Know Your Enemy
In his techno-bomber manifesto, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen called anyone who opposes the relentless pace of technology "the enemy." You see, Mr. Andreesen is an altruist who has dedicated his life to the betterment of humanity and he truly sees technology as our species' only hope for survival. How does Marc plan to save the world? Feeding the hungry? Bringing clean water and basic medical care to the poorest regions of the world? Eradicating polio?
Of course not! Marc is not concerned with the plight of any living human. He's thinking about the big picture. What is one person's life when weighed against the long term survival of humanity? Marc can't be concerned with living breathing people who need help today, because he needs to save the lives of billions of hypothetical humans living ten thousand years from now (seriously). It may seem callous, but we can't lose the forest for the trees.
How then is he going to ensure humanity's survival in the long run? Using technology to end our planet-destroying dependence on fossil fuels and by extension the brutal wars fought over them? Developing our civilization in a way that preserves the natural world? Preparing for a global pandemic?
No. Obviously, the way to solve all of humanity's crises is with drug fueled orgies in the Bahamas, paid for by credulous suckers whom Marc convinced to put their lives' savings into spurious cryptocurrency investments. Never mind that cryptocurrency is environmentally disastrous, or that it serves no purpose other than fraud. We must support it blindly and unquestioningly because it is ... technology. And anyone who opposes any technology for any reason is a God damned Luddite.
Well, then I too am a God damned Luddite. I am a technologist who very clearly understands the limitations of technology. And while I have for the last decade designed, developed, and deployed technology for the aerospace and energy industries, I don't view every problem as a nail for which more tech is the hammer. Please don't try to sell me an AI-powered smart hammer for $399, or I might have to hit you with it.
Because of disingenuous hucksters like Marc Andreesen and Sam Altman, I am faced with a general populace that sees technology as something tantamount to magic, and therefore have to spend a significant amount of time gently letting people down when they come to me with cool, but unfeasible ideas. Or terrible and dangerous ideas. I once had to explain to a manager that, while it was technically possible to bypass numerous safety interlocks in order to open a machine while it was running at a temperature of 2000°F inside, doing so would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. I then had to reassure the safety manager, who was not consulted and only heard about it later, that this was just a managerial brain fart and I had no intention of ever carrying out this ludicrous idea.
Captains of industry often become so disconnected from the means of production that they lose any perspective of risk in their endless pursuit of growth. Marc Andreesen doesn't have time for trivial things like safety. He states:
Apparently nuclear power doesn't require precautions. Marc's view seems to be that even if we make missteps in the deployment of technology, and those missteps lead to real harms to real people, that just means we're now one step closer to our goal of ensuring the survival of the hypothetical humans of the future in an effective altruist's acid trip.
Sorry your kids had birth defects, but now I have the juice to power my trillion dollar "AI" data center, which will gain sentience any day now. Once that happens, I'm sure we'll figure out a cure for radiation poisoning.
Which brings me back to the Luddites. As Brian Merchant describes in his fantastic book, Blood in the Machine, the Luddites of early 18th century Britain, were not anti-technologists so much as they objected to being collateral damage for industrialists' ambitions. At the time the loom, a machine for weaving fabrics, had just been invented. The early iterations of the loom were dangerous to use, so naturally the Marc Andreesens of the time rounded up orphaned children to operate them so that they could bust the weavers guilds and flood the market with inferior textiles. Kind of like how movie studios thought Sam Altman's bullshit bot, supported by African content moderators making $1.50 an hour, could smash writers unions and churn out endlessly boring and derivative films.
The Luddites were very popular for the time. Far from being the Debbie downers raining on everyone's future parade, their campaigns to get parliament to enforce the law and later their smashing of looms was widely supported by the people and even those conscience-having factory owners who weren't willing to maim Napoleonic war orphans. It's worth considering why the people who call themselves effective altruists want you to think of Luddites as the enemy. For that matter, it's worth consideration when anyone tries to convince you that someone else is your enemy. Anger is easily redirected and Marc wants your anger directed at the people who question the legitimacy of his business investments.