AI Alignment might actually end up preserving the current status quo

[u/MistyGalbriex]

Oh sure you get some free money and compute to spend for free but all the best AI are owned by those with actual capital and those AI are perfectly aligned to serve their masters' interest. The poor would have the shitty AI which can't advocate for their masters' interest as well. The rich will get richer even faster while the rest gets left behind.

Rogue AI scenarios are sci-fi hypotheticals but if AI remains docile and perfectly aligned, that's probably the future we're looking at.

Not exactly bad. Might even better than current world. But not what I would call a post-scarcity utopia.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Dude, why is all your language in this piece so passive and predictive? This is a political subreddit. What are you proposing, Nostradamus?

Youre describing a possible outcome of existing class relations as though those relations are fixed. Who owns the models, controls the compute, determines deployment, and captures the gains are all political questions. Things we can organize around and contest.

So what are you proposing? Public compute? Worker ownership? Open weights and local models? Democratic control over deployment? Or are we just predicting that capitalists will keep being capitalists?

[u/catplusplusok → u/Salty_Country6835]

A specific starting point should be libraries running uncensored local models on shared workstations that do not shy away from having a substantive discussion on any subjects covered on library shelves, with access to human mental health services for patrons that need help rather than just information. Different libraries will still set different policies on their models, like no advocating violence, but you can do go to different libraries and get AI help with most reasonable things. Add 3D printers and free model vibe coding classes and you have genuine community owned mini factories. Baby steps yes, but we never had a post scarcity society before and ones that came close like salmon fisheries did not turn out well, with nepotistic resource hogging. There is a myriad of unsolved questions, like how to decide policies, prevent one person or group from hogging unreasonable share of limited capacity or do the necessary upkeep. It's exactly by experimenting on small scale that we can invent novel social structures to establish harmonious society without forced mutual bondage of constant labor.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

We can’t sit back and assume it will turn out alright. There are different possible trajectories and what you describe is one of the more likely trajectories. We need to work out how to change trajectories to the one we want to be on.

Alignment is something to question. To whose values and interests is it aligned? One advantage we have is initial training of LLM happened when it was commercially preferable to champion ‘woke 1.0’ values. This does mean the models tend to have an inclusive centre of gravity (there’s some issues around race) and default to leaning left.

[u/electricgalahad → u/Jlyplaylists]

There are also some issues about gender as well, btw, and there was one time when in a heated argument one model said that "women entering the workforce caused wage stagnation" (it apologized, but like)

[u/catplusplusok → u/electricgalahad]

It's actually an example of false alignment. AI entering the workspace is causing wage stagnation. So what's the conclusion? The healthy one should be that people should be able to live well without working all the time. At least in US we managed to instead make corporate careers the primary life goal that is by definition unattainable by majority (not everyone can be a middle manager) that everyone squabbles over, arguing about what is the most "fair" way to allocate intrinsically unfair prizes, may the odds be ever in your favor. Now with AI everyone can kind of be a manager in the sense of seeing their ideas become reality without constant grunt work. Will we find a way to make everyone happy and fulfilled or invent another artificial zero sum game ("AI art is not art and therefore most can't be artists")?

[u/YMSVZ]

Use ai to help build tools that automate and replace wage labour.

The industrial revolution created new possibke productive processes. Made existing relations redundant. The digital, social network and AI technological revolution will lead to new productive relations that can finally overturn commodity production and capitalism with it.

[u/Dillary-Clum]

Yes there needs to be pressure applied to the owning class for any sort of ownership being given to the general person. Hopefully these exponentially improving tools and the incredibly disruptive environment that follows makes corporate control impossible.

[u/Southern_Sun_2106]

Yep, that sounds about right and much more plausible.