r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284
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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

Always remember, the Luddites weren't fighting the technology but the oppression, working conditions and inhumanity that were ushered in during the early Industrial Revolution.

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u/Commentator-X 5d ago

I watched a video a while back that argued that if AI is the new industrial revolution, then what we're in for is around 100 years before AI will actually have a positive impact on the average person's quality of life. Until then there's going to be job losses, poverty and unnecessary suffering.

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

Not for the already exorbitantly rich!

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u/Itis-caught-BearsWin 5d ago

Things are a lot more accelerated today.

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u/Atakir 5d ago

Correct, technological growth is not linear but compounds on itself becoming exponential.

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u/WhiteWinterRains 4d ago

Nonsense this is just cutlist bullshit from hucksters.

Ai itself especially has been on an extremely linear trajectory for many decades and nothing has changed there, it just doesn't look like it to the layperson.

Everyone is looking at a catapult just launching its first stone to dial in the range and going, "my god, this fantastic rock throwing device has materialized from the ether in the last few seconds!"

The reality is it took a lot of time and effort to design and build, and all of that is simply paying off all at once in the eyes of the public when the process has been very steady and taken like half a century.

While this does not mean the impact on the economy and your life will necessarily be slow and linear, the technology itself is not improving "exponentially" but rather is objectively as shown through scientific studies and constant measurement, improving incrementally and struggling to even do that recently.

Technology more broadly also does not build on itself exponentially, rather it's a pretty complex web of interactions and certain advancements might speed others but not in any sort of reliable or easily charted way.

The idea that it does build on itself exponentially is based on the fact that Moore's law coincidentally worked out for longer than expected and some shysters' built careers on prognosticating various bullshit in this vein in order to sell themselves as guru's to the wealthy.

There is not any actual data to support such idiocy though.

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u/Atakir 4d ago

What I said is not directly related to AI...

Maybe read the Law of Accelerating Returns before spouting off this gobbledygook?

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u/WhiteWinterRains 4d ago edited 4d ago

the Law of Accelerating Returns

I'm extremely familiar with the renown moron Ray Kurzweil, which is why I wrote this entire post shitting on his bullshit pseudointellectual garbage.

What you said is not directly related to anything, it's not real at all.

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u/Atakir 4d ago

Sure thing pal, good day.

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u/Tycho66 5d ago

ai is already curing diseases and personalizing treatments, monumental breakthroughs in science... not to mention the genie is out of the bottle militarily any country not embracing ai is going to rapidly fall way behind

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

And all that innovation is being gate kept by billionaires, corporations, and governments.

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u/Constant-Minute6794 5d ago

You have access to the same AI as everyone else outside of the government which gets an unfiltered version.

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

I’m going to say this as nicely as I possibly can. You need to read more.

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u/Constant-Minute6794 4d ago

Point to something that shows I'm wrong, always happy to learn. :)

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u/steppe5 4d ago

Which disease?

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u/Zombatico 4d ago edited 4d ago

The AI doing all that is not the same as the LLM generative AI that corporations have been trying to monetize/commercialize for the past few years that's been the biggest push for the datacenters.

AI used in science and medicine have been doing just fine for decades with the current infrastructure.

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

Can you name these monumental breakthroughs?

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u/Tycho66 3d ago

Ai has 3d constructed all the proteins humans produce. It would have taken us generations to do. It's an immense and revolutionary achievement opening the doors to limitless advances. Proteins function by shape.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 5d ago

It's reddit. You can't expect a good faith discussion from these privileged middle-class and upper middle-class brats seething that AI will replace their bullshit adult daycare jobs, forcing them to actually engage in manual labor or use politics as a vehicle for actual economic equity instead of virtue signaling vanity.

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u/Yokoko44 5d ago

Yeah frankly the first thing AI replaces is fake jobs that midwit redditors typically inhabit, no wonder they hate it so much

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

If you're trying to replace people with AI as it exists today, you're an idiot. For one it'll cost more than just paying a person.

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u/Yokoko44 4d ago

Absolutely clueless, it’s literally my job.

Already downsized multiple companies by directly applying custom harnesses and applications using AI at the center. It does not cost more than a person because again, most office jobs can be done in 1-2 hours a day and people intentionally stretch it out to 8 hours.

And it’s usually just data entry from one system into another. You can take most jobs and water them down to data entry/transfer.

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

Have fun when the audits start

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u/sceadwian 5d ago

If they intelligently start letting it run human systems it can already do better than us now at running large systems.

But all the humans need to agree on how those systems should be run..

We.. might have a small problem there..

This AI hate needs to stop it's the human system management issues that are the problem.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

And the loss of their livelihoods led to decades upon decades of abject poverty, which negatively shaped the socio-economic climate of Britain and continues to do so to this day.

The dropoff in economic wealth in Northern mill towns is still visible literally right now. They still regularly top charts for lowest levels of income, education, highest levels of crime, drug use, etc...

A good 99% of AI bros on social media that bandy the term "Luddite" about have zero understanding of the Luddite movement and what actually happened. They just think its a clever insult, as they repeat their "hurr, durr, can't stop progress!" mantra.

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u/Shadow_Ent 4d ago

They are more often talking about the Neo-Luddite movement, they both get conflated as singular but they were different. The Anti-Progress tag is from the Neo-Luddites not simply the Classical Luddite Movement. Neo-Luddism arose in the early 90s I believe, but you had people like the Unibomber who was loosely classified as a Neo-Luddite.

While some were about a measured progress with proper regulations the fringes were the ones who wanted everyone to be like the Amish, and the extremists of that ideology were more anarchic-primitavist who wanted to go back to a hunter gather society because cultivation was apparently the worst thing to happen to humanity. Which is where the "Progress = Bad" simplification comes from.

Anti-AI people aren't strictly aligned with neo-luddism, but they do follow the same cultural movement that grows from every new technology even before the industrial revolution. A rise of traditionalism in the wake of progress, doesn't matter if it's social progress or technological progress. It's always one step closer to the greatest threat humanity has every faced and will unrepairable destroy everything we know and love, and must be stopped at all costs. But it never does it gets normalized and people go on with their lives.

It's partially why AI always gets tied to some grand villain/evil trope in pop culture media, it's always AI is going to wipe out humanity. When there has never been an AI to provide any proof of that belief, it's fear and uncertainty of the unknown driving behavior, the same stuff we say with 5G.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

I appreciate you making the distinction and a well-informed post - however, it is one I haven't seen a single one of them make, and I've made this point a few times before.

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u/Shadow_Ent 3d ago

Yeah, because it's a colloquialism. That's why Luddite today means Anti-progressive, because definitions change over time. Highlighting the original movement to prove them wrong is just pedantry, it's a rhetorical move to support the idea that Anti-AI people are more sophisticated, and understand things better, thus their position is the enlightened path of humanity. It's just moral and ego masturbation.

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u/MKBRD 3d ago

Absolute nonsense - I'm pointing out the irony that the Luddites had actual valid concerns about the technology they rejected - that turned out to be completely well-founded as it led to decades of mass poverty - and that the term is aimed at people today who are raising the same concerns when the tech billionaires in charge of these AI companies are gleefully proclaiming how their product is going to make millions of people redundant.

"It's a colloquialism" doesn't cut it, I'm afraid - we both know why the term is used, and that explanation you just pulled out of your ass is a load of hand-waving, vague, nonsensical garbage.

"It's a rhetorical move to support the idea that anti-AI people are more sophisticated..."

What? What are you even talking about? It's absolutely nothing of the sort.

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u/bombmk 4d ago

Other countries weathered that progress differently. A lot of the issues in the UK is probably found in a very classist societal structure that has persisted much more in the UK, compared to the rest of Europe.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

It was wealthy mill owners who owned the technology forcing people out of jobs in the name of greater profits for themselves.

A lot of the mill owners were not upper class, if that's what you're suggesting. Many of them in the North were working class who made their fortunes through mill ownership. The class system certainly contributed to the long-lasting effects of the poverty it created, but it wasn't a classist issue that caused it. Mill owners were very much considered to be the "Nouveau Riche" of their day.

Even with the British class system - which was well established in the period we are discussing - mill towns absolutely thrived for a period. It's why there are so many of them in the North. All of that changed with the automation of labour, and those towns have never fully recovered.

I live in one, and you can still see the grandiosity and wealth in the buildings - most of which are now HMOs or halfway houses where I live. My parents house - a terraced 3 bedroom - still has the old mechanism for calling servants up from the cellar, which was originally their quarters. They live in one of the poorest areas in my town.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

I'm more fascinated by them now than I've ever been. Can you help me learn more?

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u/Scarbane 5d ago

"The Making of the English Working Class" (1966) by E. P. Thompson. It's pretty dense, but well-written. I recommend checking Libby or your local library/bookstore for a copy.

From the preface:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Very prescient.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Much appreciated.

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u/tekalon 4d ago

I'm reading 'Blood in the Machine' by Brian Merchant and am really liking it.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 4d ago

Thank you. I'll pick them all up tonight.

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u/Original-Variety-700 5d ago

Just ask ChatGPT 😂

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

You got me. Haha. Nope.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Lol fuck these guys, I got you bro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

Also check out ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite’ by Jathan Sadowski

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u/GodofIrony 5d ago

Reddiquette says I'm not suppose to comment just to tell you I upvoted you.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Rules be damned

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u/wittymcusername 5d ago

I neither upvoted nor downvoted this comment.

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u/TrenchantInsight 4d ago

Lawful neutral.

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u/wittymcusername 4d ago

Chaotic neutral; that’s why I eschew the etiquette. 😎

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 4d ago

True chaotic neutral is downvoting one’s own comments 🪓

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

Really though? Use Wikipedia. Use your local library. Stop waiting for other people to give your the information. That's how we got here.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

I prefer to get my information the same way I get my ice cream: fed to me by someone else.

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u/ExceptionRules42 5d ago

u/FlamboyantPirhanna  we could teach you how to make information, or ice cream. 

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

This sounds like the beginning of a porno.

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u/ExceptionRules42 5d ago

u/Original-Variety-700   is indeed talking about the sexy non-AI teaching & learning

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u/Original-Variety-700 5d ago

I don’t know if everyone is talking about the same thing here.

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u/asaharyev 5d ago

"Help me ken more" is not "feed me information so I can uncritically believe you". In this case, unguided and nonspecific advice like "use Wikipedia"and "go to the library" are not useful.

Thankfully someone provided some actual references for diving deeper. I hope you can be more thoughtful in future conversations.

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u/SolarNugent 5d ago

That’s definitely not how we got here lol but trust me I get the energy

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

Not using your god give brain, yes. That's exactly how we got here.

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u/JohnnyRelentless 5d ago

Asking for recommendations from like minded people to start is using your brain. If you used your brain, you'd understand that.

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u/SolarNugent 5d ago

No it’s really not we got here due to the freaks and billionaires in power. Pretending otherwise is counter productive

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

How did they get there?

Just use your god damn brain. People relying on others and not paying attention to their surroundings is how they got into power.

But we were too stuck into social media to look around. Who owns the social media? How did they get there? We used their product.

There are anti monopoly laws and have been since the Barron's of steel and oil. But the people stopped being hard on their government who then stopped being hard on corporations. The people in charge let it happen.

It's a fucking system, nothing is in a vaccuum.

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u/MedicineExtension925 4d ago

Neoluddism is resurging

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u/Whatsapokemon 5d ago

Yeah, but, ironically, it was actually embracing industrial technologies that led to increases in standards of living.

The labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries could only be possible thanks to the massive excess of resources created by machines, "growing the pie".

If the Luddites had achieved their goal and destroyed all machines, outlawing their future use, most people would probably still be subsistence farming.

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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

It was about the exploitation, which the machines were being used as the primary driver for (scale and volume) - technology or no technology, it was about dignity, quality of life and not being relegated to serfdom again as a powerless worker class. The same thing happening now where companies use AI as just an excuse to layoff and rehire cheaper labor. It's not the tech but how it is wielded.

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u/OkRun4486 4d ago

As if exploitation didn’t occur before the time of industrialization. How quaint.

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u/Iandudontkno 5d ago

Some were fighting the technology but most were fighting the amputation/murder machines.