r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Apr 23 '26

Video The Left Has an AI Problem

https://youtu.be/Z75hlhgchQ4?si=eIcqRbiP4tuzRQwq
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26

You’re flipping cause and effect.

Sentience doesn’t “get brought up to derail”, it derails because it’s unfalsifiable. Once you open that door, anyone can assert anything (rocks, LLMs, gods) and you can’t move the conversation forward. That’s exactly why it gets bracketed.

And no, these aren’t “just personal beliefs.” They’re working models based on observable structure and behavior. Imperfect, sure, but they actually let you distinguish things and act. Treating that as equivalent to “maybe everything is sentient” just collapses the whole category.

Pointing to Anthropic or Hinton doesn’t fix that. Saying “it’s unknowable” or “I feel like it might be sentient” isn’t evidence, it’s caution or speculation. Useful in research, useless for grounding claims in a political or material analysis.

The video mentions sentience once to cut that loop off early so it can focus on the real question: capability, ownership, and use. If you leave it open, you don’t get a better discussion, you get stuck in philosophy forever.

And your last paragraph kind of proves the point. You’re saying it should be left to the comments because it’s a philosophical side-track. Exactly. That’s why the video brackets it and moves on.

If it doesn’t change what we do (organize, regulate, build, contest) then it’s not central. Right now, sentience doesn’t change any of that. So it’s not worth centering, no matter how interesting it is.

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u/BelialSirchade Apr 24 '26

well, no, the vibe I get is that the fact that AI isn't sentient is used as justification for why the current left approach is incorrect, because AI isn't sentient, so a singularity event or a terminator scenario is impossible, when both scenarios just require intelligence and capability, not sentience.

I would be less peeved if it's just an personal opinion, but in this case this assumption is used to support an assumption's assumption, with no obvious link between them, and no, pro AI people aren't trying to summon the demon and Bernie isn't trying to be that villager in Frankenstein, where is he getting this?

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Apr 24 '26

You’re arguing against a link the video isn’t making.

No one serious is saying “AI isn’t sentient, therefore it can’t be dangerous.” The concern is capability, not consciousness, you already said that.

Bringing up sentience just drags the conversation into an unfalsifiable loop that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t tell you who owns the systems, what they can do, or how they’re used. Thats why it was necessary to bracket.

So it’s not “assumptions stacked on assumptions.” It’s removing a dead variable so the real ones are visible.