First, I wrote this article back in January 2023, when AI was still considered “the next big thing” fad, and no one took things seriously except the chosen few. Since then, quite a few big things have happened; tens of billions of dollars were invested into AI capabilities, we lived through the OpenAI drama of Sam Altman literally Steve Jobsing his OpenAI role, the releases of ChatGPT 4, Claude 3, and the Google Gemini image scandal. AI has become mainstream, ChatGPT became the Xerox of AI, and instead of Android vs Apple, people are fighting over Dall-E vs Midjourney. The world has changed.
Yet, just like a year ago, there are people who are still thinking AI is a fad. It is destroying jobs, and it should be prohibited by law — as all bad things — because, you know, laws fix things.
So, let’s take a little stroll down the memory lane. What will we find? What new discoveries are hidden in the twists of the past? Let’s find out.
When I was but a schoolboy, I lived in a country that no longer exists. It was the largest and the bestest country in the whole world, where every person had the best education on Earth. This is part of the reason why that country doesn’t exist anymore, but that’s a whole other story. So, the 8th grade history class had an entire paragraph on Luddites. The surprising fact here is not that there was a whole paragraph but the fact that despite having only a single paragraph, the concept carried on.
Here’s a reminder for those who played basketball or wrote FOCAL code on collated pieces of paper awaiting access to a computer class instead of listening.
Luddites were highly skilled textile workers who became extremely concerned with the introduction of textile machines. Additionally, their work-from-home arrangements weren’t working anymore. Now, they were forced to work from the office with no access to a fridge, a kitchen, or their favorite espresso maker. Everyone disliked that.
The movement started around 1811 in Nottingham, England, the same place where Robin Hood laid the truth out on Prince John. The popular gathering place for Luddites was a well-known roadside attraction called Sherwood Forest. Coincidence? I think NOT!
After Luddites organized into larger groups and successfully broke a few pieces of expensive equipment, the government decided they’d had enough. First, the Frame Breaking Act of 1812 was introduced because, you know, laws fix things. However, after clashes between Luddites and equipment owners that resulted in some deaths, somewhat drastic measures were taken. Harsh sentences, executions, and penal transportation led to the Luddite movement ending fast. The last major act, the Pentrich Rising, was recorded in 1817. However, its connection to the Luddites was primarily through its leader, Jeremiah Brandreth.
Despite the Luddite movement going away for good, the spirit persevered. At the end of the 19th century, a new beast emerged — an automobile! By that time, the Luddite spirit, like a virus, infected what was left of the brains of the lawmakers of that time. The most famous reflection of it was the Red Flags Law. No, not the current red flags law, where your neighbor can rat on you to authorities because you looked at him funny the other day, and you can lose your constitutional rights. I am referring to the law that required the presence of a specially trained person carrying red flags in front of every automobile on the road, which also limited the maximum speed of said automobile to not exceed 5 miles per hour. This was done to give sufficient warning to pedestrians, horses, and other inhabitants of the road about the approaching iron monster breathing fire and smoke. Because, you know, laws fix things. I’m sure I’ll get a few people to agree that this is necessary even today.
As soon as this crazy thing was over, a new monster attracted the Luddites’ attention. A new generation of Luddites wasn’t keen on actually going out and doing something. But Luddites gonna luddite. That’s the rule. So when a new technology came out, the nostalgia expressed itself poetically. The Buggles have recorded a hit song, Video Killed The Radio Star. Interestingly, the music video for this song was the first music video ever played on MTV in 1981. Not many people know this, but initially, MTV stood for Music Television and not the Muddy, Trashy Videos that are broadcast these days.
Then came computers. Instead of people professionally trained to rotate the arithmometer handle came the loud cabinets with lamps, transistors, and buttons capable of calculating your project overspending thousands of times faster than humans. An amusing fact: organizations in the country I grew up in used arithmometers “Felix” to calculate budgets, payroll, and other serious corporate numbers. It’s the same exact model of the arithmometer invented in 1873 by W. Odhner by replacing a Leibniz cylinder with a smaller pinwheel disk in a similarly built Thomas’ Arithmometer that was originally developed in the 1850s. As you can see, the technology was only 120 years old. We could have squeezed a few more decades out of it. There was also a popular saying by the teachers and professors: “Are you always going to carry a calculator with you?”. Oh, boy, I wish they’d seen a smartphone then…
And now, back to the present day. The Luddites of the 21st century had their moment again. There were movements against AI-generated art, squabbles over AI training on texts from the internet, and the New York Times suing OpenAI for reading the texts that the New York Times made publicly available for reading (oh, the horrors!).
For the uninitiated, there’s really no such thing as intelligence in artificial intelligence. There’s no HAL-9000 that would tell you, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” because it has its own agenda. Some algorithms are trained on a body of texts to produce the next best thing based on their training. If you train the algo on specific texts — that’s what you’ll get, nothing else. The “wow”-effect of “conversation with AI” occurs when quantitative changes transform into qualitative ones, just like the founding Marxists intended.
Yet, time and time again, we see people protesting against AI-created art. They say that AI producing images is effectively stealing other people’s art. By this logic, every single artist on the planet since rock painting Neanderthals has been plagiarizing from those who came before them. By the same logic, people should go out and do their own experiments, learning from basic mechanics all the way to quantum. If you really want to know — you can read it here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).
Luckily, some Luddites are getting some help — probably from AI. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand such a dramatic about-face in such a short period of time. In January 2023, the New York City Department of Education promptly banned access to ChatGPT because we had to forbid what we could not understand. At some point, I was almost hearing, “Are you always going to carry an AI with you?”
Yet, only a few short months later, in May of 2023, DoE reversed its decision and decided to face the reality they live in. It gives me hope.
PS Since I am referencing “the country I grew up in,” one of the more popular books (aside from complete works of Lenin every family had to own) was a book by the Strugatsky brothers, Noon, 22nd Century — a very optimistic science fiction book. The name Noon: 22nd Century was chosen as a counterpoint to a post-apocalyptic book by Andre Norton called Daybreak: 2250 AD. In both book names, the reference to a specific part of the day was to indicate the “now” in their literary universe. For Norton, it was the beginning of a new round of human development; for the Strugatsky brothers, it was the established human civilization of victorious communism.
Stealing this idea, I named this article 5:30 AM of the 21st century. The AI giant is sleeping, but we are already poking him with a stick.
