I think that’s a bit too extreme. Are all machines bad? No, obviously better to have mechanised agriculture than be all peasants. But he is grasping something here which we are now dealing with more directly. It’s the classic Moloch trap of “if you have enough power to optimise hard enough then all slack is destroyed and eventually life itself”. If you thought that was an inevitable end of all technological development (and we haven’t proven it isn’t yet), you may end up thinking being peasants is better too.
I think that’s a bit too extreme. Are all machines bad? No, obviously better to have mechanised agriculture than be all peasants. But he is grasping something here which we are now dealing with more directly. It’s the classic Moloch trap of “if you have enough power to optimise hard enough then all slack is destroyed and eventually life itself”. If you thought that was an inevitable end of all technological development (and we haven’t proven it isn’t yet), you may end up thinking being peasants is better too.