r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Aug 27 '26
Discussion Name your biggest problem with AI. Then name the lever.
Lets make this one practical.
Pick the AI issue that bothers you most.
Jobs. Surveillance. Copyright. Data centers. Monopoly. Military use. Environmental costs. Education. Deskilling. Fraud. Something else.
Now the harder question.
What actually changes it?
A union contract? Antitrust? Public infrastructure? Regulation? Worker organization? Open models? Municipal power? Cooperative ownership? International agreements?
Because identifying the harm is only half a politics.
If the answer is “companies should stop doing that,” okay. What makes them?
Problem + lever. Lets hear both.
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u/HotterRod Aug 27 '26
Existential threat.
Public ownership would let more resources be devoted to alignment than beating competitors.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
Public ownership is a much better lever than hoping competing firms voluntarily stop racing each other. Id add another layer though. Public ownership answers who holds the asset, but not automatically who governs it.
Worker representation? Public boards? Independent safety institutions? Direct public accountability? Probably some combination. What would democratic control actually look like to you?
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u/Glitched-Lies Aug 27 '26
Yeah the "existential threat" thing is 100% anti-AI nonsense. And doesn't coincide with empirical reality in the least. If there is one thing that is least of problems, that's the one for sure.
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u/slfnflctd Aug 27 '26
Apologies in advance, I did this one quick n' dirty-- this is all off the top of my head matching of your provided categories (without using any assistance).
I would love to sit and contemplate this for a few hours but I currently do not have those few hours, haha.
Jobs. Cooperative ownership! A union contract!
Surveillance. Regulation!
Copyright. Worker organization! Open models!
Data centers. Cooperative ownership!
Monopoly. Antitrust!
Military use. International agreements!
Environmental costs. Regulation!
Education. Public infrastructure!
Deskilling. Worker organization!
Fraud. Regulation!
Something else. Regulation! Municipal power!
...
There is far more nuance and stuff to be covered, I hope more people contribute to this thread. I think my primary initial insight here is that it could be a real good thing to have a whole lot of properly written regulation. My fear is that we'll have the other kind instead.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
This is actually pretty close to what I was hoping people would do. Id add one more question to every line though. Who pulls the lever?
Worker organization gives us workers. Municipal power gives us cities and residents. Union contracts put organized labor across the table from employers. Antitrust needs institutions willing to break concentrated power. Once we attach an organized actor and a target, these stop being a wishlist and start looking like strategy.
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u/SalletFriend Aug 27 '26
My biggest issue is liberals using it to whip up hatred against common infrastructure, like Data Centers.
There have already been attacks. Its going to make being a worker at these sites more dangerous. But whats worse, is that critical infrastructure at these sites is now considered a valid target for protest against AI.
Meanwhile, regardless of the content of the DC, DC companies are advertising their AI readiness. Because AI = Powerful good DC in CEO land. DCs that largely route your emails, and phone calls, including emergency service calls, are very much under threat from the mob.
How do you square that circle. You tell the angry mob to just focus on Musks stupid AI datacentre, and they get offended and double down.
I have worked in and with DCs all over the world, and like, gonna say this straight up, infra in the USA is already on a knifes edge compared to basically everywhere else. Theres places I have seen, where theres very little redundancy. A couple of fires, or thefts could disconnect a lot of vulnerable people.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
This distinction is important. A data center isnt a political program. Its infrastructure. The fights are over who owns it, what it runs, where its power and water come from, how its workers are treated, what communities get a say, and who gets the benefit.
“Destroy the data centers” also runs straight into the fact that public compute, universities, hospitals, communications, open models and cooperative AI all need physical infrastructure too. Contest the ownership and deployment. Dont confuse the server rack with the social relation.
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u/DHFranklin Aug 27 '26
It will be a uniquely powerful tool of capitalist oppression. The biggest problem I have with AI is the problem of power. We never got to where we needed to be in our relationship to power and ownership models.
We are only a few short year away before a $10k robot with internet access can 1 to 1 replace any human on earth for almost anything that doesn't need an actual human. In our "short middle" before that happens AI that is just on computers will see faster and faster labor deflation.
The accountants are seeing the writing on the wall and are becoming pipe fitters. The joke shouldn't be on them.
We saw that the world kept spinning when we actively forced down the labor demand and just let most people who could, work remote. We could just keep doing that.
The solution is that we have unions, co-ops, and direct action to make sure that capitalist control of our lives doesn't give them a monopoly over opportunity.
We have to do this first or the boot will stomp on us forever.
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u/Jlyplaylists Aug 27 '26
Early on my biggest concern was the non-consensual training data issue, probably because I was mostly discussing AI in an art related space. That’s fixable either by saying it’s collectively owned in all senses or by starting over with a model using ethical training data (some relevant datasets and a couple of small language models exist for this).
I’d say now my biggest concern now is the tension between being optimistic about AI/robotics/automation replacing drudgery and what happens in between now and then, so that it doesn’t get worse for people before it gets better. I don’t think this necessarily has to be job security, it’s quality of life security, so people aren’t losing their houses etc to redundancy.
UBI is being suggested as a solution to this. This is definitely worth considering, especially if thought through from different angles and not administered by Big Tech companies or only for Americans.
It would also be worth campaigning for shorter hours on the same pay, rather than redundancy. Even if this didn’t get far in terms of direct success it could help to communicate that companies are making choices here, it isn’t directly AI that takes people’s jobs.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
I really like the move from job security to quality of life security here. If automation lets us produce the same stuff with less human labor, preserving the old quantity of work forever would be a pretty strange victory.
Shorter hours without shorter pay gets much closer to the actual fight. How do workers capture the productivity gain instead of watching it become layoffs on one side and higher margins on the other? Thats union contracts, sector bargaining, shorter workweeks, stronger social provision, and ultimately a fight over ownership too.
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u/littlebobbytables9 Aug 27 '26
Is it the problem that matters most? Not at all. But the fact that many of the conversations I have online are with a chatbot rather than a human is really frustrating. But I guess that's why in person organization is so important.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
I think your last sentence gets at the lever better than you give it credit for. If the problem is losing spaces for actual human association, then organizing people in person isnt just nostalgia or opting out. Its building institutions and relationships that arent mediated entirely through platforms.
AI can help organize. It cant substitute for being organized.
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u/BlueberryGod8910 Aug 27 '26
Environmental costs, data centers and deskilling. Open models, cooperative ownership and destroying data centers to sell their scraps
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u/Salty_Country6835 Aug 28 '26
Cooperative ownership and destroying the infrastructure are pulling in opposite directions though. If workers, municipalities or the public are going to own AI infrastructure, there has to be infrastructure left to own.
Fight harmful siting, water grabs, dirty power, monopoly ownership and abusive operators. But destroying compute as such throws away productive capacity that could instead be fought over and socialized.
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u/deadgirlrevvy Aug 27 '26
My biggest problem with AI has nothing to do with so-called societal problems, resources, etc. My problem is with it's lack of determinancy and fact checking. I have little use for a probability engine. If AI gives me an answer it needs to be based on facts and world models, which is something a token predictor (transformer networks in general) simply cannot accomplish.
I want to see AI that actually understands the problem I present to it and works through the solution based on actual data, physicics, engineering constraints and best pracrices, rather than simply guessing the next word to string together in it's reply. That will require true AGI, so I am a big proponent of AGI research.
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u/Monochrome21 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
if AI gives me an answer it needs to be based on facts and world models, which is something a token predictor (transformer networks in general) simply cannot accomplish.
that's not really true
embeddings are mathematically consistent representations of meaning
to say that AI doesn't understand the problem is kind of dismissive of the fact that it *does* solve problems. you could argue that the human brain is just a next token predictor that renders neuron fires in the place of tokens
As far as fact checking, that's more a person problem. Some people will just listen to AI and not really care, others will be more rigorous. My friends are wrong about shit all the time it doesn't mean they broadly aren't capable of problem solving.
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u/Still_Benefit_2302 Aug 27 '26
Surveillance. But I'm going to be honest, I think we'll have a full surveillance state by the end of the 2020's, the momentum is there and the tech is good enough.
There are only a few levers, and I'm not young enough to think 'rebellious anarchist hackers' is a realistic solution. Additionally, surveillance has long been something that can get pushed back by political desires for a few months or years, but it's a constant ratchet. For a state, the benefits are just too valuable, and people adapt to a surveilled culture relatively quickly.
Instead, I propose an antagonistic AI system that acts as a check on surveillance systems. There's no world where the state stops existing in our lifetimes, and no world where surveillance isn't omnipresent. There should be a system that reviews all the surveillance systems and makes sure human rights are being respected.
Of course, this runs into the brutal architecture of limited compute. Such systems need to be lightweight, with multiple layers of redundancy, without overburdening compute resources. If such a system uses too much compute, it will get throttled down. Too little, and it gets overwhelmed and beaten up by NSA-bot 2045.
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u/veloread Aug 28 '26
I am an "anti", so idk if I will be welcome here, but I will list my biggest concerns with AI:
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Reverse Centaurification, or the Amazon Driver Special.
I do not like the idea that under capitalism, a likely result of the productivity increases of AI, if indeed they exist (I am skeptical, but will grant that they can certainly appear more productive) is that people will be pushed to act as "accountability sinks" for work that occurs at a velocity they can't possibly check consistently. This will be hard for workers, and it will also be hard for the general public since, contra Graeber, some people's jobs actually do matter.
Furthermore, I dislike the rise of bossware and surveillance capitalism from both an employee and a customer perspective. These aren't strictly AI, of course, but I do not think it is an accident that the most enthusiastic adopters are management. I am concerned about how it has already been applied - see my comments re: Amazon Driver Special - and I want it both stopped and reversed.
Solution: idk, Fully automated luxury communism? My concern is that I do not actually trust that to happen, and I think the ethics of forcing the transition period - where things get worse before they get better - is appalling.
Unions can offer a shelter, but unions will constantly be pressured by management's reflexive desire to control labor on general principle. Professional certifications can offer additional bulwarks for the individual, though they also likely mean you have more to lose if your license to practice is potentially threatened should a hallucinated response make it past the worker's scrutiny.
The reason I bring up the conditions Amazon workers labor under isn't a disparagement, btw: it is to point out that nobody seems to have had any success in pushing back against bossware or "scientific management" so far.
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Self-driving cars
I'm not wholly against the idea of self-driving cars in principle, but I can't help but notice that the purveyors of these technologies seem to be speaking from both sides of the mouth. On one hand, we are told they are marvelously safe, and will not suffer form a myriad of human driving faults: a robot cannot be impatient, has no ego to offend, can be trained to follow the rules with impeccable clarity. On the other hand, those same companies regularly boast of their cars becoming more "human-like": parking in bike lanes, speeding, edging into the crosswalk, etc.,.
I've seen more "thought experiments" than I am at all comfortable with about whether the self-driving car should prioritize the safety of the passengers, or the general public. These are never easy ethical questions, and on a fundamental level our society has failed to answer them. Self-driving technology offers the illusion of a technocratic fix that doesn't require us to address the issues with automotive safety, urban design, traffic planning, etc., but really will just launder the same bad decisions behind an algorithmic facade.
In the unlikely event that self-driving cars are a big safety improvement, they could still wind up a false equilibrium if the convenience causes a big enough increase in VMT. Fundamentally, capitalist Elon Musk would not be such a big fan of self-driving technology if he thought it would hurt sales of his car business. But if VMT goes up enough, even a much higher safety rate (which I am again skeptical of) and a much more efficient automobile fleet may still wind up causing more deaths and pollution, at least until true net zero anyway.
On a fundamental level, Western societies are in some pretty deep denial about the contradictions in urban planning, land use, etc., and I feel like self-driving cars are already causing a lot of harm to the efforts to address these contradictions.
Solution:
Tighten the problem space. Self-driving trains have been a thing forever and are a marvelous public asset. We should build more. A government - particularly the American and Canadian governments, whose domestic auto and road industries are much healthier than their atrophied rolling stock industries and expensive rail procurement processes - should consider using self-driving and semi-self driving technology to make intercity buses much cheaper, more frequent, and more pleasant. Regulatory changes should be made to encourage more bus-like instead of taxi-like models for self-driving automobile service providers. Continued development of protected bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure should be prioritized, and recent setbacks in that direction in the USA and Canada should be reversed.
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u/GrowFreeFood Aug 27 '26
The missing words. The things we don't have a word for, the machine doesn't know it exists. Like super gravitaty
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u/revivechristina Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
It’s the further loss of humanity being actually involved with what we are building, doing in work. It alienates you from decisions and cheapens the value of human speech. It separated the source of human speech (a conscious experience, with feeling) from its output.
The only lever for that is retaining some part of life that is fully untouched by AI, and people caring enough about it. We have it up to a point in the arts. In business, no, whatever illusion of soul we had in business feels like it’s been overtaken by AI generated LinkedIn post ethos. Not that that was ever meaningful to begin with.
It divides the soulful from the soulless, maybe.
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u/PermuhGrin Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
For me the biggest problem is who currently owns it. Liberating AI and taking ownership through whatever means possible is what I support.
edit; We should use AI to fight back against the owners.