Trump escalated his attacks from random people in boats to assaulting the President of Venezuela and kidnapping him. This is horrifying. The US has continually lost credibility around being on the right side of wars since the Iraq war. We are certainly on the wrong side of this. Even if Maduro is a horrifying and awful to his people, this is not the way to drive change in the country’s leadership. Trump unilaterally did this without consulting Congress, blaming “leaks” as the reason why. Leaks don’t matter, it’s a legal requirement to notify congress before any action. Trump blatantly broke our laws along with international law in kidnapping a world leader.

This sets an awful precedent if the US government can issue a warrant and use that as the basis for kidnapping a world leader, then other countries can and will do the same. This will create a level of escalation on the world stage that we may never get back in the bottle.

Taiwan may be at risk to China. Ukraine may be at risk to Russia. Israel may do the same to the leaders in Gaza.

The US may be at risk to other countries as well. There’s no real difference between going after Venezuela than going after North Korea. Just the fact that N.K. has the Bomb, whereas the countries in South America do not have the Bomb. Which of course, does change the math a little bit.

I’m angry about this. The US is failing in the ideals we claim to be living up to. We are a rogue state at this point. I would not be surprised if we get sanctions piled on us by the UN. We should. We would do this to other countries if they had done the same.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant which is about the Luddite civil war. I call it a civil war, despite the fact that generally, historically, this has been categorized as a small group of radicals that didn’t understand the value of progress. However, as Merchant’s book explains this isn’t the case at all.

Before getting into all of that, let’s discuss what a Luddite actually is. Most of us learned incorrectly in British History (or as part of a European history or international history), that Luddites were anti-technology. However, this isn’t the case. It was actually literal class warfare. This was a case of the working or middle class rising up against the capital class.

I’m sure most of you have heard of the term “Cottage Industries,” right? The term was coined to describe how businesses existed before the Industrial Revolution. Families, generally multigenerational, were craftsman of a specific trade. An example of this would be family that creates yarn from wool. They sell this to families that convert that yarn into clothing. A family would typically use a relatively manual piece of hardware to make the product they would make. They used machinery, because they wanted to improve their productivity. They understood how to repair and maintain their equipment. To be successful, you needed to be a skilled laborer. It was hard to do this work. It required years to master the tools.

When the Industrial Revolution kicked off, new machinery was developed. With the invention of steam power to drive multiple machines at once, equipment could be tied together and powered by a central power plant. This required significant investment of capital. To capture a return on this investment, capitalists drove down other costs, such as quality of material and salaries for employees.

The Luddites revolted against this change. They broke the steam engines and machines that produced lower quality clothing (for example) and drove down salaries for employees. They did not destroy all machines arbitrarily. Luddites wanted to maintain their quality of life. They weren’t making irrational decisions or irrational demands. The demand to keep the same living wage and living conditions is a very human one. Very reasonable.

People starved because of the change to these industrial plants. Children were forced to work in the plants, they were the cheapest source of labor. If a child could do the work, why would you want to hire a man that could think and reason that he should have more. A child from an orphanage wouldn’t know any different and would work themselves to death. Which happened, often.

We’re now in a similar sort of situation with AI. Is just a statistical tool that analyzes large sets of data and predicts things. This is, intentionally, a stripped down version of what it does. There’s a lot of hard work that’s gone into it. However, the end result is a statistical model based on past data. If you request specific information about a topic, the Generative AI tool will generate a statistically probable collection of text associated with that question.

The most straightforward impact of these tools are the loss in value of non-fiction pieces of work. Nonfiction in terms of reporting, novel research, and analysis must be consumed by the AI for it to be useful to an end user. When reading any of those primary sources it is important to read them critically. To understand the biases of the news source or the researcher.

AI strips all of that context. There’s no material difference between a piece of news from Fox News that is an opinion piece about a immigration which argues for the Great Replacement and a scholarly analysis of immigration which describes the overall economic benefits different countries reap from those immigrants. Without proper citation and collapsing of these articles into a single response, it’s impossible to analyze critically, because there is no context. The AI could decide that the great replacement is real and good because there is an economic benefit for the country to encourage immigration.

The Great Replacement isn’t real. So this is something the AI made up. However, the reader would have no idea which part of the statement is truth or fiction based on what’s presented.

This is dangerous. Writers and artists should be fighting against AI, because it strips their work of important context. It takes all the value for the AI company rather than sending the reader to the source. The AI Company does not compensate the original author. They don’t think they need to.

Artists are fighting back by using tools that hide watermarks in the artwork, which poison the dataset for the AI. These artists are being treated by tech bros, as Luddites. Which technically they are Luddites. But it’s a compliment not an insult.

These artists are continuing a long tradition of working class fighting against exploitation. We should celebrate these artists.

I am sure my writing has been stolen by AI. I’ve always used a Copy Left license for my work. However, I did not expect the work to be copied by a machine like AI. I only was willing for my work to be interpreted and modified by a thoughtful person.

I finally published a book I’ve been working on the past 4 or 5 years. It’s definitely inspired by Wheel of Time, basically like a sequel where the son of Rand has to finish what Rand started.

However, the magic system is very different, the world is its own thing and the dark one, Yanesh, is an actual being that does really interact with the world.

Bruce, the main character has to deal with significant trauma before he can even start trying to deal with Yanesh. He’s got to sort out what’s going on in his life and his found family in Alata.

I hope you check it out!

Yesterday, Marc Andreesen published a Techno-Optimists Manifesto. You can find it here. It’s pretty clear from reading it that Andreesen does not understand that he’s picking a pretty extreme position with his stances. He claims he’s neither left nor right, but he’s very far right. He may actually support some leftist leaning candidates, but all the candidates he would support are neo-liberal far right capitalists.

He’s pretty open about this as he quotes Milton, Hayek, Von Mises, and Mokyr in his manifesto. Milton is the intellectual force behind Ronald Reagan’s policies. Von Mises is a force for austerity. Along with Hayek, these three thinkers were the reason we had austerity and sequestration in the 2010’s. These thinkers, they are the reason why our scientific efforts in the National Labs and in universities slowed to a crawl. We had fewer PhDs, Post Docs, and other positions for fundamental research as a result.

A techno-optimist should not support policies that stop basic research in new ideas. They should not support policies that encourage basic research. They should not support policies that force people to chose jobs in industry rather than continue to move their research from the lab into a start up. It’s antithetical to what technologists or innovators want.

Andreesen is against a very specific set of ivory tower academics. He might think, you know what it’s fine, let’s push all these academics out of the university and get real jobs. They can get jobs at start ups, or get money from me to start their new venture. The problem is there’s always a strong selection bias in VC’s that lean towards the latest hype. This is evidenced in Andreesen supporting Web3, Generative AI, and Crypto still.

In fact, some of his enemies, Tech Ethics, are rightly pointing out that Generative AI can cause significant harm. Writers like Timnit Gebru, Ruja Benjamin, and many more are right to argue we need intersectional thinking around technology development.

Technology has never been a neutral force.

Technology has never been a force for good.

Technology has always been used in a way to reflect the people that wield it.

Luddites, didn’t want to destroy technology because it was bad. Luddites wanted a fair share of the profits gained through automation. Automation can be used as a tool to liberate employees to work on more complex tasks. Automation can be used as a tool to control employees to drag their work to the least complicated and simplest. So they can be eliminated and removed.

Marc Andreesen’s techno-optimism is full of dog whistles. Two stick out to me almost immediately. The first, like Musk, he argues that the world population is declining. This is patently untrue. All evidence points to steady increase in population past 2100 at the least and likely well beyond. However, if you know, you know. He means, white population. Western Population is in decline. That’s the cause for concern. The great replacement.

The second is a title, “Technical Supermen.” This sounds like he’s arguing the VC’s in Silicon Valley are the Ubermensch. That they are the superior thinkers. That the techno-optimists will be the ones to save humanity. This is, yet another white supremacist line of thinking.

Finally, his list of enemies are the last dog whistles. Tech Ethics, is first and foremost driven by intersectional thinkers. Black women. People of Color. Tech Ethics forces technologists to answer questions like

“What sort of bias did you instill in your technology that causes the car to drive INTO black people?”

“Why does the soap dispenser not see a black person’s palm?”

“Why does Generative AI produce sexualized images of women of color?”

These are the people that he believes are enemies of technology. People that ask questions about why technology is causing harm.

He believes the Trust and Safety organizations at companies like Twitter are the enemy. Trust and Safety keeps the Nazis out. If you do not want your social platform to become the Nazi bar, then you use Trust and Safety to allow people to remove the Nazis. If you do not, then your social media platform is for Nazis. This is what’s happening at Twitter. Twitter has become the platform for racists. For Neo-Nazis.

All this is bad. It’s doubly bad, because Andreesen has a lot of money. It’s triply bad, because he is the person that will fund the next round of entrepreneurs. He is a very influential Venture Capitalist. If these are the ideas he’s espousing that his next round of funded CEOs must adhere to, Tech is only going to be more dangerous. It’s only going to get whiter. It’s only going to get less ethical. It is only going to be a weapon for the future that Marc Andreesen wants.

I don’t want to live in that world.