Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.
Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.
problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)
I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.
so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
All of this crap has already been figured out by Silvio Gesell and his free economics ("Freiwirtschaft") movement before world war two. In fact, it has been figured out before Lenin got to power. Communists could have just stolen his ideas, pretended that they were their own and be done with capitalism.
Instead, we live in this absurd timeline where our communist "saviors" preferred losing against capitalists over achieving their stated goals. This tells us that in communism, the means are the goal and the proclaimed end goal is just an excuse to perform the means.
If communists genuinely wanted to help their people and they accept that they might not know how to get there, they would at least run hundreds to thousands of economic experiments, something that wouldn't be possible under capitalism, to find the methods that work. Instead, the self proclaimed saviors are inherently anti-reformist and against incremental change to improve society. They demand that all economic activity be under the control of the state and thereby destroy all possibility of performing economic experiments.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.