alt Hacker NewsDon't be fooled into thinking that the tractor or the loom brought about positive social progress.
It wasn't the machines that caused the social progress. It was the organised labour movements (and the variously destructive or violent sabotage movements) pushing back against the machines that made the social progress.
The tractor and the loom made life noticeably worse for the people they replaced until they organised against them, and even then it took decades for them to get back the limited kind of quality of life (and health) an agricultural worker might have had.
I do find it interesting how many AI people make tractor and loom analogies without the slightest grasp of the true history of the industrial revolution.
Any social progress that comes from AI will not be something AI people can claim as their success, because it will have happened at their expense. There will be pushback; it may be violent.
The suggestion that violence may be necessary does not strengthen your argument, it exposes its weakness. A movement that cannot defend its ideals without romanticising destructive force is not protecting social progress. It is to fundamentally misunderstand where social progress comes from, or what represents a good life.
As for the rest, it's a remarkably selective account of the industrial revolution. Your argument relies upon the unspoken inference that pre-industrial agricultural life was somehow a better life that was diminished by progress.
The tractor did not merely replace farm workers. It allowed a tiny fraction of the population to produce vastly more food while releasing millions of people from exhausting agricultural labour. Perhaps you would prefer a life of hard physical labour, low output, poor medicine, food insecurity, and little protection against injury, disease, or harvest failure. Perhaps you don't like that you toil away in an air-conditioned office writing video game code, for a salary that you wish was higher, because you dread the cost of your next smartphone purchase.
Technological change created enormous productivity gains. Yes, these often unfairly disadvantage workers trained in the outgoing industries. But I don't hear you arguing for a return to hand-weaving, because the societal benefit of progress is inarguable.