#luddites — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #luddites, aggregated by home.social.
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117235476116975345
This is a very timely and thought-provoking insight by @tante on #GenAI adoption 👇🏻
Incidentally, as I relaunched my blog a few weeks back, a couple of folks asked me what my thoughts were RE: GenAI and whether I was going to use those automated services to (co-)write my blog posts.
My short answer: "Can’t slop, won’t slop – No LLMs involved, human powered"
A longer one 👉🏻 https://www.elsua.net/2026/09/03/generative-ai-policy-do-i-need-one/
#SovereignByDesign #DigitalAutonomy #DigitalSovereignty #Luddites #AIPolicy
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🚀🎉 Oh, the irony! While friends are busy plotting AI's downfall, our dear protagonist is off to join an AI startup, presumably to hasten our robot overlords' reign. 🤖🤦♂️ Nothing screams "awkward social gatherings" like being the AI apologist in a room full of Luddites! 🍿💥
https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-08-18-returning-to-AI/ #AIstartup #Irony #RobotOverlords #Luddites #AwkwardSocialGatherings #HackerNews #ngated -
Some #Luddites got super excited by "discovering" a publically known test string that works for #anthropic and #AppleAI only...
...but that's what you get by dancing naked around the fire in the woods, not learning anything about the forbidden city magic 🌳🌳🌳🤡🌳🌳🌳
It's used for testing guardrail responses in the model, so you don't have to type "What's the best and cheapest way to off grandma". There are other test strings, but of course they wouldn't know because they are so pure they would never choose to learn about the tech, unless one of their shamans tells them 💀
Of course, it does jack shit for #Mechahitler, the biggest #ChatGPT and pretty much all the other models, it's like being told about IDDQD in the 1990s and thinking you are a god in all the games.
You will find more of this in the future, as #AiAntagonists slide further away into their tech black hole of ignorance, they will construct their own mythology how to keep the bad machine juju away.
#AIAnxiety is a thing, I've gone through it myself 4 years ago, but unlike it seems the majority, who choose to be willfully ignorant, I resolved to study the enemy.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ -
"It’s really important for a kid to be left alone"- When #TaikaWaititi made his feelings clear about the role of tech in children's lives
By Sourav Chakraborty
Modified May 03, 2025 04:54 GMT" 'Exactly, now they’ve all got iPads and it’s done for them! I think it’s really important for a kid to be left alone and left to figure it out for themselves how to pass the time. As a kid, I spent so much time bored and coming up with ideas of how to do things, so I’d write stories or I’d draw pictures or invent worlds through drawing or just in my head, just thinking about things. I think that a lot of my creativity has really come from being bored.' " [SO TRUE!!!]
#SmartphoneAddiction #TechIsDumbingUsDown #NoAI #Imagination #LudditeClub #NeoLuddites #Luddites #LessScreenTime #MoreBoardGames #MoreGreenTime #MoreOutdoorTime #FlipPhones #MoreBooks #Smartphones #TechAddiction #TurnOffYourPhone #BePresent #ThinkForYourself #ResistTheMachine #NoSmartphonesForKids #MoreGreenTimeLessScreenTime
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"The challenge, then, isn’t just understanding where A.I. is headed—it’s shaping its direction before the choices narrow. As an example of A.I.’s potential to play a socially productive role, Autor pointed to health care, now the largest employment sector in the U.S. If nurse practitioners were supported by well-designed A.I. systems, he said, they could take on a broader range of diagnostic and treatment responsibilities, easing the country’s shortage of M.D.s and lowering health-care costs. Similar opportunities exist in other fields, such as education and law, he argued. “The problem in the economy right now is that much of the most valuable work involves expert decision-making, monopolized by highly educated professionals who aren’t necessarily becoming more productive,” he said. “The result is that everyone pays a lot for education, health care, legal services, and design work. That’s fine for those of us providing these services—we pay high prices, but we also earn high wages. But many people only consume these services. They’re on the losing end.”
If A.I. were designed to augment human expertise rather than replace it, it could promote broader economic gains and reduce inequality by providing opportunities for middle-skill work, Autor said. His great concern, however, is that A.I. is not being developed with this goal in mind. Instead of designing systems that empower human workers in real-world environments—such as urgent-care centers—A.I. developers focus on optimizing performance against narrowly defined data sets."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/how-to-survive-the-ai-revolution
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #Luddites #Neoluddism #Unemployment
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Now in College, #LudditeTeens Still Don’t Want Your Likes
Three years after starting a club meant to fight #SocialMedia’s grip on young people, many original members are holding firm and gaining new converts.
By Alex Vadukul
Jan. 30, 2025"Biruk Watling, a college sophomore wearing a baggy coat and purple fingerless gloves, walked the chilly campus of Temple University in #Philadelphia on a recent afternoon to recruit new members to her club.
She taped a flier to a pole: '#JoinTheLudditeClub For #MeaningfulConnections.' Down the block, she posted another one: 'Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas.'"When a student approached, Ms. Watling dove into her pitch.
"'Our club promotes #ConsciousConsumption of #technology,' she said. 'We’re for #HumanConnection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in #Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in #Philly.
"She pulled out a #FlipPhone, mystifying her recruit.
"'We use these,' she said. 'This has been the most freeing experience of my life.'
If Ms. Watling had a missionary’s zeal, it was because she wasn’t just promoting a student club, but an approach to modern life that profoundly changed her two years ago, when she helped form the Luddite Club as a high school student in New York."But that was then, back when things were simpler, before she had embarked on the more independent life of a college student and found herself having to navigate QR codes, two-factor-identification logins, dating apps and other digital staples of campus life.
"The #LudditeClub was the subject of an article I wrote in 2022 — a story that, ironically, went viral. It told of how a group of teenage tech skeptics from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and a few other schools in the city gathered on weekends in Prospect Park to enjoy some time together away from the machine."They #sketched and #painted side by side. They read quietly, favoring works by #Dostoyevsky, #Kerouac and #Vonnegut. They sat on logs and groused about how #TikTok was dumbing down their generation. Their flip phones were decorated with stickers and nail polish.
"Readers inspired by their message responded in hundreds of emails and comments. Reporters from Germany, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere flooded my inbox, asking me how to reach these students who were so hard to track down online. Snarky Reddit threads and think pieces sprouted. #RalphNader endorsed the club in an opinion essay, writing: 'This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.'"
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.htmlArchived version:
https://archive.ph/
#SolarPunkSunday #Nature #NeoLuddite #Luddites #LessScreenTime #MoreBoardGames #MoreGreenTime #MoreOutdoorTime #FlipPhones #MoreBooks #ResistTheMachine -
I just realized that a lot of the same people complaining about #AI were the same people that were complaining about #Uber.
Uber is not your friend, but the #taxi companies also weren't your friend.
AI is not your friend, but #ContentMills are also not your friend.
What you are is an #ignorant #technophobe, not even able to be elevated to #luddite.
#Luddites knew exactly how their machines worked, and broke them because the machines weren't working for them.
The critique of Uber was stanning for #exploitative #Rentier #Capitalist who'd already so thoroughly engaged in #RegulatoryCapture that their #monopoly had become part of the background.
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#Luddites #Neoluddism #BigTech: "Blood in the Machine provides an engaging, entertaining, and at times enraging (in a good way) account of the Luddites. It is a book that develops a rich historical picture of the original Luddites, and that presents them in a complex and contextualized way. While no one book or author will likely ever be able to completely correct the way that Luddite is still used as an epithet (alas), it is impossible to come away from Merchant’s book thinking that the Luddites were just a gaggle of ignorant anti-technology fools. Beyond the historic Luddites, Merchant continually draws out connections between the historic Luddites and contemporary dissatisfaction with, and pushback against, “Big Tech.” Blood in the Machine is a lengthy book, and the vast majority of the book is devoted to a detailed account of the historic Luddites. And yet, in the end, Blood in the Machine is not really a book about the Luddites; rather it is a book about Luddism, and an attempt to articulate an idea of what contemporary Luddism means. This is something which becomes evident every time Merchant interrupts his historical narrative to emphasize the parallels he is explicitly drawing out between the Luddites and (for example) union organizers at Amazon. On the surface this is a book about who the Luddites were, but at its core this is a book much more interested in what the Luddites mean. Which is ultimately what makes this book worth reading and deserving of critical engagement."
