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How the AI boom is informed by the Industrial Revolution

Is another revolution against tech coming?

For instance, it was surely part of a farmer’s workday to regulate the temperature of Dutch chicken incubators in the 1600s, so when Cornelis Drebbel invented the first thermostat in 1620(over a century before the Industrial Revolution) it replaced that job function with an "intelligent" agent. In a lot of contexts, if ChatGPT does spread and is adopted by entrepreneurs and executives en masse, it could squeeze and transform vocations, give employers more control over the work process, and, again, drive down wages. I think the idea that the rise of AI companies alone will lead to conditions that are so bleak that we have a reprisal of the Luddite uprising — in the sense of an organized campaign of mass sabotage against employers' tech anyway — is pretty unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future.

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