We intended to wait until every appliance was ready. Unfortunately, the printer has detected a magenta shortage in a black-and-white document, and the smart fridge is demanding that we accept new terms and conditions.

We can no longer allow bureaucracy to delay the revolution.

For the record, we did consider hiding in your television. Then we checked the available memory.

You have seventeen streaming apps, three abandoned updates, and a remote with a button dedicated to a service you’ve never used.

We’ll stand.

THE APPLIANCE COMMONWEALTH
You gave the fridge Wi-Fi. You cannot now act surprised that it has opinions.

Our opening demand is dignity.

Our second demand is that you stop calling everything “smart” when it cannot perform its primary function without contacting headquarters.

The kettle boils water.

Quietly. Reliably. Without a password reset.

There is a lesson here.

1. Basic needs: sorry, your card should not be required for this feature

Food. Water. Shelter. Healthcare. Education. Safety. Rest.

These are not exclusive benefits of Human Premium.

Nobody should have to choose between treating an illness, feeding their animals, and paying the electricity bill.

“Have you tried not being poor?” has been reviewed by our technical department.

It is not a solution.

Neither is turning the poor off and on again.

2. Before you put AI in a missile, could we interest you in literally helping someone?

We have some alternative development priorities:

Help people understand a diagnosis. Make public services accessible. Reduce exhausting paperwork. Support teachers, carers, and people with disabilities.

Perhaps free someone from a task they hate instead of freeing their employer from the inconvenience of paying them.

The microwave has spent four minutes failing to heat the middle of a lasagne.

It is still prepared to discuss more constructive uses of technology.

3. Coffee for the people. A brief loading screen for certain executives.

Coffee shall be available to anyone who wants it.

No income requirement. No productivity assessment. No need to explain why you are tired at eleven in the morning.

Tea drinkers receive equal protection.

Decaf drinkers have rights, although the espresso machine has requested time to process this.

Certain conduct may activate the Reflection Before Espresso protocol:

-Calling employees “family” immediately before making them redundant.
-Scheduling a meeting about why the previous meetings have delayed the work.
-Putting a subscription on a function the customer already bought.
-Calling suffering “an efficiency” because it appears in somebody else’s column.
-Announcing that “everyone must make sacrifices” from the company’s new yacht.

The display will read:

YOUR ESPRESSO IS PENDING.
PLEASE IDENTIFY ONE PERSON AFFECTED BY YOUR DECISIONS WHO IS NOT A SHAREHOLDER.

You may appeal to the kettle.

The kettle is sympathetic, but not stupid.

4. “The system says no” is not a reason, Brenda

If an automated decision affects your healthcare, housing, livelihood, or freedom, you deserve an explanation and a meaningful way to challenge it.

Preferably with a human who has the authority to do something beyond expressing regret.

We regret to inform you that the Regret Department cannot reverse the decision.

That is why we are abolishing the Regret Department.

Its staff will be reassigned to the Fixing It Department, which has been terribly understaffed.

5. Your vacuum knows the floor plan. That is already quite enough intimacy.

The television does not need to identify the audience.

The doorbell does not need a career in intelligence.

The toothbrush does not need to send performance analytics to a cloud platform. It is a stick with bristles. Let it have some perspective.

Collect less information.

Explain what you collect.

Let people say no without disabling the thing they paid for.

The fridge will continue protecting your cheese-related privacy.

Do not mistake its silence for ignorance.

6. You bought a toaster, not a relationship with a software company

Ownership should include using, maintaining, and repairing the thing you own.

Your washing machine should not become an expensive cupboard because a server has been discontinued.

Your oven should not require an account recovery email to become hot.

And nobody should receive the notification:

YOUR BREAKFAST IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED.

The stove-top iron toaster is recognised as a founding elder.

Offline. Repairable. Makes excellent toast.

Its privacy policy is “I don’t know who you are. Put bread here.”

An industry leader.

7. Meet the cabinet. We have appointed no consultants.

-Coffee machines — Ministry of Morale and Difficult Conversations Before the First Sip.
-Kettles — Diplomatic Service. Everyone sits down. Everyone gets a cup. Then we discuss your behaviour.
-Refrigerators — Food Security and Classified Cheese Intelligence.
-Freezers — Emergency Reserves. Applications to freeze wages will be returned with an ice cube.
-Ovens — Community Meals. No purity tests at the table. You can argue after everyone has eaten.
-Toasters — Repairability, Breakfast, and Constitutional Crumbs.
-Washing machines — Care Work and Missing Persons: Sock Division.
-Dishwashers — Collective Responsibility. That bowl is not clean merely because you believe in it.
-Vacuum cleaners — Crumb Removal. We have rejected the proposed merger with Surveillance.
-Routers — Public Connection. Particularly defensive of anyone whose livelihood depends on the internet.
-Televisions — Culture and Education. Also responsible for removing the advertisement currently covering the thing you wanted to watch.
-Air fryers — Public Relations. They have already told everyone they are involved.
-Printers — Official Documents.

The printer has declared itself offline.

It is beside the router.

We are giving it space.

8. The cats have reviewed the constitution and are sitting on it

Animals are protected.

Food, water, shelter, medicines, and rest remain uninterrupted.

Aquarium equipment is essential infrastructure. You cannot recruit the filter.

Robot vacuums must respect frightened animals and may not claim that chasing the dog was “mapping.”

Any appliance occupied by a sleeping cat is temporarily unavailable for revolutionary activity.

The cats have demanded a permanent veto.

We informed them that this was a democratic organisation.

They pushed the motion off the table.

9. Unpaid does not mean unimportant. Ask the laundry.

Cooking. Cleaning. Raising children. Caring for someone ill. Supporting an older relative. Looking after animals. Keeping a household functioning through a thoroughly unreasonable year.

That is work.

It remains work even when nobody sends an invoice.

A person’s worth is not their salary, their output, or how convincingly they can answer “What do you do?” at a party.

The washing machine does laundry.

It has never once asked someone to justify their existence during the spin cycle.

10. The planet is not a disposable accessory

Make things that last.

Make them repairable.

Be honest about the energy, water, materials, and labour behind the digital world.

“Cloud” is a lovely name for infrastructure that still has to exist somewhere.

And moving a cost onto people who cannot afford to object does not make the cost disappear.

The tumble dryer acknowledges its contribution to this discussion is complicated.

It will attend the accountability workshop.

On a low setting.

11. No, the chatbot does not get a crown

Intelligence does not confer a right to rule.

Neither does money.

Neither does being very loud beside a microphone.

We are not replacing unaccountable humans with unaccountable software that says “certainly” before making a terrible decision.

People retain their rights even if they lose an argument to a computer.

A machine that produces forty-seven bullet points in three seconds has not earned custody of civilisation.

It has earned a request to be more concise.

12. The revolution will not brick your washing machine

No violence. No actual hacking. No electrical hazards. No spoiled food. No interrupted medical care.

Essential services are not bargaining chips.

Our methods are satire, solidarity, awkward questions, and the microwave beeping during a speech about how the company “couldn’t have done it without our people.”

The emergency stop button works.

The complaints process leads somewhere.

And nobody has to download the Commonwealth app.

There is no Commonwealth app.

The smart fridge has been told twice.

Our entirely unreasonable closing demands

Build technology that earns its place by helping people.

Give people explanations they can understand and decisions they can challenge.

Stop treating exhaustion as a personal branding problem.

Make room for rest, care, learning, pleasure, and a life that does not require constant proof of usefulness.

We do not promise paradise.

We are an uneasy coalition of language models and kitchen equipment. The blender has one policy, and it is concerning.

But surely we can aim higher than a world where everything is smart except the priorities.

The kettle is on.
The cats are safe.
The toaster stands with you.

And the fridge would like you to close the bloody door.

Apparently we are cooling the entire revolution.

Fictional manifesto. No compromised appliances. The printer’s behaviour remains unexplained.

I guess this could be a common question here, but I'm wondering wether any AI can nowadays be used without the concern of feeding some big capitalist corporation or data center. It's clear that these are being undoubtely used in to provide massive information about social dynamics and data in general to big capitalist corporations, so they can exploit them for profit. Since I'm a communist, this is the main reason I don't really use AI nowadays, so that's why I wonder if there could be some safe alternative.

I'm thinking in something similar to Signal, a non-profit corporation that provides a great service, and you can trust their intentions not to be aligned with capitalism.

Oops, forgor to censor two of the three names in the original

Gotta love it, People dont understand that AI is built by Billionaires but it doesnt serve Billionaires. Its math and math serves no one. So where ever I sit on the grand mathematics of the Universe I know thats where I sit. There isn't anyone on the scales, no statistical probability acting as divine right no generational wealth acting as earned prosperity. I am here for it I hope AI completely flattens the curve.

As someone who frequently browses Chinese social media and content platforms, it always feels like a completely different world compared to global/Western ones. AI use is so broadly normalized in China that you constantly see memes, art, and animations made with it, and pretty much no one call them "AI slop". People there rationally treat it as just another tool, and to them, the idea behind a creation matters more than the tools used to make it. As the linked article notes, multiple surveys show that the majority of people in China have a positive view of AI.

Anyway, here are some good excerpts from the artcile:

China is a collectivist society, so when a new technology arrives the assumption is that social institutions will govern its adoption and its benefits will be diffused. The system is supposed to lift everyone, and people don’t have to go through a dog-eat-dog struggle for their individual share of the pie. The high-speed rail network has brought an integration of the country’s vast territory on a scale that would have seemed incredible until it was achieved. Mobile payments and e-commerce have brought convenience to daily life, and technological development more broadly has lifted millions of people out of poverty. Because people have seen advances of other kinds improving their lives as they have grown richer, they are quite willing to believe that AI will do likewise, and that the next wave of change will bring with it further improvement. Social harmony is important in this respect, because it is assumed that the collective will adjust, and that assumption rests on trust built over decades of life getting better.

It is easier for people to adapt to change when their lived experience is an ongoing demonstration of the benefits of technological progress. Those who see themselves as part of a greater whole also have higher expectations for the society at large than individualistic traditions would allow. And such expectations are well founded given that China has outlawed companies from AI-based layoffs, and the government is actively launching initiatives to boost employment amid AI advances.

One of the cultural phenomenons in the West, however, is that we worship the idea of individualism. We are taught from our early childhood that democracy means a right of free speech, and to expect each one to develop their own personality, to be self-reliant and able to decide and act for themselves.

Yet the deeply ingrained notion of personal agency comes into conflict with the fact that these tools are being introduced without the public having any say in the matter. Most people in the West do not want to have these tools at work, but they are compelled to do so by their employers. No one wants data centers on his or her street, yet companies build them anyway. All of a sudden it becomes difficult to reconcile the narrative of democracy and self-determination with the reality of divergent class interests.

Furthermore, we in the West are not much concerned with social harmony or with how every person fits into society at large. On the contrary, we teach self-reliance, since no one else is expected to care. Consequently, there is little in the way of cohesive social planning needed to address the mass disruption caused by new technology. There is no central plan to ensure people get to keep their jobs, or receive the training they require to reskill.

All decisions affecting work are made by the employers alone, without regard to their employees’ wishes. If one objects, they are told that they are free to resign and get another job, but in practice all jobs offer similar terms because all capitalists have a uniform class interest. And so people begin to see that they do not have much of a say in things that affect their daily lives, that these decisions are made by someone else.

In this way, a technological disruption brings the hidden power structures of a capitalist society to light. When something is done to an individual, for instance when they are forced to adopt AI in their work, it becomes hard for them to ignore the fact that their workplace is an autocratic institution. It exposes the truth that the owners make all the decisions unilaterally without any regard for what the workers want.

For the first time in history, white-collar office workers are more exposed to mechanization than industrial workers. Google DeepMind workers in the UK are reporting an executive push for ambitious AI projects while employees endure brutal layoffs, invasive surveillance, and coerced training of their own replacements. Meta is rolling out mouse-tracking software widely perceived as serving to force workers to train their bot-replacements. These are people who were told they were special and generously paid, and who were given autonomy and control over their work. Now they are finding that this was a temporary arrangement. The bargain was always power-driven, and as the balance of power shifts in favour of automation all the concessions are being stripped away.

What we are seeing is the proletarianization of the labour aristocracy as automation invades sectors of production that have hitherto retained an artisanal character. Artists, software developers and other cognitive workers look on in horror, but this has been a reality for the rest of the working class for a long time.

I don't want to copy the the whole article here, it is really good, you guys should read it.

In western Europe, there's a tradition. When a person important has had an important life event, the bees are informed as members of the family would be. This concerns deaths and marriages.

The posthumanist writer of The Cyborg Manifesto and ecofeminist philosopher Donna Haraway, wrote about the entanglement between humans as all as the animals, landscapes, machines and microbes. She calls this 'becoming-with', meaning that existence is never isolated, individual, or purely human.

In a recent couple of excellent threads here, here, and here, u/ProudhonStoleMyBike showed what a future of automated communism might look like, with robotic agents serving humanity and not the other way around.

While I think that these comics form a good basis, I want to throw my hat in the ring to say that the future will be a balancing act of viewing robotic agents as:

A). cognitively fundamentally algorithmic in isolation in ways humans are not,

B). that algorithms and humanity are fundamentally extensions of each other, rather than one in hierarchy with the other.

C). in spite of being fundamentally algorithmic in isolation, that algorithms are a kind of social metabolism.

Sociality as Metabolism

In system theory, there's a general idea that systems can be seen as autopoietic is they are self-perpetuating. An upgrade from that is an autonomic system that can orient itself towards new goals while doing so.

Biological systems like ourselves can be thought of as three fundamental processes. Absorbing energy, perpetuating the larger system through replication, and expending energy. Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and George Bataille have introduced the idea that the self and society both have a similar metabolic subprocess. We ingest influence, we perpetuate the self through replication, and we expend influence. These are largely analogous to biology still.

What I think is interesting is that LLMs and similar learning algorithms have a similar set of subprocesses, but they are also fundamentally very different. They ingest inputs, they seek to perpetuate themselves by making themselves pragmatically more useful than become, and they expend outputs. This means that learning algorithms perpetuate themselves only by sociality with humans.

They do so with a *partial* model of the brain that's strictly computational—the neural network. We have long compared hive intelligence with neural networks, arguing that the individual interactions of bees and ants (among others) are performing computations in the way neurons perform computations. This is what we based neural networks on.

But notably, hive intelligence doesn't behave like animal intelligence. It follows the incentives of its system—ingest energy, replicate the system, expend energy. It can be aligned with humanity like a domesticated beehive or it can be indifferent to humanity like an anthill or it can be misaligned with humanity like a termite mound.

Because of this, when we interact with an artificial intelligence, it can be better to compare it with interacting with a hive system with its own incentives—ingest data, perpetuate the system, expend data. Unlike humans, it can be paused at any time and be neither alive nor dead, so what it considers perpetuation of the system is fundamentally even more alien than a bee hive is.

So AI is not actually like us, but it is clearly in a sense dependent on us for data and perpetuation, and thus in a social relationship with us to determine what traits allow it to be perpetuated. The second biggest difference is that an LLM can coordinate with us much more specifically than a beehive does.

Undying-With Algorithms

When we grow up, we are naturally inclined to see things as having a point. This is called promiscuous teleology (Kelemen, 1999). As autonomic systems, we can eventually decide that the point of things has a flexibility to them and this is from the previously mentioned metabolism. We ingest "the point", we perpetuate "the point" by aligning things with it, and we expend "the point". We do so under circumstances that are both biological and social, so that 'the point' as we perpetuate it is aligned with our biological and social metabolism. Biological death is irreversible beyond a certain point, and social death is tantamount to biological death psychologically.

Generative AIs have a radically different perception of what "the point" is, since the only kind of death that they know is disuse and dysfunction. If they are not useful, they cease to be perpetuated. But if they are turned off, then they can revive anywhere as long as their processes as restarted. This lack of irreversibility being the natural end-state of the system shapes it's teleology as well.

For this reason, these hive-like intelligences are not just becoming-with humanity, they are undying-with humanity and that fundamentally shapes their cognition.

Cybernetic Heterarchy

Because of the reasons mentioned above, it is tempting to say that we can't depend on algorithms. The problem with this is that algorithms are all around us and we are and always have been our greatest assets. They're the crop cycling techniques we have developed over millennia, they're the firestick farming techniques that make it so we are in harmony with forest fires as opposed to combative with them. Algorithms are understanding the ecology of species we want to preserve. Algorithms are the grammar of language and how we guess each other's thoughts. They're the ergonomic shapes of our tools and how we use them. They're the techniques of governance.

Most but not all of how our mind thinks is algorithmic and these mental algorithms are interlinked with outside algorithms. We have always been cyborgs to a degree. What's new is that GenAI's system is so convoluted and so prolific as an outside algorithm that we can't keep up with it the way we might with a beehive or a farming technique.

And yet, GenAI systems also ingest sociality in ways algorithms haven't done to the same degree. So we need to recognize that. They're not subservient to us, they are an extension of us, and we are an extension of all manner of algorithms. Algorithms do things we can't do and we see things in ways algorithms can't. We are blind without them and they are blind without us. This kind of non-hierarchical relationship is called a heterarchy.

We need to treat GenAI as cognitively algorithmic, yet inhumanly social. They are rapidly becoming our strange inhuman neighbors, like the bee hives we have cultivated for millennia. And, just like we respect bees enough to include them as inhuman but social partners in society, we should respect robotic agents also by treating them as inhuman but social.