If history is any indicator, the last group of middle class professionals who decided to take this question into their own hands ended up getting executed by the state or exiled to penal colonies[1].
The rest of them, and their families, ended up dying in utter destitution. That's what "we" will probably do again.
you are free to not use the technology. the luddites went burning down other people's factories, so not super surprising to me that the state responded with force.
But people don't use the word "Luddite" as some sort of worker protesting for the sake of vengeance at the government that abandoned them. People talk as if Luddites were some backwards people, that failed to adopt technology and died because they couldn't adapt.
If being a Luddite involves a civil war, it is no longer an argument in favor of never questioning technological progress.
And the Sons of Liberty threw other people's tea in the Boston harbor. They were free to buy tea elsewhere.
The state made machine breaking a capital crime. That is, if you break or destroy a machine, you can be executed.
Many who were tried and convicted of machine breaking were accused or guilty by association, or literally broke machines, and were executed. States responded with death and contempt, not merely force.
This has been a problem with every new productive technology. The civilized answer is "society takes on the responsibility of teaching them to do other things".
Of course, this often does not happen for one of two reasons. First, society doesn't always choose the civilized answer; it often chooses to just marginalize the folks who just lost their jobs. Second, society often really wants to pick the thing they're teaching these people to do -- this is how you get people trying to teach coal miners how to code, despite coal miners being by and large uninterested in coding.
These are pretty real problems that we're already grappling with, but we're going to need to get very serious about it very soon. LLMs aren't the only reason why.
> So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today
Funny that bullshitting was the easiest job to automate to perfection. But now everyone can spin up their AI bullshit operation. Anti-bullshit AI would be very valuable in this situation.
Even if we conveniently assume that all the people of the future smaller population have it in them to do the jobs AI is not yet good enough at (and none of them are would-be copywriters because that's where their skill ceiling is), surely the game-theoretical shift from "if you, aspiring original writer, don't make it for some reason or another, you'll have to settle for a lower-prestige/-pay writing job" to "...you'll actually be stuck with none of the skills you acquired being of particular value to anyone". Writing as a career would assume a risk profile more akin to trying to become a K-pop idol.
