The moral ascendancy of the Luddites and why you should resist AI in your work and life with ecclesiastical fervor
In the early days of the 19th century, highly-skilled textile workers in England revolted against the industrialization they rightly believed would replace them with the introduction of machinery that required only cheap, unskilled labor. They called themselves Luddites, after Ned Ludd, a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters sent to mill owners and government officials. Mill owners took to shooting the protestors, and eventually, the movement was suppressed with British troops. Many Luddites were executed or sent to penal colonies, and the revolt was quelled.
While in common parlance, the word Luddite has come to mean someone who is anti-technology, the protests were not about technology or tools of the trade, but about fair pay and safe working conditions. The mill owners traded in skilled workers for machines, making the jobs both more dangerous and less financially viable for labor. It was a question of profit over labor, and big business won, as it always does when left unchecked.
We have a similar situation today. Not only have LLMs (Large Language Models) been built on a foundation of intellectual property stolen from millions of artists, they are being used to replace human labor in order to increase profitability at the expense of society at large. This is happening with no concern for how to replace those jobs or care for those workers. There is a very real human cost for this supposed technological advancement, not to mention the environmental catastrophe it is causing.
It was a question of profit over labor, and big business won, as it always does when left unchecked.
Outside of the tech bros who believe that GenAI can and should be used for everything, most people take a more nuanced approach. There are the modern Luddites, such as myself, who see no long-term benefit from engaging in such heresy because we believe GenAI to be more morally indefensible, as well as creatively and practically problematic.
Once you delegate higher function to a machine, you eventually lose the ability to perform that function on your own. There are real consequences to this behavior, both for the individual and for society as a whole. Not only are you stealing from others, but you’re cheating yourself.
What’s left is nearly everyone else who finds some acceptable use for GenAI because they don’t think of that particular function as something that would be harmful—to them. If you’re not a photographer or illustrator, why not use GenAI to create art for your project? If you’re not an editor or proofreader, why not use an LLM to “clean up” your emails? You don’t do those things professionally anyway, so what’s the harm?
Everyone seems fine rationalizing the thing that they believe won’t harm them, or at least won’t immediately take food out of their mouths. They don’t seem to mind that it will take from someone else.
“It’s coming for us all,” they’ll tell you. “It’s inevitable. There’s nothing you can do. You have to just accept it.”
I expect quite a bit more from my alleged community of artists. I fear too many can no longer claim that moniker, especially on this platform, because they view the process of writing as just another method of gaming the system for profit. I’ll never understand that mentality. Writers transcribe their thoughts in order to connect to the humanity in themselves and others. There is no place in that process for the idle chit chat of a programmer’s delusions of what comes next.
There is no place in that process for the idle chit chat of a programmer’s delusions of what comes next.
Many people will read the above and take from it that change is inevitable. The men who built wagons were always going to lose out to those who built cars. A printing press was always going to be more efficient than a scribe and would therefore always prevail. Time marches on, and those who refuse to accept progress are rolled up by it. Right?
Even if you were not to calculate the enormous cost of power and fresh water, both of which are in short supply, this technology is designed to make a few people obscenely wealthy at the expense of society at large. This is not a net win for humanity. It’s a loss. We are moving towards an era of authoritarian governments that care little for the needs of their people. The planet is trying to cast us off after centuries of abuse, and we’re throwing fuel on the fire. I may eventually be shot by my own people, but I refuse to provide them with the ammunition to do so. I may lose, but I refuse to be a source of aid in my own defeat.
I may lose, but I refuse to be a source of aid in my own defeat.
I grew up and went to school with Mennonites, who are closely related to the Amish, and I became quite familiar with the method to their madness. The Amish took the Biblical principle of being “in the world but not of it” quite literally. Despite what you might think, they don’t reject technology out of hand, but evaluate each on a case-by-case basis, deciding whether to allow it based on whether or not they believe it will be disruptive to their deeply held values of family, community, and faith.
They reject zippers instead of buttons, not because zippers are inherently evil, but because they are unnecessary. The job of keeping your coat closed, or your pants secure around your waist, can be done without them. Essentially, it’s technology for technology’s sake and more than they need.
They allow their children to ride bicycles, scooters, and even rollerblades, but not e-bikes or anything motorized. They use power tools now, but they must be hydraulic. Many Amish businesses have phones now in order to do business with the world, but they keep them in the barn. Making things easier doesn’t always make them better, and the Amish have decided that the process is just as important as the end product. How we do things matters. How we get there is a reflection of who we are.
Making things easier doesn’t always make them better.
It’s rare that you come across a moral quandary that is an absolute black or white, and the moral relevancy of AI is no different. We must all find our own line in the sand. You can call me a hypocrite if you like, but I’m fine with a computer program checking your grammar and punctuation for you, even though I would warn that it’s a slippery slope and you have to respond to each suggestion with care and thought.
If the LLM that trained your grammar program learned from the collected works of mankind in order to remind you where to put the comma, that seems fairly benign. We’ve been using spellcheckers for decades, but not without a serious decline in our ability to spell. Literacy rates are not likely to improve once you let a computer do everything for you.
The minute your grammar program starts telling you how best to form thoughts and ideas, however, is the moment you should question its judgment. It can’t tell you how to write. It can only tell you how most other people wrote, and that’s not finding an original voice; it’s mimicking the voices of so many lost souls that there’s no longer any meaning to it.
In his seminal book Dune, a novel about the socioeconomic realities of environmentalism and the dangers of messianic power, Frank Herbert wrote, “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” — Frank Herbert
In the grand scheme of things, we are just moments away from seeing this cruel fantasy come to fruition. We stand at the gate, with many paths laid out before us, wondering which will lead to salvation and which to destruction. Relying on a chatbot to organize your thoughts is not the end of the world, but it is on the path towards it.
I believe that art has enormous power for change. In the past, it was our novelists, poets, and playwrights who had the power to change the world. In recent decades, it’s been our comedians and humorists, screenwriters, and filmmakers with the power to influence culture. That power has never been more important than it is right now.
We are at a critical crossroads in human civilization. This is not just the next thing to come along, the next bit of technology. We are standing on the cliff. You can strike that as hyperbole if you desire, but there is no historical precedent for the environmental calamity facing us at the same time that authoritarians are coming to power and billionaires are hoarding all the gold. Who knew there’d be dragons, after all? The combination of income inequality, along with overpopulation and a lack of renewable resources, has no historical parallel, nor any discernible upside.
You can’t fight fascism with a chatbot built by a billionaire, as they are in league with one another. You have to remove yourself from the yoke of incompatible aspirations. What’s best for them is not what is best for you, so why would you tie yourself to them in this way? You will not be carried along as you might hope, but rather, you will be dragged and trampled.
Originality requires you to zig when everyone else is zagging, and you can’t rely on the past to dictate your future. An artist must be free to discover the path of their own choosing, not forced to follow in the footsteps of those who came before. That is how you find yourself stuck in a rut, unable to deviate from the path prescribed for you. You’ll never develop an original strategy based on an amalgamation of old tactics.
Be independent in your thoughts and deeds. Let no one, man or machine, attempt to guide your hand, lest you be tempted to follow the path of least resistance. This path leads to darkness and despair. The hero’s journey does not begin with a prompt to see what the last guy did. You must go your own way. A path of your own choosing, where the outcome is unclear, and success is not guaranteed.
That’s real life. The only kind worth living.
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