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i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

gonna just fully lean into being a stereotypical leftist here: yinz claim to have read marx yet clearly haven't read marx or internalized the ideas within bsky.app/profile/segy...

a thing i've been thinking about posting for a long time is "back in those days, the workers didn't say "eww factories were created by capitalists to enrich capitalists, we should abandon factories" they said "we should seize them and direct their output for the good of humanity"

I understand where you're coming from, but I also think it's worth thinking about the fact that the split in tone here is along the lines of people who are currently financially stable and the people whose livelihoods are *presently* being eroded by these technologies with no upside in sight.

If you think there's an upside to building this technology so it can be captured by labour, I think there needs to be an actual story being told about how that can actually be accomplished. Because otherwise, people whose careers are being destroyed today are just being told to stop resenting it!

Again, I don't think your intentions are bad here - but I think to change minds here, people would need to hear something practical about how things could actually change *in this instance* instead of the same cycle continuing where capital captures all value while eroding labour's share.

yeah, i fully agree that presenting a good future is important, just like, for any political project generally. i think that i struggle to have *any* conversation about these things at all because it immediately gets so heated

i think it's also tough because when i'm not online, 99% of the conversations i have about this, *especially* with non-programmers, are positive and curious and excited about the future with these tools. the only real negativity i come across is devs, people online, and some minor IRL concerns

That said you know, a lot of the people I know are artists, people working in the arts in related careers &c. So I think it's not *super* surprising that people in that position have a very different opinion. At least in my life, it's mostly devs, people in management/business owners who're positive

But of course I don't know how that reflects the kinds of conversations you've been having! "No one I know voted for Reagan" &c.

For sure! For me, non-devs are mostly a combo of slightly annoyed that it’s shoved into everything, but interested in the actual chat tool products themselves. A lot of devs I know don’t like non determinism and hallucinations but to non-devs, computer use is already that way, so it’s not as much