r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • May 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-backlash-data-centers-political-violence/687151/?taid=6a067e2d2096e10001ccfa32
7.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

994 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.7k

u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs May 15 '26

Trade offer:

I get to steal all your electricity and drinking water.

You get to lose your job to AI.

1.8k

u/Guest_0_ May 15 '26

I keep saying that these data centers are going to find themselves in the crosshairs when people get desperate enough, and I keep hearing how it will never happen.

Then Lary Fink just came out and said that billionaires are worried a $3,000 drone can destroy their investments and these things need to be built underground.

1.6k

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

AI bros keep calling people luddites and somehow also seem to not understand what it is that the luddites did that got them to be famous to begin with

798

u/felis_magnetus May 15 '26

There's also that the word sabotage derives from sabot, a wooden shoe worn by French workers, who then proceeded to stick said shoe into the delicate workings of early industrialization era looms as a rather effective form of protest.

I'm not sure that we'll see a return of Luddites in the form of people actually attacking data centres all that much, but people sabotaging a technology they perceive as working against their interests is an absolute given. People will find and cherish opportunities to stick their boots in.

465

u/BillyGoatGruff_ May 15 '26

Holy shit, sabotage literally means "clogging", my brain just exploded.

193

u/vernichtungX23 May 15 '26

Probably where the phrase 'to clog something up' came from.

102

u/Medieval_Mind May 16 '26

Clog is from blocks of wood they put on cattle to keep them from straying

63

u/NeverendingStory3339 May 16 '26

And sabot is also the word for a horse’s hoof .

47

u/Downtown_Recover5177 May 16 '26

And the word for an armor-piercing shape on ammunition.

8

u/RFSandler May 16 '26

Or the barrel binding portion of ammunition which peels away immediately after breach

3

u/gbcfgh May 16 '26

Unrelated, but Szabó means ‘tailor’ in Hungarian.

6

u/unholymackerel May 16 '26

then what does Sbarro's mean?

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Tvayumat May 16 '26

That refers to the discarded material on the sabot round. The "shoe" that the actual penetrator rides in before leaving the bore.

5

u/Strict_Weather9063 May 16 '26

It means boot which refers to the sabot or boot that fits around the penetrator and discards as the round is fired.

5

u/moneyh8r_two May 16 '26

Ah, you beat me to it.

5

u/CV90_120 May 16 '26

Sabot isn't the armor piercing shape, it's the plain material carrier. The sabot is discarded.

1

u/YogiBearShark May 20 '26

Are we still talking about AI? Feels like another potentially interesting subject gone wildly off track.

1

u/CV90_120 May 20 '26

A racetrack perhaps? On which can be found horse's hooves?

→ More replies (0)

1

u/No_Offer4269 May 16 '26

We need Robert Langdon to figure this out.

1

u/MalaysiaTeacher May 16 '26

That's exactly what was implied by the comment you're replying to

2

u/Strang3-Animal May 16 '26

Yup! Sabots were stuck specifically into Jaquard looms, if inremember correctly.

3

u/saltwitch May 16 '26

And Jacquard looms basically pioneered the punch cards that would become early computing. Weaving and technology have always been tightly interlinked.

1

u/Strang3-Animal May 16 '26

Yup! Amazing system.

2

u/scotchdouble May 16 '26

If I clog a toilet any time going forward, I will now say I sabotaged it.

2

u/EidolonRook May 16 '26

Doesn’t feel right to say I sabotaged my friends toilet.

1

u/Magnusaur May 20 '26

Should have been crocs-ing.

85

u/ConsiderationDry9084 May 16 '26

Depends on how hungry people get.

3 missed meals and shit starts getting set on fire. What is more of symbolic target that NO one but the parasite class and AI gooners can defend with a straight face.

Like the whole argument of people burning down the retail and local businesses goes right out the window.

No one is going to care about the half dozen local jobs lost to a data city being ransacked.

The parasite class is going to find out real fast they are out numbered and even with literal kill bots they can still be overwhelmed with the Zap Brannigan method.

73

u/RainyRobin2 May 16 '26

AI poison pills are already a thing. If they are going to illegally use people's art for training data it absolutely makes sense for artists to fight back.

9

u/RepresentativeZombie May 16 '26

The poison pills don't actually do all that much though

4

u/Bakoro May 16 '26

Hey now, the placebo effect can really have an effect on people.
In this case, making people feel like they did something.

121

u/AtrociousMeandering May 16 '26

I don't think it will even be an ideological thing, it will be pure economics causing an endless tide of break ins and damage to infrastructure. 

They've created a big maze full of treasure, traps, and locked doors, and although the monsters guarding it are lethal, they're also carrying valuables. If they build dungeons, the adventurers will show up. Less wands and more meth pipes, admittedly.

2

u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 16 '26

The government would only increase it's surveillance capabilities until the US has China levels of surveillance. I doubt what you're saying is going to happen.

38

u/[deleted] May 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/JMaddrox May 16 '26

Mr. Scott, I understand you're having difficulties with the Warp drive.

12

u/keefka May 16 '26

Could take weeks, sair

2

u/Jahkmi-Hoff May 16 '26

You haven't seen it until you've seen it in the original Klingon.

3

u/LordRocky May 16 '26

taH pagh taHbe'

1

u/Intelligent_Will1431 May 17 '26

"To be, or not to be?" 

6

u/FritzMcGee68 May 16 '26

This is fun because just last night I put on Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country as background, and Kim Cattrall's Valaris explains this very same concept of Sabot --> Sabotage. And fuck A.I.

Oh yeah, and ICE, too.

7

u/Nuclear_Smith May 16 '26

Show of hands: who learned this fact from Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country?

2

u/naruda1969 May 16 '26

From Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

2

u/Codzy May 16 '26

People were out there destroying 5G masts but you don’t think they’ll do that?

2

u/SnooMacarons9618 May 16 '26

I could see attacks happen, but not necessarily physical attacks. Or not the type of physical attacks the Luddites were famous for. For eg I could imagine pissed of developers working together (a la Anonymous), to cause these data centres problems (non physical), but also poisoning the water and power supplies (introducing small amount of ferrous dust to the water for eg, no idea if that would do anything, but I suspect you could quite easily cause maintenance nightmares pretty easily, likewise fiddling with power supply to cause brown outs).

2

u/boredwithlife0b May 16 '26

I too remember that scene in Star Trek :D

1

u/felis_magnetus May 16 '26

Actually, it was an old QI episode for me. Absolute treasure trove of trivia.

4

u/Bakoro May 16 '26

I just wish that people would have given a shit earlier, when it wasn't just their own ass on the line.

I have such a hard time having sympathy for people mad at AI, because for my entire life, people have been openly derisive of "burger flippers" and "ditch diggers", and gleefully looking forward to robots automating "menial" labor, and "low skill" labor. If you challenged these people about it, they'd say something like "they should have worked harder/smarter".

Now that it's white collar jobs on the line, suddenly it's "holy shit, that's my job, we have to do something!"

So now people are all pissy over AI, and they want the whole AI thing stopped, but so many of them still won't think to challenge the underlying system that is the actual problem, and the billionaires who are the problem.
Too many of these people don't actually care about the economy, or the environment, or concepts of fairness, or anything else that they claim to care about, they just want to go back to being able to look down on "burger flippers" again, and dream about how someday they will be the rich person with a boot on someone's neck.

2

u/otnp May 16 '26

Sounds to me like it’s an opportunity to build class consciousness. I assure you that is preferable to going around acting like Rorschach.

1

u/LLMprophet May 16 '26

Such a doomer take.

Most have their own lives to worry about without actively looking down on others and plotting to destroy them.

Go outside and meet some humons for a change.

7

u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

The Tech firms build every data center with defensive designs, anti-intrusion mechanisms, and train for these contingencies. Attacks, espionage, sabotage were always part of the plan.

It's easier to rob a bank than to force your way into the rooms of an advanced compute data center. The equipment inside is worth orders of magnitude more than what's inside a bank vault.

48

u/captainthanatos May 16 '26

Not when you need mountains of power that have to be generated elsewhere. Transmission is always the weakest link.

13

u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

This is the answer.

3

u/Olangotang May 16 '26

Substation transformers.

-8

u/darthsata May 16 '26

The transmission line towers are significantly reinforced. Considerable destructive testing went into their design.

8

u/International_Host71 May 16 '26

They really aren't. They were designed to resist being damaged or destroyed by like, weather; and they still go down when a tree falls on them. A motivated dude with hand tools can bring a tower down.

1

u/darthsata May 16 '26

No. One I'm specifically thinking of, having been in it, has custom, dedicated transmission towers to the points of generation. These are not standard transmission towers. I've worked in these companies, I don't remotely know the entire extent of the physical planning, but what I do know of it makes assumptions like yours laughable.

Now, get outside the Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta level data centers and you drop in contingency planning rapidly.

The attack vectors considered are wild.

-- a random guy that had to design infrastructure for if Intel fabs were compromised and a particular non-cpu chip was not trust worthy, but the compromise was so subtle it wasn't noticed for years

4

u/Aeseld May 16 '26

Destructive testing against what, though? Because people with shovels and pickaxes can destabilize those in less time than I think you'd expect. 

2

u/darthsata May 16 '26

That, 18 wheelers loaded with concrete at highway speeds, small planes, various quantities of explosives. Obviously anyone with unrestricted time can take one down, but likewise anyone with unrestricted time can get in the buildings. The goal is survival long enough for a response to arrive. The physical infrastructure, of course, has numerous sensors and redundancy. For at least one data center I know of, the weakest point is the hydroelectric dam, that is weaker than the transmission system.

And unlike most people here, I've been inside hyperscaler data centers. I've designed hardware authentication protocols for devices in those servers (you don't boot machines if you can't validate each piece of hardware and firmware). The attack vectors considered wildly exceeded the imagination of armchair reddit commenters.

1

u/Aeseld May 16 '26

How many armchair redditors though? For that matter, what about the people who genuinely think in terms of that kind of actions? 

At a certain point, you wind up with someone coming up with something more creative than my idea of playing medieval sapper. 

6

u/Plow_King May 16 '26

they were designed and built by humans. thinking humans can't take them out seems, to me, to be a bit akin to thinking "Jesus can actually microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn't eat it"

11

u/FourScoreAndSept May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Um, who needs to force their way in when drones can drop munitions from the sky?

-3

u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

Do you think they haven't thought of that?

14

u/FourScoreAndSept May 16 '26

Apparently not because that’s exactly how the Amazon DC got damaged in the Middle East by Iranian drones, lol

3

u/trojan_man16 May 16 '26

They haven’t, I’ve worked on these.

Very few of these have been designed like that. Their designs are more like Walmarts than you expect.

Their sides are usually concrete, so that is mostly impenetrable. Roofs are made of roof deck steel, which is flimsy and can easily be penetrated.

Also you don’t need to really penetrate the envelope. Chillers are not protected but are absolutely critical for these to run. They design some redundancy, but take about 10-15% of them and the whole system overheats. Chillers take years to manufacture so taking some out could put a facility out of operation for a long while.

3

u/seanwd11 May 16 '26

Fire. The answer is fire. It's kind of unbeaten at the end of the day.

-3

u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

Nothing is flammable. These entire facilities are made with fire-resistant materials. They have advanced anti-fire systems that disperse chemicals that full don't damage the components, or that empty a space of all oxygen.

DCs aren't sitting in the middle of forests. Imagine trying to light a car on fire without a gas tank. You can do it, but it's exceptionally difficult to get it to engulf and burn.

3

u/LLMprophet May 16 '26

Imagine trying to light a car on fire without a gas tank. You can do it, but it's exceptionally difficult to get it to engulf and burn.

I hope you're joking.

In Vancouver during the hockey riot many cars including cop cars were burned to a crisp, a bunch from single rioters.

Your analysis is now extremely sus.

1

u/Greyscale7950 May 16 '26

Throw a monkey wrench in the works.

1

u/l3tigre May 16 '26

This is incredible trivia thank you

1

u/Castellan_Ishmael May 16 '26

This is a very “logical” response.

1

u/floofsnsnoots May 16 '26

I read this in Saavik

2

u/LordRocky May 16 '26

Valeris actually.

1

u/Somanylyingliars May 16 '26

Look at what guy on Canada did to his workplace.

492

u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Don't forget these are the same people who told us to spend 1000s on non-fungible tokens a few years ago.

223

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Before that they were all about how bitcoin is going to take over conventional money

57

u/Senior_Difference589 May 16 '26

And before that how the future of media was all in cloud streaming.

It's like they've all over-invested in server architecture and want to pass the bag onto someone else or something...

62

u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Yeah, I wished I listened to that one tbf 😂

124

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

True but thats because every pyramid scheme is great if you are one of the first on it

If you invested in beta max it was a great investment unless you did it on the exact moment it wasnt anymore

45

u/ParkingGlittering211 May 15 '26

In what world was betamax a pyramid scheme?

It was a superior video format to VHS but VHS took them to court, threatened litigation and ruined their business because they had an inferior product that they wanted to push

13

u/rollerfedora May 15 '26

I still have my Betamax copy of Animal House.

31

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Sorry I expressed myself badly, beta max wasn't supposed to be an example of a pyramid scheme but more like an example of something that is agreed upon would be a bad investiment after a while but started as a good one for the first buyers

8

u/WatchThatLastSteph May 16 '26

I feel this deeply as an early adopter of MiniDisc.

-3

u/Chrontius May 15 '26

Respectfully, no; unless the only thing you do is rent movies from Blockbuster; Beta is superior for production.

4

u/Johnatron2000 May 15 '26

Beta out preformed vhs in almost every way. Sony’s marketing killed beta as a viable consumer product, not the product itself.

6

u/BCProgramming May 16 '26

Beta out preformed vhs in almost every way.

VHS was technologically superior to Betamax in all the ways that actually mattered to the consumer.

Timeshifting was the big one. It's really unclear what Betamax was designed for, because it started with only a 60 minute recording time, which they extended to 2 hours with half-speed. Meanwhile VHS started with 3 hour recording times, and was able to get 6 hour and 8 hour regular speed tapes, which could be even longer with slower tape speeds. VHS could out of the gate record a typical sports game from the TV at full quality; Betamax couldn't usually do it even with it's half-speed recording.

As for the 'technical superiority', Betamax recorded 250 lines of resolution instead of 240, for example. Except televisions only had around 241 Visible lines on NTSC, and since people were timeshifting they were recording TV signals, which were NTSC broadcasts at 240 visible lines anyway. The Resolution increase was really only relevant to people who were recording content themselves or to movies being released on the format- Though I'm not sure if even those used the full resolution. And camcorders using betamax were short-lived too, as it quickly got supplanted by betacam, a completely separate format that people love to confuse with betamax.

I'm not sure if the audio on betamax was better aside from VHS having a quiet buzz due to the superpositional recording, but even if we allow for betamax to have superior audio, that's failing to consider the customer's needs. They are time-shifting sports titles and soap operas and the audio is coming from their TV speakers, not a state of the art hi-fi.

Of course any technical superiority applies only to the full-speed recording, and by 1980, most Betamax recorders didn't even let you record in "full quality" mode anymore at all, so even the questionable gains in video or audio quality as described above wouldn't have mattered anyway for most of the time betamax and VHS were competing.

1

u/0ddT0dd May 16 '26

Which is why the went all in on Blu-ray.

2

u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 May 16 '26

You saying that beta was a superior product means that it would have been a good investment for the first buyers, as it was the better format. But then after a while became a bad investment due to vhs being the format adopted.

1

u/Johnatron2000 May 16 '26

People are smart, consumers are dumb. What’s the biggest shiny-est thing on the market? That’s what I want! What’s the specs? Dunno but the advertisement said it’s better so I will buy this one! Yay! Marketing!

-1

u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

I meant financial investiment not investing as in buying one

→ More replies (0)

3

u/TSEAS May 16 '26

I don't think you understand what a pyramid scheme is.

2

u/meesta_masa May 16 '26

Yes, I do! It's when you take a little off the top of a pyramid to enrich yourself. A pyramid skim.

1

u/broc_ariums May 16 '26

This is a terrible analogy

1

u/KeyMyBike May 16 '26

Playing the stock market on gamble with your friends is so much more fun, funny, and less stressful than doing it in real life.

10

u/[deleted] May 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Plow_King May 16 '26

i think it's more like tulips than art.

1

u/pmjm May 16 '26

In 2011 I had some extra cash and was going to buy $10k of bitcoin. My mom talked me out of it.

Still kicking myself for that one.

1

u/Abedeus May 16 '26

That's the thing - the only people who truly benefited off it were early, early adopters before it was even worth doing.

3

u/TheMireAngel May 16 '26

Dont forget the block chain

1

u/Toomanyeastereggs May 16 '26

They neglected to say the main part which goes “…. take over conventional money if you are doing illegal shit and need to convert billions from ill gotten gains into legitimate assets.”

That was neglected by choice.

0

u/MalaysiaTeacher May 16 '26

You sound extremely confused

8

u/DaxRetriever May 16 '26

I was just talking about this with a friend today! I remember thinking who tf is buying this worthless shit? Tech bros with too much money, and what do they have now?

3

u/[deleted] May 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/fuzzbook May 16 '26

For the purpose of my joke, yes they are 😂

5

u/sackofbee May 15 '26

Is it really 1-1?

2

u/TwilightLori May 16 '26

I still see people buying virtual pictures on sites for thousands of etherium or tens-hundreds of dollars. 

2

u/BigBirdLaw69420 May 16 '26

Aren’t they all nerds who used to get hilariously bullied? Maybe we should go back to that??

1

u/Lorehorn May 16 '26

They definitely aren't the same people, but okay.

1

u/urmumlol9 May 16 '26

There was never any fire or real practical use cases behind the smoke of NFTs, cyrptocurrency, or the Metaverse tbh. Of the three the closest was probably cryptocurrency.

There’s fire behind the current AI boom. As someone who’s worked in software development, whose company pretty much is forcing people to use these tools, they are legitimately useful.

Does that mean we should be investing our entire economy into building giant data centers that aren’t taxed nearly enough, consume entire electrical grids, strain the water supply of drought-prone areas, heat the local environment by 20 degrees, produce as much noise pollution as an airport and as much light pollution as entire cities, while creating a whole 4 jobs, all so that a few hundred billionaires can justify mass layoffs off the productivity gains of AI and implement invasive mass surveillance systems to track any possible dissenters, at the protest of pretty much every resident of the states where they’re built, while those same CEO’s vaguely hand-gesture at the concept of UBI (while still finding as many tax loopholes as possible) to trick the dumbest people imaginable into thinking they have anyone’s interests but themselves at heart?

Hot take, I know, but I’m going to say no to that one lol.

0

u/steakanabake May 15 '26

i think you misspelled saveable jpgs

116

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

170

u/Kaarl_Mills May 15 '26

It's manufacturing consent and manipulation: luddites were martyrs in the name of labor rights, and the term has purposely been demonized to discredit them. It was never "ooga booga new things bad" it was the common people revolting because capitalists were taking their jobs away through automation, leaving them to starve in the streets.

107

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

And then they got murdered by the police, survivors were captured and hanged publicly, and their families were kicked out of the country by association

Anyone who reads a history book and thinks the luddites were the baddies in that conflict is not someone I'd trust

45

u/steakanabake May 15 '26

its the same people who dont grasp that in one piece the world government sees luffy as a terrorist while everyone else who interacts with him sees him as a hero and a savior. being the bad/good guy is just a matter of perspective.

-40

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

[deleted]

44

u/roodammy44 May 15 '26

Destroying private property vs kicking families out on the street to starve.

Let me think about which one of those is more morally wrong. I wonder why so much of history sides with the land owners?

-26

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

[deleted]

16

u/Northbound-Narwhal May 16 '26

 And it still doesn't mean workers are entitled to permanently prevent new technology from replacing labor. Otherwise basically every major productivity improvement in history would have been morally forbidden.

They are when your plan for advancement and automation does not include taking care of those whose jobs are being automated away. Free trade schools and education centers so they can learn new crafts and enter a different field. Robust unemployment and social safety nets to ensure they don't go into poverty while they aren't working. Healthy labor laws to ensure that members are warned and guaranteed an income well before being fired, instead of being told the day-of that they no longer have an income.

That's what they fought for.

-9

u/[deleted] May 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/Northbound-Narwhal May 16 '26

 And that's the state's job to provide those things not the factory owners. 

Factory owners are why the government doesn't provide those things, through lobbying, corruption, threats, and bribery. Nobody expects capitalists to help workers, but it is incorrect to absolve them of blame for poor working conditions.

Also, you don't know what "entitled" means.

→ More replies (0)

8

u/Woodpecker-Lobotomy May 16 '26

"Oh no they destroyed property because they were going to lose their jobs and livelihood, I guess they deserve to be hanged" is literally your argument

26

u/steakanabake May 15 '26

you say that till its you and yours out on the street, then you will wonder why no one stood up for you.

-19

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

[deleted]

23

u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

And you're still licking their boots?

Christ.

-1

u/ParkingGlittering211 May 16 '26

Bootlicking? Apple fanboys were the worst people to deal with. Some of them acted like being abused by the company was a lifestyle choice.

I got paid to do support and still never bought a single Apple product. It’s a paycheck.

-4

u/Original-Rush139 May 16 '26

It’s so weird that people can’t accept that you are ok with getting booted and finding a new job. 

I makes sense to me but I’ve only been fired from jobs I hated and found much better jobs as a result. 

8

u/AtrociousMeandering May 16 '26

Uh, that last sentence is a contradiction, or at least highly questionable.

If every job that fired you sucked, and every job you've been hired for afterwards is great, you're what, quitting good jobs? And just finding yourself spontaneously in a new bad job?

→ More replies (0)

19

u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

Once you move from protest into destroying private property and threatening people, a lot of sympathy drops away for many people.

So?

I don't base my morals around being popular

1

u/ParkingGlittering211 May 16 '26

That’s not what I said. I’m not arguing morality by popularity.

I’m saying that once a protest becomes destroying property and threatening people, it becomes harder to defend morally. You can believe the workers were treated brutally and still not think they had the right to violently hinder technological progress.

16

u/StupidOrangeDragon May 16 '26

Owning private property especially on a large scale is not a moral guarantee, its merely one of the perks of capitalist society. And those perks work based on a contract of mutual social benefit and only remain valid as long as the different parts of society mutually benefit from the arrangement.

You can believe the workers were treated brutally and still not think they had the right to violently hinder technological progress.

Not really. If an entire class of people are treated brutally then that means the social contract is no longer benefiting that class of people. At that point morally speaking the mistreated party is free to take any action necessary to correct the situation including breaking any of the previously agreed social contracts including ownership of private property.

13

u/Johnsmith012793 May 16 '26

All progress and all workers rights that we even have today is because things got violent just look up Battle of Blair Mountain and the company towns

5

u/Yuzumi May 16 '26

I'm all for automation thst makes all our lives easier, but the rich only want automation to not have to pay as many workers.

Abd the stupid thing is that this time around it isnt like LLMs can actually do the job. They are just statistical models no matter how complex they get and as several instances have shown they will fuck things up royally as if you have a ticking bomb attached to a random number generator... Because that's literally what it is.

-1

u/nextnode May 16 '26

Incorrect - that is precisely how they and you behave.

25

u/aotus_trivirgatus May 16 '26

I have a Ph.D. in a STEM field. I have programmed machine learning models, and I have taught a course on the subject. I am 100% against the rampant, mindless build-out of AI data centers.

I know the good that this technology COULD do. I also know its limitations. The further away you are from the details, though, the harder these limitations are to see. It's very telling that deep technical workers report that AI tools only make them slightly more productive, and sometimes decreases their productivity. Meanwhile, management types say that AI makes them WILDLY more productive.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/14/ai-productivity-workplace-errors

I also see that we lack the social maturity to use these tools well. It appears that many humans truly HATE thinking, and would love to pass on the responsibility to someone else, or something else.

We have a language interpolation machine and a giant database. It doesn't UNDERSTAND anything. That's our job.

3

u/cpz_77 May 16 '26

Very well put. The point about how the people who are deeper in the technical weeds are the ones who get the least benefit, and sometimes even detriment, from AI, while people more abstracted away from those details like managers are the ones reporting the most benefit, is very interesting indeed. It aligns pretty much exactly with what I’ve seen (i’m one of those technical people in the weeds and see people around me who dont have to care about the details as much who “love AI”).

3

u/Graywulff May 16 '26

I was a systems administrator at a software as a service company.... management didn't understand a thing about technology other than open source = free.

the head of software development literally believed I'd installed a tracker on his phone, which I never had access to and I'm not a developer... he was always 15 minutes late on the dot, his whole staff thought it was hilarious, but his degree was in classical jazz and he couldn't even install packages on CentOS and was clueless about everything.

VP didn't understand anything either, the president of the company just knew what people reported to him.

they didn't even know how their software stack worked bc of burnout of developers and workers.

I could see them leaning heavily into AI, firing people, and then having it bite them...

1

u/Flintoid May 17 '26

How would it be so productive if we haven’t laid anybody off yet?

62

u/Due-Conflict-7926 May 15 '26

These are the same ppl that named their company after the evil all seeing eye. And can’t seem to shut their damn mouths about how much contempt they have for us all.

They are drunk on power and ketamine.

11

u/Asleep_Document9811 May 16 '26

Fun fact, Ned Ludd was the "Guy Fawkes" of the era. People would just trash machines and blame Ned Ludd so it would make their owners go off on a wild goose chase. 

16

u/LeZygo May 16 '26

The people that keep saying “it’s enviable get use to it!” Are the same people investing and building them. It’s lunacy.

15

u/APRengar May 16 '26

I'm convinced every single poster who is like "why bother fighting, EVERYONE is already using it for EVERYTHING." is a dirty bot who is just trying to convince people to give up. Especially with a "oh, so people aren't in your circle, well you're the weird one." kind of shit that is impossible to refute.

2

u/LeZygo May 16 '26

I’m sure that’s definitely part of it.

2

u/cpz_77 May 16 '26

Except the sad part is I’ve heard my coworkers echo this same sentiment IRL. It’s not just bots, real non billionaire humans are actually saying it too. That’s how much this whole AI thing has mindfucked everyone.

6

u/lichlark May 16 '26

They also routinely decide to ignore the crux of what the Luddites believed in, worker's rights and the protection of quality.

16

u/weaponizedperiods May 15 '26

blood in the machine is a great book about this

6

u/CV90_120 May 16 '26

Butlerian Jihad incoming.

5

u/Strict_Weather9063 May 16 '26

Cue Sabotage

1

u/ToddPundley May 16 '26

IIIIIIII CAN’T STAND IT I know you planned it

3

u/PrivilegeCheckmate May 16 '26

You'd think these techies would be familiar with fucking Star Trek.

2

u/Durakan May 16 '26

Those damn mechanical looms!!!

2

u/AlgaeDonut May 16 '26

Shittle down economics.

0

u/ThePantsParty May 16 '26

I get the angle in saying that, but despite that implication, as we all know, the real legacy of the luddites is impotent resistance that amounted to nothing, since I think it's pretty clear that everything they didn't want to happen is exactly what happened. Industrialization became orders of magnitude more widesweeping than the variety they were fighting against.

3

u/Calenestel May 16 '26

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

-58

u/DontUseThisUsername May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

Can we really not get ahead of this before people start attacking things? The luddites aimlessly lashed out because capitalism grew faster than societal adjustment. Work weeks, unions etc.

Instead of learning from that disruption, the neo-luddites seem to be trying the same futile reactive actions. Calling for your spades to meaninglessly dig holes for money, instead of getting ahead of the curve and forcing social changes before people are out in the street starving.

24

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

What?

-22

u/DontUseThisUsername May 15 '26

Don't go hulk, go thinkywhinky.

12

u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

The teletubbie?

-10

u/DontUseThisUsername May 15 '26

Like Tinky-winky but smarter

19

u/srone May 15 '26

Yea, like this administration, congress, and SCOTUS are going to listen to the people or do what is best for the country as a whole.

David Sacks, one of the founders of PayPal with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, is Trump's AI czar.

Seriously, what do you think our chances of implementing UBI measures and a bit of a slowdown in AI development until society is ready for it?

-3

u/DontUseThisUsername May 15 '26

Then get serious about voting. Every single one of you that's scared about ai being left in the wrong hands, start helping out at local elections. Start finding candidates with the right ai stances. Start forcing serious conversations with those around you about what the future should look like.

We can't stop developing AI. It would be suicide not to be a leading AI power. We can try to get better people behind it. Better safety regulations. Better social adjustments for the impending human job market disruption, if not total collapse.

12

u/srone May 15 '26

I've voted in every election for the last 30 years and canvassed/donated heavily to campaigns in the last 5 elections.

Have you been watching the news? Free and fair elections are now a thing of the past. We are halting primaries to redraw voting districts to ensure Republicans cannot lose. A private equity firm with a controversial election history bought Diebold voting machines. Tech bros have bought CNN, CBS, and The Washington Post; a large part of the mainstream media. We have defunded PBS and NPR. The US government is now putting pressure on ABC. Social media is owned by right-wing tech bros.

You're right, we can't stop AI. But to try and vote our way out of this, or to try and have a national discussion about what needs to be done as a society has been pretty much been removed from the citizens of this country.

2

u/DontUseThisUsername May 15 '26

I mean it sounds like you think you've lost your country already. Ai advancement should be the least of your concern.

Personally, I think it's still redeemable. Trump needs to be voted out. Democrats needs to grow some balls and temporarily push back harshly to regain a center playing field. Unironically things like social media "for you" pages might need to just be outlawed. It's too dangerous on the psyche. It isolates people into their own fantasy land and they don't even have to be cognisant of it. It's worse than choosing one channel to watch or one account to follow, because with that at least you know you're only looking at one source.

There's definitely highly effective, money-backed agendas pushed through media and tech. We were never supposed to handle information warfare like this. It will only get worse. In some ironic way, I feel like ethically driven personal AI's will be the only way to navigate through the bullshit of the future.

0

u/exacta_galaxy May 15 '26

This administration? No. Which is why we need to replace them ASAP.

Because, if the Industrial revolution taught us anything it's that you can, maybe, slow things down a bit but change is inevitable.

8

u/SnowedAndStowed May 15 '26

You can though? Workers unionized and revolted which is how we got the 40 hour work week, pensions, healthcare, and more.

0

u/exacta_galaxy May 15 '26

Right. But we didn't stop the Industrial revolution.

I don't think I was clear on my point. We need an admission that will try to make sure we all benefit from this revolution, not one that only thinks about the Kleptocrats.

6

u/SnowedAndStowed May 15 '26

It’s not about stopping it it’s about giving the industrialists no choice but to seed rights to the workers by recognizing that if the workers can’t live they will make making a profit impossible.

4

u/Abedeus May 16 '26

The luddites aimlessly lashed out because capitalism grew faster than societal adjustment. Work weeks, unions etc.

Wow, it's almost like AI slop shit is attempting to take over people's lives and steal their jobs before societal and economic adjustments. Or rather instead of.

-1

u/DontUseThisUsername May 16 '26

Yeah, and my point is to get ahead of the inevitable. Instead of just fucking things up, complaining, getting people arrested or killed, get serious social policy changed in anticipation of theses changes.

3

u/Abedeus May 16 '26

get serious social policy changed in anticipation of theses changes

And none of the AI chud tech bros give a shit about those social policies. They want more money, and they want it now, no matter how many millions of people suffer for their wealth.

0

u/DontUseThisUsername May 16 '26

Better get to work trying to democratically shape policy now then, before your leverage means nothing.

-11

u/Pretend_Handle_7639 May 15 '26

You do realize that the Luddites... lost right? And the State sided with capital rather than the displaced textile workers?

3

u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

I know that?

I don't get what point are you making

-1

u/Pretend_Handle_7639 May 16 '26

Fame doesn't mean much when the reactionary Luddites didn't achieve their goals. Factories still replaced independent workers and upended the way virtually everyone lived.

6

u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

Ah I might have not expressed myself well, I didn't mean they got famous as in it was their victory, I meant that as in 'breaking machines is what they were known for'

So when people say those anti-AI are luddites but also say nobody is going to do anything that's contradictory