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‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse
From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future – is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?
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. It’s typically code for ‘We’re gonna find a way around labour regulations’ … I don’t think it’s unthinking backlash or King Canute fighting against the tide [to point that out].” One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. Wisecracking on the brink, the TrashFuture gang have no time for the brisk dismissal of groups like the neo-luddites, but neither are they all that keen to start an assault on the world’s computer farms, delivering the pre-emptive blow to future AIs that Yudkowsky has called for in print.
Or read this on r/tech
