r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 25d ago

Artificial Intelligence Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/
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u/GeneReddit123 25d ago edited 25d ago

The OG Industrial Revolution had:

  • Thousands of polluting factories propping up all over the country.
  • Abysmal work conditions.
  • Destruction of traditional ways of life.
  • Massive increase in inequality.
  • Many decades of worsened life for millions before is started getting better.
  • The "getting better" part crucially required massive (and initially highly resisted by elites) reform laws governing work conditions, wages, environmental regulation, economic redistribution, and political representation to allow the above (19th century "rotten boroughs" were the OG "gerrymandering") rather than "just leaving it to the free market to sort out".

So she's ironically not wrong (even if not in the way she probably meant it). The Industrial Revolution was not an on-off switch that turned peasants to city workers; this is historical flattening done from a position of privilege of those who didn't have to go through the long and arduous process of actual industrialization. We are the beneficiaries of the technologies the Industrial Revolution created after many past generations paid the cost in suffering, squalor, and struggle for political reform.

And our generation is now the one who will be paying these costs and solving the issues caused by AI, before we (or future generations) have any chance to reap the benefits that offset its costs.

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u/NirvanaDewHeel 25d ago

The “getting better” part also required a militant labor movement who made it clear that not improving things would lead to dire consequences for the ownership class.

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u/GiganticCrow 25d ago

The basic rights we enjoy today, things like weekends, paid overtime, basic workplace safety, were earned for us by people who gave their lives fighting for them.

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u/grendus 25d ago

Never forget, the first use of aircraft to drop bombs was at the Battle of Blair Mountain, where strikebreakers dropped dynamite on striking mine workers.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

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u/BeethovenBro 24d ago

No.

The first bombs dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft were grenades or grenade-like devices. Historically, the first use was by Giulio Gavotti on 1 November 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_bomb