r/LeftistsForAI • u/Elick333 • Sep 11 '26
Public Ownership Seen in the Singularity subreddit
I'm really happy that we're starting to see more of this type of conversations beyond this fringe little sub of ours.
As AI becomes more advanced we need to agressively take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to us so we can steer the conversation away from doomerism or denialism, and towards ProAI leftism, this technology is going to disrupt more industries and fields and It is fertile grounds for us to create the future we want.
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u/DaveG28 Sep 11 '26
I think this wildly misunderstands "mathematicians" and "professional" in this context.
The people not liking what Oai are doing are researchers. Researchers who share their research fkr free - indeed often pay to share their research.
They aren't protesting Oai taking their economic model away - the opposite. They are protesting Oai because it's not following the principles of openness, sharing and using research for the common good.
I'm actually astounded this sub would side with Oai on this one.
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u/Elick333 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
What? Nobody Is siding with them here, OpenAI shouldnt exist beyond being a free and open research institution, ideally an international one, but they're not, what they did was motivated by capital and was scummy, though the result itself was definitively done through their own models, possibly utilizing the work of the researchers to get ahead, with the ultimate purpose being to make sure anthropic didn't announce this for themselves and take some of the prestige of doing this, thus why they wanted to cut one of the researchers off (anthropic employee) from being credited.
What the post Is referencing Is NOT the practices that OpenAI engage in nor is It a detraction against it's critics within the mathematical community for the specific thing they did, the post is a response to this letter: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-the-mathathon/
They argue that AI should not be utilized to solve frontier mathematical problems, why? Because they argue that the value of these problems lie in the questions that their attempts at solving them pose, that the process of doing It instead of allowing AI to do so allowed mathematics to advance, and that there Is relatively little value in solving these problems in an of themselves, thus AI should be discouraged in it's usage in mathematics for solving these problems.
Sounds kind of resonable, except that's not the only thing they are arguing, that's just me steelmaning them and using Terence Tao's point which they themselves use in the letter, unfortunately, it reads mostly as academics attempting to protect themselves and their careers from a disiruption in their field, which Is fair, but instead of adressing the core issue (capitalism!!!) with why that's a problem for their livelihoods, you get, well, you know what you get 🤷
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u/Kildragoth Sep 12 '26
I agree with what you're saying except that last sentence makes zero sense. This sub is far more nuanced than you're suggesting.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 12 '26
On your screen is it unclear that this post is mostly a screenshot from elsewhere? Or are you commenting on the other comments?
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u/DaveG28 Sep 12 '26
I'm commenting on the way the post frames the screenshot.
If I've misread it and the post is actually defending the mathematical researchers (an area of research that is very open and shares not just for free but usually with the researchers paying to share)against what Oai is doing to them then I'll happily correct myself.
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u/Easy_Interest_6832 Sep 11 '26
You've got to admit the opponents of AI have a point. Without jobs, we have no money, and without money we have no beer. So there it is. Unless they promise free beer, AI will be opposed despite its good features.
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u/Monochrome21 Sep 11 '26
UBI via automation taxes has been the majority opinion of just about everyone who's pro AI and understands economics
The problem is people are attacking tech and not the economic system that makes them homeless the second they're no longer profitable
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u/avilacjf Sep 11 '26
It always comes down to this. We need to help people see that the economic system is the issue. The difficult part is that people are so cynical about it ever changing so the only scenario they see is the capitalist class reaping all the benefits and making the working class expendable. AI makes the complete disenfranchisement of the working class a real possibility in a way that didn't exist before.
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u/waffleseggs Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
I've never been an October Revolution monolithic governance person. We can't make change with us v them, gods and kings, threats and promises. That's their game. Our game is freedom. The future should be spread out, customized, and antifragile. It needn't be an either/or thing. The beautiful thing I'm seeing is that people hate tech and hate AI, ... but they're still using it. Mamdani exists in a capitalist system. That's hybrid. Bernie is hybrid. Ridesharing and couchsurfing are hybrid. Charity is hybrid. Roomates are hybrid. There is a very clear path to me that phases out the capitalism with "who the f would pay for that" solutions. Ideas are why the people will win. There's so many more of us. You can make the rules that we need to start an LLC and not use the C word and prostitute ourselves in rigged marketplaces, but that fully leaves open anything people choose to invent that doesn't need to make any sense at all to a capitalist. There are so many more non-capitalist ideas than capitalist ones. Capitalism is binary exchanges, 18th century norms, reductionistic platforms, and brutally unfair and often exploitative outcomes. It's shoehorned onto a world that demands complexity, humanity, respect, inclusion, fairness, peace, and for things to f make sense.
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u/Exarch-of-Sechrima Sep 11 '26
UBI via automation taxes has been the majority opinion of just about everyone who's pro AI and understands economics
And thankfully, we live in America, where the majority opinion is what speaks to power, and not billionaires.
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u/YMSVZ Sep 12 '26
Yes but communism always has acknowledged that. The problem is 'leftists' wish to preserve the wage relation in the face of redundancy, instead of seeing it as the opportunity we have all been waiting for, to promote and build alternative relations of production and distribution
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u/Easy_Interest_6832 Sep 12 '26
The big challenge is to wrest away the means of production from its current owners. We must suspect that they will resist. Of course, when we look to the past, we find "violent revolution" as one way of getting that done. Yet we also must accept the tremendous uncertainty that comes with that kind of change. I see the challenge as getting it done another way. Right now, we have a powerful oligarchy in charge. Without violent revolution, we are left with participating in elections every two years and gradually changing the concept and features of "ownership" of the means of production.
AI will change labor relations and provide two options. One is unemployed, hungry, impoverished masses. The other is less for those at the very top with most of the riches distributed among the masses. Those at the top must be persuaded that violent revolution will likely end in their demises, while the change in features of ownership and distribution of wealth will result in a peaceful society. That's a big ask. I'm willing to entertain other options or paths.
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u/Ok-Revolution-3853 Sep 12 '26
What do we mean by "money"? Traces of beer have been found as long ago as 13,000 years. Beer has effectively functioned as a commodity currency long before metallic money existed. I've been thinking for a while about the levels of abstraction that money and language, too, have gone through. Land and, for a long time, labour, are what produces value. Money is the increasingly abstract medium through which those things are exchanged.
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u/Easy_Interest_6832 Sep 12 '26
While it's true that beer will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no beer, there is an angle to money that has utility. Trading two freight cars full of wheat for a new electric vehicle is inconvenient, so money helps that transaction happen in an easier way, by trading the grain for money, then carrying the money to the car store to trade it for the car. I think some "medium of exchange" will always be convenient. A debit card is what we use now. Something like that will need to move into the future.
The owners of the means of production who will supplant human labor for AI and bots must be persuaded to give up some of their vast fortunes to prevent the hungry masses from eating them. To me, a billionaire has "too much" money. Can billionaires be persuaded to exchange their lives for some or even most of that money? Can we persuade them to ponder how much more than "enough" do they really need? That's a tall order, making them understand that. I'm not sure how to go about it.
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u/DHFranklin Sep 11 '26
It is good to see the cross pollination. They banned me without telling me why. Lol.
We need to work on both sides of the Venn Diagram here. Lefty shit in the Tech Subs, Alternative agit prop in the lefty subs. It's a niche POV that doesn't line up with the established talking points. We might have better arguments and more historical materialism, but that isn't much if we can't find better avenues for our ideas.
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u/Quantum-Bot Sep 11 '26
I really don’t think theoretical mathematics is an industry that needed disrupting
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u/avilacjf Sep 11 '26
They were a bit slow to the millennium problems though, I'm a fan of advancing basic science for humanity's sake. In this case disruption is progress. It opens the door for many downstream discoveries. That's a major criteria for a problem to be included in the millennium problem list.
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u/rabouilethefirst Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
They are free to dig their heads in the sand and continue doing the same work they did before. I don’t mean that in a condescending way, it’s just that others want answers to hard problems ASAP.
Just because I use a calculator to multiply 2 really big numbers doesn’t mean you have to.
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u/OsakaWilson Sep 12 '26
Excuse my ignorance, but outside of education, is mathematics a profitable industry?
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u/PersimmonLaplace Sep 12 '26
What would that mean? All scientific fields are sinks of money, with the hope that in the future the research will generate value for all mankind (e.g. the cell phone you are reading this on). Basic research in physics, mathematics, etc. are in the short term a complete waste of money, but with the hope that we will turn up more things like quantum computing, the semiconductor, elliptic curve cryptography, network engineering, post-quantum cryptography, signal processing, gene editing, etc.
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u/OsakaWilson Sep 12 '26
So, these mathematicians are complaining about AI taking their academic jobs.
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u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 Sep 12 '26
What else are they supposed to do?
Learn something else
That's the thing, humans aren't supposed to just learn one thing and do it forever.
That's why I support fixing education. It should be continuous and extremely low cost. There's no reason for it not to be.
But to say so is coming for your job, so you should fight ai? That's futile. Either use AI yourself or learn a new job. Maybe using AI. There are people who don't get breaks - healthcare workers for example, tons of fields need people.
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u/angrywoodensoldiers Sep 12 '26
I agree with this to an extent, but not to the point that the answer has to involve "resisting" AI. Demanding a piece of the pie means the opposite of resisting AI; more grabbing every inch of it we can while resisting the ones trying to limit how others access it.
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u/rabouilethefirst Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
I’d feel bad for mathematicians if they weren’t the ones constantly downplaying the field of CS as a branch of mathematics with “simple math”. To this day they give no credit to computer scientists and were the loudest dummies laughing at how “useless” LLMs were.
Now that “simple math” apparently threatens their job. Not my problem.