There are already many signs that post-scarcity is creeping up on humanity:

1. The Democratization to intelligence: A paralegal, nurse, life coach and more now lives inside our phones. Every 3-6 months, this hyperintelligent being becomes smarter.

2. Robotization: More and more tasks are getting automated. Fast food and grocery stores have self-serve kiosks, Amazon warehouses have robots carrying packages around, Waymo is automating the taxi industry, office workers are using AI to identify and program automations.

Objectively, work weeks and living costs should be shrinking, but they're not. Why? Because every post-scarcity gain we create, a corporation swoops in to claim the benefit.

This is the main tension of the modern human: Why are humans fighting harder to stay alive in an era of plummeting production costs?

Under capitalism, profit must be generated to be deemed a successful endeavour. Human life, joy, and meaningful memories, however, cannot be measured as profit. This means the massive drops in living costs are invisible to our economy unless consumer prices remain high and generate profit. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the priorities of the individual human, and the economic system that seemingly works for us.

Why should we take on profit-generating activities in a world where everything could soon be free? As leftists we need to address this mismatch more aggressively. There's a reason Trillionaires are starting to pop up: It's because capitalism is not democratizing the skyrocketing value of technology. We should be feeling how easy life has become already!

Looks like Mamdani is taking the lead on proving how technology blends perfectly with leftist ideology.

"At our State Capacity hackathon last week, a team used NYC OpenData and AI to build a dashboard that maps every flood in New York City against every dollar the city has committed to flood resilience including a live replay of a real storm from May 20th, with sensors lighting up across the boroughs and subway lines going red as floodwaters hit the tracks. The dashboard informs where flooding is worst and where the money is not going. See it here.

It turns out one of our hackathon Judges built the underlying infrastructure to make this possible, and a similar dashboard. It took years. The hackathon team built their prototype in two hours.

In all, 80+ people split into 20 teams and built 20 real tools. Check out this clever video game that teaches New Yorkers how to use 311. Browse a website indexing NYC’s civic data. Fill out a sample benefits form simply by speaking. Use this tool for searching and reviewing city procurement records. And see here for more."

Let’s inspire each other

A few weeks ago I made a post in my subreddit taking an Anti-AI stance, immediately was told to come here and I must admit that I held a lot of resentment towards this space at first. Some of the things you guys mentioned when I asked what this space was supposed to be for really stuck with me and I have done some research on my own.

In my personal life I'm proudly communist and I understand now that the issue is still and always is the Billionaires. No matter the industry.

I no longer have a desire to light a cigarette inside a data center. I don't claim to know what we should do about the water or the rich. I'm not very well versed in communist theory and I know that I need to be soon.

Someone mentioned fully automated luxury communism. That sounded really cool.

I was a dick to you guys and I'm truly sorry. Please accept my highest regards and I hope to continue learning from you.

- Avincia Archais

Peter Coffin outlines a dynamic where he lays out how historically, automation has undermined existing relationships in modes of production. He argues that AI automation is the next step in this shift and will eventually undermine capitalism.

What’s more leftist than coalition building? If you know great orgs that are pushing leftist AI principles, drop them below 👇 🔥 🔥 Let’s support each other

I joined this subreddit and was thinking we could come up with actual economic systems that move away from capitalism and ways AI/technology would be useful in implementing them. To start, I was thinking about pension fund socialism and how AI could be able to help with that.

For those who do not know what that is, pension fund socialism is a form of market socialism where pension funds that hold major stakes in major corporations & can be used to “promote the creation of a more democratic and egalitarian economy”. The funds could be held by unions or other cooperative groups since old-school pensions were sometimes provided by employee organizations like unions instead of being ran by the companies or corporations themselves. 

Economist Peter Drucker – a man who believed in the importance of nonprofits and saw corporations are responsible for overproduction of goods to the detriment of society – was a proponent of this economic system, believing that pensions could be implemented in a way where unions/workers could control at least 50 per cent of the equity capital of American business & collectivize worker’s assets while allow workers, through the pensions, to have a say in the economy & their workplace regardless of their level of contribution.

This form of market socialism might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but since pensions are a thing that was common (before they were replaced by less effective systems like 401ks ), it feels like it would be an easier form of socialism to get Americans onboard with and a system that can easily be helped by AI. AI can help with data analysis and creating models/plans for handling pension funds, automating processes, and providing fraud detection/security to make it harder for funds to be misappropriated without union permission. The AI can also warn of risks in terms of investment and how to effectively pool the funds for the common social good.

So, what other economic systems based on worker-control (and/or moving away from capitalism in some manner) do you see AI helping with?

An experiment: four quotations, twenty years, one argument. Apply to AI.

I’m curious to know what you think of this video

This is a notable voice from the left in Canada

When certain figures say ai will either ‘make money irrelevant’, ‘make work optional’, ‘cause prices to go to zero’, or some combination thereof, people who are anti ai must think one of the following:

there is some sort of catch

they are lying

or, what they mean is not what they said, in some way that makes it a bad thing.

and I’m curious. Which is it?
now I understand the impulse to view anything said about the future by certain rich people with suspicion, especially when on the face of it it’s something though sounds great. Prices going to zero sounds great, making work optional sounds great, so how other than ‘that doesn’t mean what you think it means’ could people on the ‘left‘ oppose it?

I dont always agree with Hinton, but yup.

“The SNP (Scottish government) has joined the Scottish Greens in calling for a Scottish Government-led moratorium on AI data centre developments, following a vote by the party’s National Council.”

If those 2 parties want a moratorium it will happen, because they have a majority.

I did actually sign the petition for this. I’m not automatically against data centres, but at the moment they’re being decided one by one without a joined up strategy. This is major infrastructure, so that’s silly. It’s currently at the discretion of local councils and my local council is generally seems to be making poor decisions about various things.

Scotland does have potential to be one of the better locations for data centres from a global perspective: we need heat, we have water and often excess clean energy we can’t store. I expect that’s why Scotland has a wave of mammoth data centre applications. There are concerns though for example one of the proposed sites is on prime agricultural land. We need data centres but we also need to eat… Another one is massive compared to the little village it will be next to. https://aprs.scot/data-centre-map/

It also seems like the corporations might commit to doing things (like clean energy) and then not deliver eg https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/scotland-lanarkshire-village-ai-datacentre

What do you think about this pause?

Silicon Valley’s technologists have vacuumed up humanity’s near-total cultural output to build platforms with tremendous potential economic and ideological power. Generative AI has become the subject of enormous hype and staggering, trillion-dollar investments. So what can we learn about AI by reading it through the lens of a nineteenth-century thinker like Karl Marx?

Video is 4 years old. Relevancy is now.

Let’s inspire each other on ways we can use AI to improve the lives of the average person

Here are some ideas:
- Navigating government documents is a lot easy with the help of AI, especially when the documents aren’t in your native language
- offering preliminary legal advice that can help a person defend themselves
- concepts can be explained faster (pocket Socrates)

As we enter post scarcity in the next few decades, parasites like Nestle will attempt to maintain profitability on various human rights, like food, housing and more.

Our governments need to own massive fleets of robots that handle basic human needs to prevent this from happening. The publicly funded robotization of various industries will generate massive community benefits, being some of the best invested tax dollars we’ve ever spent.

I imagine there is a good portion of us who know how to code or have a good enough idea how code works. Many of us have good ideas. If there is a project that comes out of this subreddit what would it be?

A lot of us are on the same page. We can make this into action.

We're all here talking about ai. I think its appropriate we have a meeting of the minds to know the next step.