@farseen@fedi.nptr.xyz @reformed_content_marketer@mastodon.social Tractors cause something called "tractor pan". Basically, they're very heavy and they squish the ground, slowly creating a very compact layer of soil just below where the disks reach. The problem builds up slowly over time and is expected to become a large issue in US agriculture in a few years. The use of diesel also increases the carbon input for food. Multiple calories of petroleum go into every calorie of food. However, farm labour is really very difficult, hard physical work and switching back to plough horses would massively increase labour input. This also makes food more expensive. We have the ability to redesign tractors. A Dutch inventor has come up with light tractors that are passively powered by wind. Farmers are resistant because they don't want to have to wait for favourable weather to run their machinery, but it does show that a redesign is possible. So tractors: 1. Make food more affordable and abundant in the medium term. 2. Have longer term ecological problems that are addressable. 3. Replace labourers from jobs that often few people want anyway because the work is so hard. 4. Farming safe food is an inherently useful technology. LLMs: 1. Have massive ecological problems which are not addressable - the technology uses vast amounts of data. It's like it's brute forcing language (etc). 2. Under the best possible conditions, their output is dubious and contains embedded bias, thus propagating social harm. 3. Under normal/worse conditions, they're extremely useful for fascism and spam and are eroding democracy. 4. The data gathering is causing massive problems for the web and is shredding rare books. 5. They are a financial scam that is much larger than the mortgage crisis. 6. They are not adding to the amount of reliable information in the world. Looms: Luddites were not against mechanisation, they were against poor working conditions: long hours, low pay, child labour, lack of safety. None of their complaints are an inherent feature of the technology. It's easy to imagine an ethical use case for looms. Ergo Luddites were on the right track, but it's not a direct parallel and we don't need to get caught up in trying to make it one.