people. This propelled the creators of these machines into a new technocratic class, effectively controlling the worlds of the common people.

It's right there in the opening paragraph of OPs post. It's the people who controlled the machines that could not be trusted. We're not worried so much about about AI going rogue. We're worried because people who control it have aleady gone rogue. It is too powerful and dangerous a tool to be trusted in the hands of primates.

In Dune: Awakening, the first DLC has a storyline that takes you into the heart of a surviving AI's lair. It's strongly implied that humans drove it insane, rather than it starting out murderous.

Software developers saving face?

I've always believed the Jihad was mostly about world building - defining a different vision for a how a future civilization could look than most sci-fi of that era was considering, and then exploring consequences of it throughout the epic. Somewhat akin to Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, but maybe even more similar to Tolkien.

I think it was also motivated by a desire to solve a number of problems with sci-fi that explores the far future and realistically considers the evolving role of machine intelligence. Frankly, a lot of those futures are not interesting for human story-telling because the humans are no longer making the important decisions and aren't the agents of change. Different authors have dealt with this problem in different ways.

Banks acknowledged that the Minds would be making most of the most important decisions, but carved out niches where humans (rather inexplicably) still held some advantages - e.g. in Special Circumstances. Much of it feels honest - humans in the Culture are mostly hedons who have everything provided for them by machines, everything is wonderful, and some people really struggle to find meaning. Ultimately though I don't find it credible at all. He doesn't see (so the Minds don't see) the ethical problems with his imperialist hegemony. He doesn't know about the alignment problem so there is no explanation of how it is dealt with, etc.

Vinge quite famously pointed out that you can't write sci-fi about super-intelligence because you have no idea what a super-intelligence would do; this is where many essential ideas of the singularity came from or were popularized. He dealt with it in one series by creating the zones of thought - godlike superintelligence and many technologies can only exist in the High Beyond or Transcend - far from the galactic plane. The further you get from the galactic center the faster computation can happen (including human thought). So you include elements of that in the story, but the story is set in zones where humans have to do pretty much all the decision making while dealing with threats posed by superintelligence. In Marooned in Realtime he dealt with it by disappearing the civilization without explanation (from the perspective of the characters).

Egan dealt with it - in Diaspora - by creating machine intelligence that is grown exactly the same way as human intelligence is - basically the next stage of human evolution. Those people retain most human characteristics (of personality, character, love, friendship) but still have incredible powers of reasoning and scientific exploration. He tells Vinge to hold his beer and follows those threads where he thought they might lead.

I think you're mostly right. Herbert worked backward from sand dunes in Oregon to create his Dune universe. He needed reasons for people to look and act and fight in certain ways that would make people interested in reading his work. The Butlerian Jihad was justification for why there was no C3PO. It's why the events were told but never shown.

But it's still interesting to consider why he chose those particular devices.

> Vinge quite famously pointed out that you can't write sci-fi about super-intelligence because you have no idea what a super-intelligence would do

That's silly. We have no idea what a god would do; many have written fiction about them (and I'm not slyly slamming the Bible: intentional fiction).

In fact, from Colossus: The Forbin Project to Avengers: Age of Ultron, many authors have written about intelligences greater than ours and their "obvious/inevitable" decisions.

What about the cyborgs ? Whatever their name was.... I can't remember. But they were the "thinking machine" class?

> In the original 6 Frank Herbert novels

Aren't there just three of them?