AI Backlash
The AI backlash is growing fast, and my read is that it will be one of the defining stories of the coming years. It arrives from a lot of directions at once: labor, copyright, energy and land use, safety, plain consumer irritation. The people involved want different and sometimes incompatible things, and they use overlapping language to ask for them.
So far the collection holds a few angles.
- Neo-Luddism follows the organized movement around work and the long career of the insult it is built from.
- Butlerian Jihad covers the demand to ban the machines outright.
- Reactance and future narratives explains why declaring a future inevitable produces people who want to fight it.
- Permanent Underclass takes apart one of the fears underneath, the expectation of being made surplus, and finds thin evidence for it.
New angles come in as they get far enough along.
Linked References
Butlerian Jihad
This is a Primer primer on the Butlerian Jihad, on what Frank Herbert’s text says about it, and on the...
Neo-Luddism
This is a Primer
primer on neo-Luddism and on the two-hundred-year career of the insult it is built from.
Permanent Underclass
This is a Primer primer on the permanent underclass, the phrase that has organized how Silicon Valley talks about everyone...
Reactance and future narratives
The louder someone insists a particular future is inevitable, the more people push back. Not because the future described is...