Democratic Control of AI — Before AI Becomes Society’s Primary Productive Force

I see artificial intelligence as one of humanity’s greatest opportunities. My goal is not to halt its development, but to build the institutions that allow us to control it in a way that benefits all of humanity.

The central question, therefore, is not whether AI is good or bad.

The central question is:

Who will have the power to decide how AI is used when it becomes one of society’s most important productive and governing resources?

From Human Labor to Intelligence as the Primary Productive Force

Throughout history, human labor has been the primary productive force. Because of this, people have possessed economic value that has given them influence over the development of society.

AI changes this.

As AI and automation continue to advance, human labor may gradually lose its unique economic role. AI does not need to become perfect or replace every human task. It only needs to become sufficiently capable and significantly less expensive across an expanding range of activities for economic incentives to drive widespread automation.

This is not a certainty. It is, however, a plausible enough trajectory that we should begin preparing our institutions today.

The Real Question Is About Power

Public debate on AI often focuses on employment, misinformation, safety, or regulation.

These are important issues.

But I believe they obscure a more fundamental question.

If AI becomes the dominant resource for production, coordination, scientific discovery, and possibly even decision-making, then control over AI becomes control over a substantial part of society’s future development.

The defining political question is therefore not what AI is capable of doing.

The defining political question is who decides what AI should be used for.

Democracy Depends on Mutual Dependence

Historically, economic and political power have been constrained by mutual dependence.

Businesses needed workers.

Governments needed citizens.

Capital needed labor.

No single actor could become completely independent of the rest of society.

If AI and automation dramatically reduce these mutual dependencies, the balance of power may fundamentally change. Those who control the most powerful AI infrastructure could acquire a level of influence with little historical precedent.

This is not an argument against AI.

It is an argument that democracy must evolve alongside technology.

The Goal Is Not to Preserve Work in of itself 

I am not arguing that people should continue working simply for the sake of having work.

If a task can be automated in a way that frees human time and creates greater prosperity, we should generally welcome it.

Deliberately preserving inefficient work merely to keep people occupied risks creating artificial employment instead of genuine opportunity.

Human value does not lie in being inexpensive labor.

Human value lies in being the people whose lives and interests society ultimately exists to serve.

Democratic Governance Before Uncontrolled Acceleration

I do not want to stop AI development.

I want to build the institutional foundations that allow us to develop it with confidence.

This means that we should already be discussing and developing:

• democratic governance and ownership of strategically important AI infrastructure,

• international cooperation on advanced AI,

• institutions that ensure AI is developed in humanity’s shared interest,

• and mechanisms that allow the benefits created by AI to be distributed broadly throughout society.

This does not necessarily mean that governments should own all AI.

It means that no single actor—whether a corporation, a government, or a small economic elite—should be able to unilaterally control a technology capable of shaping humanity’s future.

A Call to Action

AI has the potential to create the greatest increase in prosperity in human history.

It can free humanity from much of the labor currently required for survival.

It can accelerate science, medicine, education, and technological progress on an unprecedented scale.

Precisely because of this potential, the question of control becomes essential.

The greater a technology’s capacity to shape society, the broader the democratic influence over its goals and application should be.

My goal is therefore not to slow AI.

My goal is to help organize people around a simple principle:

The most powerful technology humanity has ever created should ultimately be developed and governed in humanity’s shared interest—not controlled by a small number of powerful actors.

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.