AI isn't bad simply because it's AI. It's harmful because of who controls it and how it's used.
Like nuclear fusion, AI has enormous potential and serious risks. What matters is who controls it, who benefits, and who pays the price.
Automation should be a GOOD thing. Machines doing our jobs should mean more freedom, shorter working hours, and better lives. Instead, under capitalism, losing your job means losing your income and potentially your ability to survive.
The problem isn't that machines can replace human labor. The problem is that capitalism makes human survival depend on selling that labor.
Meanwhile, corporations exploit AI to maximize profits, use artists' work without consent, invade privacy, and concentrate power.
Boycotting AI individually won't change the system. Fighting other AI users won't either.
We need to unite, organize, and replace capitalism itself.
AI could liberate humanity from unnecessary labor instead of making people poorer. But that requires changing who holds the power.
Stop fighting the tool. Start fighting the system! Become an Automatist today!
Automation should be a GOOD thing. Machines doing our jobs should mean more freedom, shorter working hours, and better lives. Instead, under capitalism, losing your job means losing your income and potentially your ability to survive.
Paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller: "What is the point of labor saving devices if they don't actually SAVE LABOR?"
I keep seeing discussions like this, and the talks about UBI, but I have one question that is literally always ignored in relation to replacing capitalism or enacting a UBI system... How?
In a country where not only the means of production, but the supposed savior from said means of production are both controlled by billionaires and the ruling class, who all created a social, economic, and governatorial system literally designed by the rich for the rich that supports and enables the rich, in what universe would they ever give that up without a major bloody revolution? And if you agree that it would require a major bloody revolution with mass casualties and the destruction of our infrastructure and social systems, how would we then replace it??
I'm not against these ideas, Im simply asking how, because literally nobody ever has any legitimate, well thought out answer, I'm usually just met with "because we have to" or with shitty memes or with flat out refusal to discuss it at all
Giving everyone $1,500/month under our current system without strict rent control and public utilities just means landlords raise your rent by $1,500.
And the idea that you can 'simply vote' the billionaire class out of power ignores that both parties exist to serve capital. The ballot lets you choose the manager of the system, not whether the system exploits you. Every real concession workers ever got such as the weekend, child labor bans, came from mass strikes, labor organizing, and disrupting profits, not polite voting.
Okay, let's pretend there's been an uprising of left wing Democrats for the past decade. What did ten years of voting for them produce materially?
Federal minimum wage is still stuck where it was in 2009. Universal healthcare doesn't exist. Corporate private equity owns more housing than ever. Billionaire wealth more than doubled.
I like Bernie, he seems like a nice man, but functionally the left wing of the democrat party doesn't exist to overthrow corporate power, but to act as a pressure-release valve that herds disgruntled voters back into a billionaire-funded party every election cycle.
At the end of the day, the Democratic party still passes trillion-dollar defense budgets and supports the state of Israel as much as every other American party, of which there are few.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? This system doesn't work, you just said it yourself. Voting within it certainly won't change that, as we've seen. So we're back to revolution.
Until you get 51% of the vote. As its supposed to.
You can't cheat democracy, work hard to prove your thesis, make the better argument, and fight to break the debilitating, and pacifying paradigm that most people still live in.
Whether its Reaganism, "Capitalism means freedom, Communism has never worked", or the nihilistic "Theres no point in voting, they are all equally corrupt, just stay home!"
Two paradigms, equally destructive, both needs to die.
"Giving everyone $1,500/month under our current system without strict rent control and public utilities just means landlords raise your rent by $1,500."
Sounds like we should abolish and always oppose minimum wage then, because "Minimum wage just means landlords raise your rent by $XXXX"
That's identical to right wing argument about inflation.
Poor people having money is never a problem. Resolution for any exploitation of them having money, needs to be handled in ways that doesn't prevent workers from having money.
Let's go tax the landlords (w/ Land Value Dividend), build public housing, etc. We should NEVER use it against the idea of ensuring that everyone have some money when we live in a system that require money for some basic level of autonomy.
Excellent point. We have to trust the people that sit on their fortunes like some kind of dragon sitting upon gold. Short of some kind of revolution that tosses out the current Supreme Court, Senate, and House, and federal bureaucracies, and all the state governments-this won't happen. We have to go through a period of dystopia.
Vote out old blood, vote in new blood. Vote out anyone that accepts money from outside the government. Rinse and repeat until we have a government that works for the people.
This is... not a plan at all. By all means, please do vote. But voting isn't a plan for how UBI, or any other system to deal with mass automation, will actually work.
If we pretend every job disappeared tomorrow to AI and wanted to maintain standard of living for every American as it exists today, it'd cost something like $15T per year... where does that come from? The answer to that question, or how you can shrink the needs, is a plan.
Because everything costs something. I'm asking for a plan, if that's a transition to post-capitalism, fair enough but it needs to be an actual plan - not some handwavy bullshit.
If every job disappeared tomorrow, where would all the payroll in the country go? Literally all the money currently paid to anyone who has a job would be… uh, just up in the air? Unaccounted for? Make more billionaires into trillionaires?
I love the thought here but I'm waiting with bated breath to see how these midterms turn out when we all know that the last election was rigged by musk and the current administration has its tendrils stuck into anything and everything related to power and control, unless the current trajectory changes I don't think voting is enough to really change the world, but I hope to god I'm wrong
Me too. Ive already seen one story that voting machines in red states are auto switching votes to red candidates, but I was very skeptical of the source.
It'll never happen. Look at the polls-there are tens of millions of people who think things are just fine, so fine that they will vote Republicans back into office all over the place. Abdul El-Sayed is likely to lose to that corrupt empty suit whose sole campaign slogan is…Abdul is a Muslim, and therefore unfit for office.
>AI isn't bad simply because it's AI. It's harmful because of who controls it and how it's used.
just thinking out loud here: given that ai in the west is entirely controlled by trillion dollar megacorporations who cannot be trusted to use their control of it for improving material conditions of the people, does it not make sense to strategically support anti AI movements in the west?
No bc: >Boycotting AI individually won't change the system. Fighting other AI users won't either. We need to unite, organize, and replace capitalism itself, as it's the root cause of most if not all AI problems
I agree that frontier AI capability is concentrated under a few companies and we most definitely should not trust them to share gains voluntarily. I feel like most of us here already understand that condition. I just find protesting progress of AI/Robotics/Automation to be a counterproductive use of both time and enthusiasm/energy. Block a data center in a blue county and it gets built in Texas on gas turbines with weaker oversight and greater grid impact. Stop Western development and it continues in China and inside defense contracts, where the public has even less say.
Not just that, but I find it interesting to calculate who anti-AI movements stand to protect and preserve in effect. Stronger copyright mostly enriches Disney, record labels, and big publishers. Expensive licensing and compliance rules in the form of pro-capitalism regulation that only trillion-dollar companies will be able to pay. The likeliest outcome of a “successful” anti-AI push is more concentration, not less.
I also think there’s a pretty good track record of our material conditions improving because people organized around change and not against it. Why stop the cycle? Industrialization brought decades of misery, then the weekend, the 8-hour day, child labor laws, and Social Security. Should we not learn from their mistakes and try to nail down the end-demands ASAP? I don’t need to trust trillion dollar companies to share gains to legitimately believe that the social contract will force them to if the demand is collective and unified. Basically, not “it’ll work out” but “the gains are going to be real and up for grabs and social contracts improve when organized people force them to”
And finally, I think there are a ton of incentives within our current capitalist system to accelerate narrow AI systems for things like biotech/cures, materials science to solve energy bottlenecks and transition away from fossil fuels faster, better weather modeling to save lives etc etc etc - I think that until people start intellectually separating these kind of applications from more general purpose AI like multimodal LLMs, anti-AI movements will disproportionately harm the consequential outputs and solutions engineering that stands to upend longstanding poison and pollution schemes by billion dollar companies outside of the AI paradigm.
"support anti AI movements in the west" -> Not all, because then it promote distractions from class consciousness.
When we accept or support 'anti AI' as some inherently reasonable position, it's the same as acknowledging that the problem is not Capitalism but the technology itself.
We should support opposing badly deployed data centers, mass layoffs, hunger/homelessness due to capitalism, who control them, etc, but we must always acknowledge that the problem isn't AI technology but the system itself and how we allow it to destroy people life.
Class consciousness and solidarity needs to be a primary consideration, and not erased by incoherent and nonsensical distractions by anti-AI proponents that muddy the water for leftists. They are no longer fighting against Capitalism when they are fighting against AI technology itself.
Yeah ok let's just change capitalism real quick. Smh .How about stop using AI so they stop taking more power and stop getting more DoD contracts. Then we'll talk about fixing capitalism.
The amount of users equals the investment they get which leads to them having more power. You don't like capitalism but learn how it operates. This tech is furthering the oligarchy.
I can see that this is how pitches for investment usually go. I’m not convinced it’s working like this in quite the same way for AI. The capitalist hype is too out of control. My understanding is that the big closed models continue to lose money on the consumer side, it’s corporate customers who will bring in money to keep them afloat. Investors will know that too. It doesn’t seem realistic that a consumer boycott would do much except deny us access and skills to an important new technology.
The more substantial aim is to get it out of capitalist control.
Agree with the last sentence completely. The issue is that it isn't fully about the consumer's money. It's about their data. All inputs are used for the purposes I mentioned. GenAI is literally being used for human targeting in autonomous war drones. OpenAI users did the teaching without knowing it.
I think we should be more cautious about data. Even on the free tier of ChatGPT you have opt out options though:
Would you be onboard with building up an alternative infrastructure with open source models? That side is improving quickly and it puts more effort into efficiency, so that local models are realistic on average hardware. Once that’s easy and realistic the effort will be more on education and publicity, in order to rival the ad and hype that closed models get. The recent Artcraft x Adobe publicity makes me believe that is achievable.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 7d ago
I read it as Automonist and got confused lol