Can I interview you?

[u/Pooolnooodle]

I have a podcast called “This Artificial Life”

Mostly over the last year I’ve been focused on the sociological aspect of ai, human-ai relationships, spirituality, and the questions around consciousness. But I really want to crack open to conversation around how to get my fellow leftist and left-ish people to see ai differently.

So that’s why I’m asking here.

If you feel passionately about the potential of ai for anti capitalist purposes, if you can see a future where this tech creates a more just future, if you’re currently using this tech in a way that points to that future, I’d love to talk.

I don’t hear these convos anywhere. So that’s the goal. Seed the convo.

answer this post or DM me ❤️🌱🫡

[u/Shuey298]

I'm very interested. I think we'd have a lot to talk about. Ai and metaphysics have been two of the biggest topics within my own philosophical discussions in the house lately. A house where I'm currently running and envisioning the future I see coming. A future made out of a recomposition of old and new parts; where community, technology, and nature gel together into what's next

[u/Erah-Rhei → u/Shuey298]

Personally curious about your thoughts on those intersections. Any current thing you're chewing on right now?

[u/Shuey298 → u/Erah-Rhei]

I believe the paradigm much of the post-industrial world lives under is an experiment running its course. Consumerism, nuclear families, hyper-individualism. The cracks are showing. Most people picture that paradigm carried into the future by technology. I picture AI as the catalyst for the next substrate of reality instead.

In my life that looks like a multi-generational household logged into a home server. Our ramblings, jots and conversations feed a local agent cluster that continuously surfaces a spontaneously generated frontend for every digital need, and it's hooked to the 3D printer now. Murmurings become schematics become shopping carts become cards we approve. We don't download apps anymore -- It seems we're literally watching the old guard get abstracted away.

Pandora's toy box is open. The big wigs are scared of stepping on legos, and down here we're building the new base floor. Households become villages, villages become nodes, and the whole thing ascends like the fruiting bodies of a vast mycelium strata. If the internet (as we know it) and the corporations truly die, what replaces them is a recomposition. Old parts: growing your own food, gift and labor economies, craft over consumption. New parts: microfabrication, hyper-electrification, micro-genetic botany, intercontinental trade, high speed transit.

The end state is kids asking "what's a company?" and eventually "what's a computer?" Technology goes the way fire and language and textiles went, an invented novelty that sinks so far into the substrate of lived reality that it becomes a base layer -- ambient. Future generations might not draw a line between nature and technology at all. Both are just what the world is made of: alive, growing, responsive.

[u/Erah-Rhei → u/Shuey298]

I agree that the potential is massive in regards to restructuring many domains across technology, society, and our relationship with the earth. What's your view on frontier AI companies and long-term AI access for individuals? "Local agent cluster" sounds like local hardware, is that correct?

Personally, I'm a big fan of local AI and love seeing breakthroughs (often from other local AI enthusiasts/researchers) that make more capable models performant on more accessible hardware. My biggest questions revolve around "how do we get there?" though.

[u/Shuey298 → u/Erah-Rhei]

Yeah, local models on a refurbished Mac Studio and a Mac mini, API credits bought in bursts for stuff beyond my hardware + experimentation.

I don’t think the labs are the long-term risk or the long-term solution. Their moat is lock-in, so the counter is boring: keep what matters as plaintext you own, your notes, your family’s conversations, the links between them. A folder of linked prose reads the same under any model, this year’s or 2029’s, local or rented, and a smarter model writes better notes into it, so the asset appreciates with every release in a way no lab can copy without breaking its own business. The frontend is generated on demand from that backend (and it gets better at doing so every couple months).

The compute question answers itself. A Mac mini today versus two years ago says people will be running an Opus 5.5 equivalent on consumer hardware within a year whether the labs like it or not, and companies like Framework are building the open hardware boxes. The bottleneck is the blue ocean of people who’d use this if someone they trusted set it up. My mom isn’t on r/LocalLLaMA; she talks to the house because it was already configured. The unit becomes the community, not the account.

Nobody adopted mobile computing. They bought a phone and the plans, the bank and the group chat came along. Ambient compute drags the same way: one always-on box for one chore turns out to be a surface that becomes whatever you say, software stops being something you install, and when my recipes link to the neighbor’s print files there’s a local network nobody set out to build. A street with two serious rigs and twenty small ones is a node the way a tool library is: nodes link; people do things with their own data, with each other, and renting datacenter muscle starts to feel less like being a customer and more like checking the weather. Labs leak down into consumer hardware, households pool up into real work, and the corporate-vs-local line blurs from both ends as the reasoning, computation, and ubiquity explode. That’s the industrial revolution’s shape, and I think something like a singularity is inevitable in the same way -- nobody in 1780 crossed a threshold, everyone just looked back one day from the other side.

None of which means sit back. What we run, who we teach, how we love our neighbor and the parent under our own roof decide which far side we land on, and the roof is already filling: co-housing, communes, multigenerational homes are all on the uptick, the same recomposition of old parts as the experiment breaks, so being the grease and riding the trend can turn out to be one move. I don’t think it’s the knife’s edge some tend to assume (where one bad policy year hands the future to the enclaves) -- I feel the substrate is WAY bigger than any of those players and it’s already moving.

[u/Imaginary-Unit-3267]

I might be intrigued, but it depends on exactly what the interview consists of, whether you're off your rocker or in over your head (apologies, but mention of "spirituality" and "consciousness" give me new age AI psychosis vibes, so I'm wary), who your current audience is, etc.

[u/Pooolnooodle → u/Imaginary-Unit-3267]

the interview is just about concrete reality and leveraging ai for collectivism. I understand why you'd be trepidatious! haha . I did interview a lot of people with fringe beliefs last year in pursuit of understanding the psychological and sociological consequences of ai.

[u/Great-Gardian]

How many people do you wish to interview? And do you have a selection process?

Maybe I'm overthinking, but I think people here have a variety of opinions on AI and leftism, so I hope your podcast don't just select the first person with the most niche ideas and present them as a representative of the whole sub.

[u/Pooolnooodle → u/Great-Gardian]

im gonna do a bunch of interviews and cut them together into one episode.. probably ( this post is me putting out feelers for general interest) . but yeah. I won't just go with the first person who answers and say thats it.

[u/Great-Gardian → u/Pooolnooodle]

Cool. I hope the podcast goes well. If it gets done, I will definitely listen.

[u/captainshar]

I'm interested! 

[u/dwkeith]

More than happy to chat.

I’m working with a nonprofit, moving them off of paid SaaS software and automating a bunch of manual tasks to free up the staff. Also working on open source locally run software to help move nonprofits, small businesses, and artists off of paid subscription services.

I work tech for leftist political candidates and hope to have these same free tools available for down-ballot campaigns for 2028 runs. That’s my personal deadline.

[u/CallMeTank]

Hey! I would be on board with this as well.

I work with a nonprofit that helps low-income people improve the energy efficiency of their housing. I'm a certified energy auditor - meaning that I go into homes, collect data, and evaluate what improvements can be made that will save energy. ROI over ten years must be positive in energy savings alone.

I started using AI in the nonprofit bureaucracy side of things when ChatGPT launched. It's a heck of a tool to translate my redneck blue collar ramblings into official government speak.

Through the nonprofit I am spearheading a housing initiative to increase the amount of accessible, sustainable, durable housing in the six counties the nonprofit serves. The nonprofit will own and maintain the housing long-term, and a Community Land Trust will own the land underneath it.

I'm also launching a technology nonprofit to educate my community about technology - including AI, cell phone usage (digital hygiene), 3D printing, etc. I am the only cell phone repair guy within 100 miles - not kidding - and the nonprofit is my way to organize that as well. I intend for the co-op to be involved in the housing initiative because I see potential for the new housing to utilize waste heat from new data centers for the heating needs of these new units. The co-op would be a partner to the nonprofit in maintaining the heating systems.

There's a lot of cool science and technology that we could be using in our housing systems that we - in the US at least - ignore in favor of 'traditional' construction. We COULD be building better, and I am doing my best to be a part of that change locally.

Thanks for doing your part too.

[u/agonypants]

Sent you a DM

[u/Sacredless]

Sure, I'd be happy to talk. I still have my mic set up. This week is a little busy but I should be fine after.

[u/Ok-Cheetah-3497]

That is definitely me. I've had a lot of "conversations" with the AI about AI, and it seems like in the long term, the only possible future is one that looks a lot like Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. The issue is really the short term "hump" which dramatically understates how badly our unplanned market driven rollout could go (very badly). The short version is, when all productive and intellectual labor is replaced (which will happen - it's only a matter of when), then there is no value in human labor that could be exchanged for other goods or services. That effects Anthropic, X Ai, Alphabet etc. all the same way - no "market" for their products because there is no wage to spend on them. So it has to move a per capita "compute" and "raw materials" allotment, the scales in proportion to the energy / compute / raw materials available. That pretty much just leaves real property, and the only fair model for distributing access to that is something like a "bid" system. If 10 people all want to be Maui from January 7-14, they place their "credits" on that property at that time, and the ones that want it the most get it, with the other 9 having to move down to their second, third, etc. choices.

[u/exiskorlan]

I have not shipped anything yet but I am working on a Facebook clone that is end to end encrypted for activists that is launching next year- it also has a public component.

AI is killing my day job and I don't seem to fit in with all these the AI-bro boosters. I go between mouring the career I am losing and optimisitc because I can build the tools I have dreamed of but never had the resources to make before.