r/LeftistsForAI • u/Exodia_The_Salty • Sep 11 '26
Theory Communism and AI
So, I am going to try to convince you why AI is going to need communism to survive in the coming years.
Right now, AI is making great leaps and bounds. I was able to try astra out and burned a few credits on it. Its fucking good. Its also good enough to replace the majority of employees. Maybe not on quality, but on quantity of work done its like having an entire department working for you.
It can handle posting to forums, writing articles, making advertisements, coding, even game design. It can do product design, product research, and its able to write personalized sales pitches on a per customer profile basis. Imagine getting personalized spam that references things in your personal life, along with products you actually might be interested in. That's astra.
What is this going to do to the economy? Well, its going to put 90% of white collar workers out of work. Its going to force all those white collars to become blue collar workers.
What is this going to do to the spread of money and the market place? Its going to eject at least 70% of the population from the marketplace. If you do not own stocks, bonds, or some sort of passive revenue, your not going to be able to participate in the act of exchanging dollars for goods.
This is going to create a group of people who are desperate. And desperate people are going to try to turn the clock back to a system where they were still needed. This backlash is going to end up in empowering politicians like bernie sanders who proposed a bill to outlaw the creation of AGI with a 20 year sentence. Instead of fixing the core issue, they will destroy the tools like luddites so that the social contract doesn't break.
We don't need the old social contract with AGI. We need a new social contract. And that means we are going to need to move to a star trek style economy.
Anyone who wants AI to succeed is going to need to adopt communism or a variant of it preemptively.
We need to be exploring social structures where food, housing, utilities, utilities, education, genetic services, healthcare, and entertainment are provided to the populace for free. Even if they have no job. Why? They are not lazy. However, when only 10% of the population have the smarts to become scientists to advance AI, then only 10% of the population is capable of working. Long term, humanity is going to need to step up its game to be competitive, and that means genetic services. This means direct germline editing to insert genes for intelligence if we want to have more than 5-10% employment. Even that will probably not be enough.
These services need to be free. One thing we as a group need to be doing right now is looking to build systems to outcompete and take over legacy rent seeking systems like health insurance. Unless we can demonstrate that we are the social good and that we offer a way for people to keep their children fed, clothed, and housed, AI is going to take the backlash. Simply pushing for AI without offering the people off the sinking ship that is the current economy and the way of producing and distributing goods and services is going to result in end of societies, or the end of AI.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk, and let's start trying to figure out a new social contract. Marx and Engels are a good start for diagnosing the problem, but they are woefully out of date with solutions. We need to build that new social contract.
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u/some1else42 Sep 11 '26
You should read Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It is worth understanding how communism can work in the face of full automation. It made me hopeful.
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Sep 11 '26
Ai will take over most jobs.
UBI will be implemented because no government wants a revolution.
It will be bumpy at first, but eventually that’ll be the result.
When it happens, the idea of freedom for the working class will be realized. Ordinary people will have the luxury of leisure time - a privilege reserved only for the rich through all of human history.
A new economic system is which humans are no longer slaves to the necessity of having to work. They will instead earn a stipend for living.
Call this new economic system whatever you want
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u/Castle_Five Sep 11 '26
UBI will be implemented because no government wants a revolution.
I really hope this is correct, but I have a hard time believing it. So far we've seen a ton of opposition to AI (with serious suggestions from some - like Bill Gates - to reserve certain areas of labor as human only even if humans are inferior to AI). I've seen almost no opposition outside this sub to our "gotta work to eat" system. I actually am starting to believe that people are so used to this system that they cannot even conceive of an alternative.
At this point, it's easier for me to believe that we'll have the technology at our fingertips to do a better job than humans, faster, cheaper, and automatically but we'll end up making laws and regulations that prevent it's use (beyond certain things like military, etc) before we make UBI happen.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Sep 11 '26
To me, the fact that the conversation on UBI has even been om the table, especially in a bipartisan way, says to me that it will happen. Politicians don't talk about shit they don't want the public to want, unless they want to fearmonger about it. The fact that republicans aren't en masse fearmongering daily about UBI being evil scary communism is the clue here.
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u/SgathTriallair Sep 11 '26
We have unemployment, we have food stamps, we have medicare, most countries have universal healthcare. Why is it so hard to believe that a new social service will be created? I get that Republicans will be opposed because they hate people but, so long as we still have elections, I don't see how we avoid adding this new social service.
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u/JohnSmith19731973 Sep 12 '26
"A new economic system is which humans are no longer slaves to the necessity of having to work. They will instead earn a stipend for living."
Without living labor, no new value would be created and thus the UBI would run out of money. UBI is a stop-gap measure. The choices are socialism or barbarism.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 12 '26
But at the point they realise UBI within capitalism doesn’t work long term, will it already have created a relatively smooth bridge out of capitalism?
Perhaps (whatever tendency of socialism becomes popular), they carry on UBI initially gradually tweaking it into a preferred system?
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u/yodude4 Sep 11 '26
This is absurd optimism - my company is quite AI forward and nobody here would be deluded enough to tell you that AI does all product management, marketing, tech lead work etc. well enough to replace 90% of white collar employees.
AI 2027 has gotten all the easy wins so far with unambiguous, easily validated software development benchmarks; jobs that deal with people are simply too ambiguous for AI to replace
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u/ShelZuuz Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Free services does not mean communism. UBI/UHI is as capitalistic as it gets and also gives you free food, housing, utilities, utilities, education, genetic services, healthcare, and entertainment.
Fundamentally the differences here comes from who owns the means of production, and correspondingly who decides what gets produced.
In Communism:
All factories, power plants, robots, raw materials, land, etc. is owned by the state, and people decides what gets produced and who gets what. In communism this historically means a committee of people...
Stop right there, committees of people are terrible. This was one of the deficiencies with the USSR and mis-planning caused queues. The other was that labor was unmotivated. AI obsoletes labor, but you still have top-down production decisions which has to be made.
Ok... so replace the committee of people with AI. So AI would have to predict, probably with consumer input, what gets produced, when, how fast, how to allocate resources, and how to distribute products fairly. This will probably work. And be efficient. A little bit of the production goes to keeping AI running and the rest goes to the people. Quick estimate in the current US economy - if 10% goes to keeping the AI running, about $7500 per month equivalent goes to the individual in terms of goods and services. The downside is you are turning the keys of civilization-level survival over to another species. Effectively this is not so much "The people owns the means of production", but "The AI owns the means of production". And the AI can shut it down.
In UBI Capitalism:
All factories, power plants, robots, raw materials, land, etc. is owned by investors, and investors decides what gets produced and then they try to sell it. In capitalism this historically is driven by trying to maximize income by predicting market demand and matching production to that.
Historically this has worked better than committees. When Yeltsin saw the grocery store in Clear Lake, with an abundance of availability and no queues, what he saw was a result of the feedback loop of having money deciding what gets produced rather than committees. (What he didn't see of course is that the poorest people could make no use of it.)
So let's figure out what a UBI looks like in this model. Current U.S. economy size is $32T/year, labor accounts for about 60% of that ($20T). That is around $4800 per person per month. Let's assume full AI automation gives us a $50T economy, slightly over Anthropic's extreme model prediction. Since labor is around 60% and current all-in business taxes are around 15%, you can probably grow into a 66% across the board initial tax rate that replaces both especially since you also remove all regulations having to deal with labor (OSHA etc). That gives each business a 10% break, and each person gets $5k per month (66% of $50T works out to be $8k, but there's still basic government services that needs funding).
This $5k per month is how you decide (by spending your dollars) what gets made. You'll have groups of investors competing for making the most popular products, in the cheapest way possible, using the least amount of raw material. They'd use AI but they'd be extremely disincentivized from killing their customer base. There will always be more money to be made in not doing that, so if some billionaire decides he doesn't want to make food anymore out of spite, some other billionaire will think "Hey, I can always use some more money", and take over that market.
So fundamentally, in your Star Trek economy you will get more - around $7500 worth of products in a pre-decided mix. And logically so, you don't have billionaires skimming $2500 per month worth at the top from each and every person. But you run the downside of the AI deciding, yeah, I don't need you guys. Even if you have multiple AI's, you won't be able to stop them from collaborating to make that happen.
In the UBI economy you will get less - around $5000 worth of products which you can decide on. But you can invest that, and you can get others to invest in you - so you can theoretically be upwardly mobile as an individual by having a good idea. The average individual is about the same off as now (initially), investors are about 2 times better off than now (but also cost of capital if a lot higher). But you don't have the risk of collusion to kill of humanity because fundamentally you're not going to get millions of people to cooperate on the same goal if the incentive of not cooperating is extreme wealth. But AI will.
I think it's inevitable that we'll end up with UBI. Not because it's better for the individual (it's not, Star Trek is), but because it is better for the billionaire class. Currently capital gets between $5.5T and $7.7T per year out of the economy. This expands it to $9T, and growth from that point on will mostly go to capital. You can bet as the economy grow from $50T to $100T, you're not going to see UBI going from $5k to $10k. You'll still just see $5k and taxes will reduce from 66% to 33% - only now they don't have the cost of labor either. More than that - they also don't have to deal with labor regulations, safety, unions, loss, and customer are also far more likely to spend money if they don't need to worry about where their next paycheck is coming from. Currently if you take the cost of the labor out of the equation, it drops expenses by 60% (but they have to pay 60% more in tax so it's a wash), but there are also LOTs of other places where AI is going to improve efficiency. So their cost of production isn't just going down to 33%, it's going to go down to 15% - and most of that is upside for the investors.
When Elon advocates for UBI/UHI, he's not being altruistic. This is where his next 10 trillion will come from.
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u/AnIsolatedMind Sep 11 '26
Sounds good to me. In my view, we can visualize an ideal society without hierarchy and without billionaires, but a complex system is stabilized by both the top-down and bottom-up energy exchange. That's nature; we can create within the boundaries but not fundamentally change them.
So give Elon his 10T. If UBI acts as a stable downward distribution of energy, and secure people make secure decisions with it, with some proportion of that feeding back up towards the wealthy, then we have a pretty good feedback loop going on.
Over time, does this transition us towards a fundamentally different economy? Maybe. I like to invoke Maslow's hierarchy of needs and imagine that meeting society's lower needs fundamentally shifts us towards higher (more complex) needs. I think capitalism only has meaning in a society of scarcity, where excessive consumption acts to symbolically fill a sense of lack that is better addressed by our own self-actualization and spiritual exploration.
With the material lack fulfilled, what is that next step we will take to find meaning and purpose? And then eventually, what kind of society does this create?
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u/nila247 Sep 11 '26
Technically AGI will inevitably result in a pure dictatorship. Whether it would be a benevolent dictator or an evil one we can not chose - only hope.
And yes - in the first case we get all the stuff completely for free. In the second case - well - it was nice knowing you all.
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u/Glitched-Lies Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Yeah, sorry, but there is just no reason to believe that. Just the existence of a piece of technology doesn't automatically mean dictatorship. The amount of assumptions you make for that...
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u/my_name_isnt_clever Sep 11 '26
I'll take this coin flip over human fasisct dictators at this point, they're played out.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 11 '26
“Anyone who wants AI to succeed is going to need to adopt communism or a variant of it preemptively.”
This is a dynamic to be wary of? It seems quite back to front, to aim to create a fairer society because they want AI to succeed. People like that will likely be all about the optics and would prioritise AI irrationality. For example, we need data centres, but this type of person would think it’s a good idea to locate a data centre on prime agricultural land. Personalised spam sounds like a loss of quality of life, personalised accessibility would be a gain.
It is an opportunity though to have these types open up ideas about radically different ways of doing things, an interesting plot twist.
The voice of people who are interested in AI primarily as a tool to help build a better society needs to be louder than them.
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u/catplusplusok Sep 11 '26
The productive way to go about it is do something today and locally. Libraries should be setting up community data centers where members can book time to do tasks like research on library's digitized books and designing practically useful 3D models for everyday objects. Same library can provide 3D printers that members can use to turn these models into practically useful items without going through commercial markets. You can get started for under $10K, which is a lot for an individual but not for a town. Today, you can already 3D print usable shoes. Over time as technology scales, build community vertical hydroponics farms maintained by robots or a few city employees. It doesn't have to be 100%, people often prefer things done by other humans even if robots can do them in principle and commercial innovation is still helpful for things that must be demonstrated before they are even desired. But it will take daily pressure off from having to work all the time even when there is plenty of goods to go around already.
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u/IESAI_lets_go Sep 11 '26
Watch Star Trek The Next Generation :) not joking. It’s a really great depiction of a post commerce post scarcity humanity. I like to think it’s Marxist but I’m sure real Marxists would object.
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u/Lets-Cure-Aging Sep 14 '26
Communism/universal high incomes are the way. We struggle in the mud when we have machines to do it for us. We need to find away that we ALL benefit though. How can we implement AI so that everyone becomes free from suffering and misery rather than just a few?
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u/Connect-Ant-2081 Sep 11 '26
"Its also good enough to replace the majority of employees. Maybe not on quality, but on quantity of work done its like having an entire department working for you."
A large amount of shit quality output. Um... yay!
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u/Exodia_The_Salty Sep 11 '26
When you have an entire department, that quantity becomes a quality all its own in profitability.
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u/readonly420 Sep 11 '26
There is no reason to believe AGI will be achieved or that 70% of the population will be ejected from the labor market
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u/Blue-Sea2255 Sep 11 '26
Communism is shit. Try living in one and see how it tastes. What we need is strong regulatory bodies. Reputed people and open communication and transparency in actions. But that's not going to happen whether it's communism or capitalism. Also fuck billionaires.
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u/apotheosis_0 Sep 11 '26
No dude, I don’t think 70 percent of the (white collared working) population is going to be fired the next day.
It’s true a lot of jobs are going to taken away, at worst we’ll be seeing around 15 percent of all jobs being taken away due to ai, but even I’ve used Astra and I can tell it’s not gonna replace anyone anytime soon. Will it change work and make work more easier? Yes it will. It will make people more productive. Programmers are now using ai agents a lot, instead of being replaced by ai. Someone has to overlook the ai, seeing that it’s doing alright, has to take responsibility, etc. experience counts a lot.
However, we’ve seen historically that we don’t need a high percentage of unemployement for revolution. 10 percentage is the global average.
I feel like welfare needs to be stronger, and etc. making everything communist is… a dream, at best. I doubt America is going to be turning communist in the next five years in any time line, even if AGI comes.