It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?
Along way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. “Write down ‘beautiful’ in your notebook,” encourages Hilton, 31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and how – centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrialising England resisted advances in the textile industry that were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence – he came to sympathise with its modern reimagining.
“Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe three definitions,” says Hilton. “Older people will sometimes say, ‘Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I’m such a luddite!’ And what they mean is, they haven’t been able to keep pace with technological change.” Then there are the people who actively reject modern devices and appliances, he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be called that) as well. “But, in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would definitely describe myself as one.”
Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” (...)
There are techno sceptic sceptics, of course, those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremonger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia bin of history, along with their 19th-century antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking – “if we want it”, Bastani wrote. Last year, the Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening Standard that called pessimism about technology “irrational”. Afolami advised the paper’s readers in bold type: Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk described AI as the “most disruptive force in history”, something that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe for ill. “You’re not selling this,” joked Sunak at one point.
Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,” Hilton says. (...)
Maybe luddism is the answer. As far as I can make out, talking to all these people, it isn’t about refusing advancement, instead it’s an act of wondering: are we still advancing our relish of the world? How queasy or unreal or threatened do we need to feel before we stop seeing these conveniences as convenient? The author Zadie Smith has joked in the past that we gave ourselves to tech too cheaply in the first instance, all for the pleasure, really, of being a moving dot on a useful digital map. Now bosses can track their workers’ every keystroke. Telemarketing firms put out sales calls with AI-generated voices that mimic former employees who have been let go. A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.
“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
by Tom Lamont, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Lisa Sheehan/The Guardian
