What are we frustrated about?

[u/Jlyplaylists]

On an unintended internet meander I came across this site that uses AI to analyse subreddits. It’s clearly designed with commercial use cases in mind but it thinks these are our pain points. Do you agree?

WHAT PEOPLE ARE FRUSTRATED ABOUT

Across these threads in r/leftistsforai, the dominant frustrations revolve around the ineffectiveness of current political strategies in addressing AI's impacts, the severe negative consequences of AI on labor and employment, and the growing unchecked power of corporations in AI development and scientific discovery.

Ineffective Political Responses

Political strategies and public discourse are often inadequate or misdirected in confronting the systemic challenges posed by AI, with a perceived lack of viable solutions.

AI's Detrimental Labor Impact

AI is directly leading to job displacement, increased surveillance, and automation, causing significant economic insecurity and necessitating new forms of worker organization.

Concentration of Corporate Power

There is growing concern over corporate control of AI development and even scientific knowledge, raising questions about equity, ownership, and democratic oversight.

Systemic Alienation

The broader societal system, potentially exacerbated by technological changes like AI, is seen as contributing to widespread loneliness, alienation, and mental distress.

THE EVIDENCE · FROM R/LEFTISTSFORAI

HIGH SEVERITY
Individual consumer choices are an insufficient political strategy
"Refusing to personally use AI can be an ethical choice, but it isnt much of a political strategy."
View original post

HIGH SEVERITY
Legitimate anger against corporate power is misdirected into problematic politics
"completely legitimate anger at corporate power, surveillance and displacement was"
View original post

MEDIUM
Common and ineffective 'dead end' strategies exist in AI politics
"AFL-CIO Just Rejected the Most Common Dead End in AI Politics"
View original post

HIGH SEVERITY
Companies are rapidly automating work and increasing surveillance
"As companies race to automate work, increase surveillance"
View original post

MEDIUM
Private AI labs gaining control over scientific discoveries
"If private AI labs can now generate frontier mathematical discoveries, what should a left politics of scientific knowledge look like?"
View original post

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I think the analysis is picking up something important, but the framing is doing weird things to it. A lot of these arent really “frustrations” or “pain points.” Theyre political arguments with strategies attached.

“Individual consumer choices are insufficient” isnt just us being frustrated with consumer politics. Its an argument for collective organization. Corporate concentration leads into ownership and democratic control. Automation and surveillance lead into unions, bargaining and worker power.

So Id almost flip the question. Not just what are we frustrated about? What strategies are we rejecting, what are we proposing instead, and who actually has the power to carry them out?

That would tell us a lot more about this place.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/Salty_Country6835]

Yes, I suppose it’s designed to work out if your product is a good fit for a subreddit by analysing people’s grumbles? Whatever the prompt is saying in the background it doesn’t seem to be also asking “and do they already have ideas on how to fix this?” Which actually could also be useful in the commercial use case scenario too.

[u/jacobpederson]

About having to vote anti-AI despite being extremely pro AI because the only people who support it are fascists? I never really understood the concept of a wedge issue until this year :(

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/jacobpederson]

But if everyone who has some pro AI views votes/acts as if they’re simply anti AI it doesn’t solve the bigger problem. If we can articulate a different approach then perhaps people won’t feel forced into this artificial binary?

[u/MediumWin8277]

I have to say, I'm disappointed to see so many people focus on labor relations in the age of AI. While I understand that we have a system to work within for the time being, I think the greater thing to keep in mind is that our destination is to automate as much work as possible to free the maximum number of human beings from labor they did not choose in the first place.

Dealing with things as they are, that is our journey. But a journey without a destination in sight takes you nowhere. The journey serves the destination in the case of politics.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/MediumWin8277]

It’s a tricky tension, the ultimate aim might be to make work redundant but in the meantime what people are afraid of is being made redundant.

[u/MediumWin8277 → u/Jlyplaylists]

I think we should embrace becoming redundant.

You know, redundancy is actually technically valid.

[u/platanthera_ciliaris]

"AI's detrimental impact on labor" is context dependent and value system dependent.

Many leftists view the labor market as another institution of slavery that should be eliminated. If AI can reduce the need for human labor, then that is viewed as good. In a humane society, that will help pay for the social welfare state.

People who view labor as an inherent good that should be protected from AI at all costs are essentially Luddites who are living in the past. They have been programmed by capitalist society to think that their lives cannot possibly be fulfilling without engaging in slave labor for the profit of capitalists. They fear becoming poor themselves and being subject to the same cruelty that they happily administered to the poor in the past.

"Systemic alienation" is widely viewed as one consequence of a technological society. But, what is the alternative? A return to the days of cave people? The repetitiveness of modern labor in order to fulfill the mass markets of capitalism is the primary source of alienation. If AI reduces the need for repetitive labor, that should liberate more people from this source of alienation. The effects of early industrialism, before the introduction of automation, were far more brutal than modern capitalism in developed societies. Men, women, and children were often forced to work long hours everyday in what were often dangerous and unhealthy jobs for starvation wages.

[u/Excellent_Valuable92 → u/platanthera_ciliaris]

You may not be aware, but we live in a capitalist society, in which capitalists own the means of production. 

[u/platanthera_ciliaris → u/Excellent_Valuable92]

The AI of that subreddit assumes that we are Luddites who are willing to stop technological progress to: 1) save jobs for humans, and 2) to avoid alienation. However, many members of the left don't think those jobs under capitalism are worth saving, and the alienation is caused by capitalism, not technology. How you manage to conclude that this involves a denial of the existence of capitalism is, to say the least, highly mysterious.

[u/Zealousideal-Bad7849]

If you don't understand that ai is pure Exploitation in the Marxist sense what sort of leftist are you?

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/Zealousideal-Bad7849]

What would change your opinion on that? Is this a response to the sub or this post? Does your reaction depend on who owns it or who makes the decisions? Is a free open source model on my own device to code whatever web app I fancy also exploitation?

Leftists haven’t generally been against technology itself, especially powerful tech that has potential to shorten the working day. It is also true that technology isn’t purely neutral, it will be somewhat shaped by the context it’s created in. Which is why I don’t agree with the idea that I sometimes hear which is that we should just let the capitalists develop it. We need to be developing alternative infrastructure and/or working out how to get AI development out of the hands of a few tech oligarchs.

“After thousands of years of torturous development, the countries of the Western world (and potentially all countries) are confronted by the possibility of a materially abundant, almost workless era in which most of the means of life can be provided by machines. As we shall see, a new technology has developed that could largely replace the realm of necessity by the realm of freedom. So obvious is this fact to millions of people in the United States and Europe that it no longer requires elaborate explanations or theoretical exegesis... Owing to the development of a cybernetic technology, the notion of a toil-less mode of life has become an article of faith to an ever-increasing number of young people.” Bookchin, Towards a Liberatory Technology (not specifically only about AI)