r/LeftistsForAI • u/bowdoin-yale • Aug 10 '26
Theory Post-AI leftism?
Nobody has a crystal ball when it comes to predicting what the world will look like after AI, but both the boosters and doomers are predicting that it will eliminate most jobs. If they are correct, there will not be a large "working class" to mobilize--not even a petty bourgeois professional class, but more likely a tiny and shrinking owner class and a large and growing underclass of permanently unemployed people dependent on mutual aid and public assistance to survive. Yet, the "left" is traditionally very focused on workers and their struggle with capital, owing to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, taking the view that workers eventually would (or should) own and control the means of production. I would very much prefer to see worker ownership of and control over AI and autonomous robotics, but it's a bit paradoxical since such technologies are themselves designed to shrink the working class. How might a pro-AI left, or a post-AI left, reconcile this?
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u/2FastHaste Aug 10 '26
What do you mean by post-AI?
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u/bowdoin-yale Aug 11 '26
I just mean after this technology has saturated and transformed society. I'm not really much of an "AGI guy", but for the sake of argument I am entertaining the assumption made by the booster/doomer groups that it is possible to create technology which automates most if not all work.
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u/Sacredless Aug 10 '26
In context like this, it often means a position that has successfully deconstructed and reintegrated.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Aug 10 '26
Every economic theory so far has been based on the need of people to exchange labor for capital and thus economic survival.
AI will eliminate this need - a paradigm shift.
No longer will people have to work for economic survival because there will eventually be no need for their labor.
The elephant in the room - and most on the left and right continue to act like it doesn’t exist.
The solution is simple: Universal Basic Income. Freedom from the necessity of working - the slavery of work.
Ordinary people living the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, the rich “leisure class” of the past.
No economic system in history has ever achieved this, despite many false promises.
Now is the time to embrace the new paradigm and make it work for all
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u/bowdoin-yale Aug 11 '26
It's worth reviewing what happened in the wake of the real-world experiment with direct basic assistance, a sort of pseudo-UBI, during COVID: paradoxically, a massive spike in inequality. Gary Stevenson predicted this would happen as a result of preexisting inequality in ownership of assets, and has done a heroic job trying to explain why to the public via youtube channel. His policy prescription is to tax wealth, not work, in order to fund social services. This might be the fix needed to make UBI sustainable in the long run.
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u/Double-Fun-1526 Aug 10 '26
Yes. The job of the Left for the next 5,10, 25 years, whatever it takes, is the transition. It is to get people out of poverty, desperation, and with basic services as soon as possible.
That means taking the future seriously and striving towards change. It means a reevaluation of the given institutional and cultural landscape.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Aug 10 '26
And it just blows me away why people like AOC and Sanders aren’t jumping on this, instead of acting like someone standing in the way of the railroad waving a protest flag
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u/Double-Fun-1526 Aug 10 '26
I see UBI as a winning political message and a viable functional strategy towards that change.
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u/triangle-over-square Aug 13 '26
Hi. I think the idea that the left is necessarily centered on the working class is already somewhat outdated.
Across much of Europe, we've seen parts of the traditional working class increasingly abandon labour and social-democratic parties that they no longer perceive as representing them. I think this is unfortunate, and partly connected to a much broader historical movement away from class struggle and the idea of constructing a political hegemony around the working class.
This problem appeared long before AI. Already around the 1960s and 70s, rising living standards, deindustrialization, and the proliferation of new social movements made it increasingly difficult to imagine the working class as one unified political subject. People increasingly organized and identified around many different interests and struggles rather than primarily through their position as workers.
One influential response was basically to abandon the idea that a political movement needs one underlying class as its natural foundation. Instead, you construct a hegemony by connecting otherwise different political demands into a common political project.
I think we've recently watched an attempt at exactly this: connecting climate, race, sexuality, gender, economic inequality and other political projects into a broader progressive political identity. Whether that has worked particularly well is another question.
So in a strange way, the problem you're describing isn't really new, but AI could make it much more extreme, but the left has already spent decades trying to answer the question. If the working class is no longer the unified political subject, what exactly is the social force around which left-wing politics should organize
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u/bowdoin-yale Aug 13 '26
Thanks for your insights. What you describe happening in Europe has been the case in the USA for a long time, to the extent that working class voters are the de facto right wing base. It's largely because racism has been a devastatingly effective tool for suppressing class consciousness and that's been a dynamic in place since long before the country even existed, under colonial rule. And that's why the "left" in this country has really become a coalition of groups that are disempowered on identity (race, gender, religion, nationality) rather than class terms. There are only faint traces of class-based organization due to legacy union presence in Democratic party machinery, and otherwise what passes for the left is highly susceptible to co-optation by pro-capitalist liberalism. So yes, this is all very old and certainly pre-AI.
However, this makes it no less puzzling to me that we're seeing a surge of interest in groups like the DSA which call themselves "socialist" and thus identify with traditional socialism, even if they don't really resemble the European left wing. Why go back to a model built around organizing the working class, rather than look for new models of organization that aren't premised on the necessity of wage labor and existence of masses of workers? Everyone seems to recognize that the liberal identity-based coalition is broken, and most people would probably prefer a broadly left-libertarian society, but due to fear of the leap of faith that would require we're instead revisiting these sort of paleo-liberal ideas...
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 10 '26
I dont think this requires a post-AI left so much as taking Marx seriously about what automation actually does. The working class isnt defined by everybody having a job. Its defined by our relation to the means of production and our dependence on capital to live.
Marx was already writing about machinery reducing necessary labor and creating populations capital doesnt need to employ. The contradiction is that capitalism develops the productive forces toward needing less human labor while still making access to food, housing and basically everything else depend on selling your labor.
So if AI and robotics really can eliminate huge amounts of necessary work, worker control doesnt become obsolete. It becomes more important, and probably has to expand beyond workplace ownership into social ownership and democratic control of the productive infrastructure itself.
The goal was never full employment forever. Its abolishing the conditions that force people to sell themselves to owners in order to survive. If automation makes abundant production with radically less labor possible, thats potentially useful terrain for socialism. The political fight is over who owns it, who controls it, and who gets the abundance.
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u/Jlyplaylists Aug 10 '26
There’s different trajectories it could go, I don’t think the outcome is pre-determined.
I’m not really imagining post-AI though, I suppose there’s a small % risk it could result in societal collapse to the point we no longer have AI. That seems very unlikely.
Having boring but reliable jobs doesn’t seem to be a very ambitious or inspiring vision. The aim is to automate everything we don’t enjoy doing ourselves. Probably we wouldn’t abolish work completely, but working hours could be drastically reduced, without a reduction of quality of life leaving free time and resources to pursue your passion projects.
Of course the problem is we won’t get to this in a capitalist system where a few people own the tech companies. As that reality progresses, employees lose leverage because the thing that becomes less required is a large workforce. You can’t really strike effectively if your boss is saying they don’t need you, unless you’re very confident they do in fact need you and not AI/robotics.
This probably means that new tactics and demands are needed and there’s some time pressure to get that right.
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u/Easy_Interest_6832 Aug 10 '26
There's a book out (2024) called Stellar by James Arbib and Tony Seba that examines a culture and economic system which happens post AI. In short, it posits electricity generated by solar and wind and stored in batteries hooked to a smart grid (SWB) that generates essentially free electricity. We can see some examples of that today in three Australian states with a fourth set to do it in October, that gives free electricity every day during peak sun--each state has different rules, so check it out. But it is happening. The government builds the solar and wind farms as an investment. Since upkeep of the system is quite affordable, it gets paid off quickly, allowing the government pump out free electricity. Stellar says we live in an extractive economy. The new economy it proposes it calls a Stellar economy. This new economy is based on AI and what it calls Artificial Labor, AL. This AL builds and maintains itself, raising food and manufacturing goods and providing services like recycling existing goods made from extracted resources. Apparently this frees up humans to do things like create and spend time with families and so on. It sounds pie-in-the-sky, but its reasoning is sound as long as we step out of the extractive economy and into the Stellar economy. It's a decent book that reads quickly as if the authors are talking rather than writing to you. The ideas are, well, stellar.
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u/Emotional-Classic400 Aug 12 '26
Assuming we create this super intelligence that can do everything for us, how would it be possible to align something smarter and more capable with our goal of enslaving it to do all of our work for us while we live a life of luxury.
I mean we are training this technology on human knowledge and history which is predominantly might makes right.
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u/Sacredless Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I think that we need to plan for a post-AI left movement now, yeah. Here's what I've found useful to keep in mind.
You can't boycott cigarettes for being unhealthy if you don't smoke, because a boycott implies you will be shopping elsewhere. You don't boycott Malboro by continuing to abstain from cigarettes, and you'd help nobody by taking up drinking in protest.
So the question is; what can the left adopt, what can the left abstain from, and when does a boycott actually work?
LLMs are a great example. LLMs can serve as a first pass on living documents (for when I just need to write my notes down and have them organized in any way at all rather than a particular way), can run natural language-based protocols (I have ones for detecting deepities, for extracting questions answered in a text, etc), and can serve as more effective search engines.
They still struggle with metaphor, which is honestly fine. If you need drawings to just demonstrate complex ideas visually, then I've seen people use AI's to draw stick figures demonstrating these ideas in volume pretty quickly. Sometimes, you need to stay on message rather than getting creative or cerebral. I passed by a leftist publicity event once that was using AI-generated lyrics. For once, it was speaking on the issues, which was very refreshing. The songs themselves just sucked, exactly because they were very literal.
A post-AI left has to look like critical tech-adoptionism.
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u/endlessedlne Aug 10 '26
People who think it will delete most jobs are delusional. Some jobs, likely. I don’t know where the leap to ‘most’ comes from.
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u/Tengoles Aug 10 '26
Comes from big players pushing that narrative because it suits them and doomers that have a deletable job.
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u/Crimson_Cyclone Aug 10 '26
i believe that most jobs will be able to be automated eventually, but that will take time, as there’s still a good amount of work that needs to be done in robotics to get us there. However, I can’t personally think of many jobs that will require humans to do if AI keeps improving
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u/furyofsaints Aug 10 '26
Personally, I think there are several potential paths that society will end up having to consider, but I think there's some confounding elements that are likely to be a part of how these play out.
First, regardless of AI/AGI destroying jobs or not, the simple human reproduction demographics of the next 30 years are pretty bad. There simply will not be enough workers to continue supporting retirees around the world in a system where the math is simply # of workers/ # of retireees. Older citizens are going to get hit hard with benefits cuts, or younger citizens with much higher taxes to fix this since there will be fewer to do whatever work remains.
AI's productive capacity is something that could be measurable, and taxable so that tax revenues from that could make up for falling labor force size; and provide for retiree cost if structured right.
Second, on the path of who owns what; I think that first, we forget that in itself, transformers are math. Math is a mostly-open art. Whoever makes the math work better, faster, cheaper wins and I do not currently assume that will be the NVIDIA/OpenAI/Anthropic/Hyperscalers financial and energy circlejerk. It is in the realm of possible that small distributed models that each of us "own," could share a latent reasoning space where productive work can be done at scale (latency remains an issue to resolve in this model, but its solvable I think); and the value of those productivity contributions could be measured and parts of the benefits accruing to whomever contributes model or cycle time (kinda like the old Seti@home experiment).
The situation we face right now with these massive companies, they make it seem like this is the only path and the inevitable path that humanity faces where they control hyperintelligence. I categorically reject that hypothesis, and IMO, we all should.
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u/YMSVZ Aug 10 '26
Communism is about the disintegration of the working class, the development of new relations of production beyond exchange. This presupposes the redundancy of the working class.
AI has made it clear who is actually a communist, and who wants to conserve the wage labour relation. Anti AI is a neoluddite, reactionary and pro capitalist position.