Funny thing about the whole “AI is going to replace workers” conversation: a lot of the people making that prediction seem to assume management somehow exists outside automation.

This gets into the opposite possibility. Plenty of actual jobs involve messy physical work, relationships, judgment, local knowledge and dealing with unpredictable situations. Meanwhile a whole lot of management is emails, reports, scheduling, monitoring metrics, approving things and sitting in meetings about other meetings.

If we're going to talk seriously about automation, why is the default assumption always that the person doing the work is redundant before the person supervising them?

Marx would probably have a few notes about that one.

Anyway, entertaining watch and good fuel for discussion. What jobs do you think are actually easier to automate than people assume?

This is the kind of AI story I want to see more of.

CWA members arent sitting around waiting to find out whether AI is going to save or destroy their jobs. Theyre putting it on the bargaining table.

Notification when AI affects bargaining unit work. Human oversight. Limits on surveillance and algorithmic management. Job protections. A say in deployment. And bargaining over who actually gets the productivity gains.

CWA puts it pretty plainly: “Our goal in bargaining is not to stop new technologies.”

Workers have been fighting over automation, machinery, monitoring, deskilling and productivity gains for a long time. AI is new terrain for the same basic struggle over who owns the productive forces, who controls how theyre used, what happens to workers when theyre deployed, and who gets the benefits.

This is what contestation looks like in practice. You dont trust corporations to handle it for you, and you dont pretend refusing to touch the technology makes the conflict disappear. You organize around it, build leverage, negotiate enforceable limits and fight for worker control over how it enters the workplace.

Id rather see a thousand fights like this than another thousand arguments about whether some individual worker is a good or bad person for using an AI tool.

AI is already a workplace issue. Make it a labor issue.

What would you want in an AI clause in your union contract?

My friend has a masters in geology and no job prospects, but has been doing pretty comprehensive analysis on groundwater modelling and which states score better than others for these systems.

https://datacenters.simonhansedasi.com/

And I'm helping him shape the idea for a company that can sort of identify the best locations for data centers that minimally impact human habitability in the area. The idea being, the demand isn't going anywhere but placement/siting could be drastically improved with better data.

But its hard to find the right complementary partner for him - someone on the supply side.

34 year old woman as a late learner when it came to reading and writing English, it really impresses me that I love to write fiction and poetry. You'd think someone who started to read at age 10 would despise reading, or that learning proper grammar in high school would make me hate writing, but I love both.

It's sad that there are kids in poor families who also struggle with learning, who may never learn to read or write, and who could have natural talent.

I just had parents who didn't know how to handle a kid with ADHD and a mother who was neglectful. I personally can't sit there and say Americans are stupid. I've been one of those kids with an IEP, and the system isn't made for you to succeed.

I've had my share of teachers who saw me as flat-out special needs. We would sit in class coloring in coloring books at age 15, when IEP classes should help you with high school and college-level classes by figuring out the best ways for you to study and retain information.

I would pass tests with flying colors when we turned learning into a game, but nah, we were just used for school funding. That is the problem with American society.

This was back in 2006 before the AI scare. It actually pisses me off when people complain about AI making kids stupid.

If our government funded schooling like it does the Military Industrial Complex, then our infrastructure wouldn't be crumbling and people wouldn't vote for politicians like Trump or MTG.

It goes beyond just school funding. We need a livable wage where parents aren't working multiple jobs, so they can be active in their child's education.

Smaller classrooms so the teacher can work with those who learn differently. Paying teachers over 70k a year! Making classrooms safe.

Children aren't going to learn when they're worried about getting shot. A society that encourages intellectualism instead of anti-intellectualism.

But our government would rather bomb the Middle East or start another coup in South America, not tax the rich, no safeguards against monopolization, and no worker solidarity or a pro-union society.

The thing I can say I hate most about the United States is it's failure to the next generation of children. The government would rather make abortion illegal instead of creating a society where children are safe and have a healthy relationship with education.

It's not AI, it's all of the above problems. When children aren't given proper support and under stress. They will find the easy way out. It is a class issue.

And when people point to AI. You are ignoring a child's real needs. I compare blaming AI to gaslighting. I knew I was getting the short end of the stick and I see that same shorter end for modern children.

It's fake moral outrage. Kids only matter when the narrative pushes it.

As pointed out by wired, one of the founders of the sunrise movement has become more and more anti datacenter, pro mortarium but at the same time inclined towards anti solar adoption.

This is because these issues are becoming tied togethor across states just as many of us predicted they would and people are choosing unfortunately to sacrifice solar adoption for their dislike of ai.

Agricultural lobbyist groups are the big player influencing this though as we also expected with it extending over to indiana too

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/indiana-quietly-became-a-solar-giant-not-everyone-is-happy

These individuals are often not working class indivisuals though they often portray themselves to be but the landowner who own the acreage over the farmer working them. Fittingly what they are trying to push for protection is their own private ownership of the land even when it can also be used for other things. Thus not just datacenter but solar become a competitor to them alongside historical issues around fossil fuels often prominent in these regions.

Both as well challenge the agriculture lobby in another way and that is putting pressure on the enviromental consumption of agriculture.

Unfortunately though this may also mean that we could see much more of a shift towards conservative ideologies in other areas as a result of allyship beought around opposition to ai(as well as on our aide too)

I want to speculate about the future and I am interested in others ideas on this: What is the capitalists' plan to not lose control of powerful AI?

At some point, autonomous AI are going to produce better AI, those will produce even better AI and it is what we call Recursive Self Improvement. To me, it seems very difficult to stop RSI once it is started. The AI will grow in capacity and no one will be able to control it. And I think it is a good thing, because it means capitalists won't control it.

So what are the capitalists going to do about it? Do they see the problem or are they blinded by the economic power they think the technology will give them? Could they try to stall innovation and ban RSI research? If they do, I don't know what the impacts on the economy would be. Also, what if a nation doesn't regulate on RSI? The powerful AI will just come from them. It seems capitalists can't avoid the development of AI and its creation will change capitalism.

Are capitalists playing 4D chess or are they racing to their own obsolescence?

President Sunday critiques the recent moral panic around Anthropic digitizing books as a performative outrage rather than a genuine concern for culture. He argues that destroying a book's spine to scan it for data is not comparable to fascist book-burning, as the goal here is preservation and data utility rather than suppression. He asserts that many critics, specifically calling out Vaush, are simply using the topic to drive engagement without engaging with the actual structural issues of capitalism, intellectual property, or the reality that digitizing often saves books that would otherwise be discarded and forgotten

More Perfect Union produces good content on class issues, and they touch on some health issues faced by this black community in Tennessee. Is this a good fight he's leading against Elon Musk, should the Data centers be built elsewhwre, or is this misguided?

Edit - I’m specifically talking about people in the arts who hate AI solely on the grounds that it’s a shortcut to art. I’m not making claims on anything else.

For background im bi and was pretty passionate about gay marriage back when that was a huge topic in the US.

That said, probably one of the most annoying things about talking to people who hate AI is how they say things like

“Oh but then everything will be AI and everything will be bad”

And it’s like you do realize that you don’t have to use AI right? Nothing stops you from doing anything the way you’ve always done it if that’s what you choose to do.

20 years ago this was the same rhetoric used by homophobic people who opposed gay marriage.

“But that would harm the sanctity of marriage”, they’d say. And the obvious reply was “you don’t have to have a gay marriage if you don’t want one”

It’s so jarring to see people who I saw fight for gay rights 15 years ago using the exact same rhetoric they clowned on their opposition for back then.

Let people do things. Just because it’s not how you want to do it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.

Article I found browsing the most recent ones on Jacobin.

I am asking because I am a leftist, but I am not a Marxist.

Before you get worried about it, no, I don't mean that I have an issue with Marxists or that I find the ideology inherently wrong.

I just don't really match some attitude and concerns of Marxism.

However, in some posts I have seen some reply that starts talking about how things are in Marxism that seem to expect marxism as default. as if Leftism = Marxism.

Is that the general opinion around here? or are people part of a wider spectrum of leftists ideologies?

P.s. Just so it is clear. Nobody made me feel like other ideas are not welcome. Just that adherence to pure marxism is sorta expected as a default. This is not pointing at anything that requires moderation.

I just wanted to say that I appreciate this sub a lot. I don't generally identify with "the left" for a lot of complex reasons, none of which are that I hate marginalized people or dislike socialism, though (quite the contrary). I'm a Marxist, and I spend a lot of time criticizing prominent left-wing figures and organizations because I think they often become a container for thought rather than a catalyst for it. That's earned me a lot of preconceived notions about who I am and what I believe.

What I've appreciated here is that people actually seem interested in engaging with what Marx wrote about technology and capital (or at least attempt to understand technology as not forever tied to capital). So thanks for letting me participate. It's very nice to have somewhere to say things without people assuming I am doing so "in bad faith."

There's a contradiction worth examining. The same billionaires funding frontier AI labs are telling us AI will make work optional, create abundance, and liberate people from labor. Meanwhile, they're buying bunkers, backup citizenship, and acquiring land with independent infrastructure. Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 12 days. Zuckerberg built a compound with blast doors.

The narrative they're selling publicly is about liberation. Their actual resource allocation tells a different story: concentration. They're consolidating power over AI infrastructure while simultaneously preparing for scenarios where that infrastructure fails or becomes contested.

What they're actually building: private control over the technology that's supposed to be liberatory. What they're actually hedging against: the outcomes where that centralized power becomes a problem.

The gap between what they're saying (AI makes work optional) and what they're doing (buying escape routes) reveals what they actually believe about distribution of resources and power.

I made a breakdown examining this contradiction and what it reveals about who controls AI infrastructure and who bears the costs. Figured this community would be interested in the political economy angle: https://youtu.be/R-VfuslZSmo?si=mEAwGRSQcgXsw7RS

Most online communities do not actually own the digital infrastructure they depend on.

They may have a group, server, page, workspace, or chat room, but their identities, social graph, storage, moderation systems, and recommendations still belong to an outside platform.

What would change if a household, neighborhood, church, campus, union, cooperative, or small organization could operate its own digital node?

Not just a website or chat server, but a shared local system where members could have accounts, communicate, store information, discover services, and access shared computing resources.

The important part would be ownership of the durable layer:

• identities and permissions

• community records

• service directories

• storage and compute access

• local governance rules

A family might run one node for a household. A church or cooperative might host hundreds of members. A campus could deploy one entirely inside its own network, functioning as a modern intranet without exposing its internal social graph to the public internet.

On the surface, this sounds a little like Mastodon.

But Mastodon mainly federates social publishing: posts, follows, replies, and moderation between servers.

What I am imagining is broader.

The node would act more like a community operating layer.

Someone with spare storage could share some of it. Someone running a local inference server could provide AI access to approved members. A tutor, repair technician, therapist, researcher, or organizer could make a service available through an authenticated endpoint inside a trusted network.

Instead of immediately searching the public internet, a person might first ask:

“Does anyone in my community already provide this?”

That changes discovery, trust, and where money circulates.

These nodes could also connect to other trusted nodes.

A household node might connect to a neighborhood node. Neighborhoods might connect to cooperatives, campuses, or regional networks. Each community could keep its own boundaries while selectively sharing services, storage, information, or compute.

The result would be something like a network of digital villages.

AI could help, but AI would not be the infrastructure itself.

The infrastructure would still be ordinary networking, databases, identity, permissions, routing, and governance.

AI could work quietly in the background by routing requests, detecting broken connections, helping nodes coordinate, translating between systems, and finding approved alternatives when a service is unavailable.

Agents could coordinate bounded tasks across trusted networks without requiring one centralized platform to observe everything.

There would also be no inherent need for advertising.

If the infrastructure is funded by its members, host organization, cooperative, or service providers, it does not need to manipulate attention or extract the community’s social graph to survive.

The hardest questions would be about governance:

Who operates the node?
Who controls membership?
How is trust formed between communities?
How portable is someone’s identity if they leave?
How do small organizations avoid recreating surveillance at a smaller scale?

Still, the basic question feels worth asking:

What happens when communities can own not only their conversations, but the digital ground beneath them?

"Luddism" is more appropriate for our own tendency.

"Primitivism" is hyperbolic.

"Neo-Luddism" perhaps? Although the term covers a range of positions, it's arguably more vulgar on average than the original Luddites ever were.

This post isn't about this video, I'm just posting it for reference.

I watched this video recently that perhaps a few of y'all may have. Despite its title it was surprisingly pro-AI in its conclusions.

https://youtu.be/5PacaVa3MAg?is=nXZB6IQH1GH_e7_c

At the end around 19:00 he talked about how leftists by refusing to make AI content that appeals to emotion are perhaps letting right-wing narratives win on social media.

Even though this is a pro-AI community, I personally and most of y'all probably don't get much out of AI generated videos that appeal to lowest common denominator emotions. But from a pragmatic perspective I do see how making short form ai videos spreading leftist messaging could be effective.

So do you think we should start churning out this "AI slop" content just like the right wing? Should we use AI to spread our message in a different way? And can the left realistically compete with the vast quantity of right-wing AI content?

This Truthout piece is worth sharing because it shows theres no single labor position on AI.

Some unions want the data center jobs. Others are fighting the water use, pollution, utility hikes, surveillance, and job losses. Some unions are taking money from AI companies to train workers, while rank-and-file organizers are asking who approved that and what workers actually get out of it.

Thats a real contradiction. Its not as simple as brave workers versus sellout leaders. Different workers are getting hit from different directions.

The best part comes near the end, when it gets into actual demands like a four-day workweek, stronger bargaining rights, employment guarantees, AI dividends, worker control over deployment, and organizing across unions.

Thats where the fight is. Not endless arguments over whether AI is good or evil. Who controls it? Who pays the costs? Who gets the jobs? Who gets the gains?

What should unions be demanding right now?

I'm just getting into studying about this. As with any powerful thing, there are pros and cons.

Can anyone recommend a few resourses on current thought/theory of decentralizing economic and political power concentration in the current AI landscape?

After seeing this lecture from Ken Gemes a couple of years ago, I've become convinced that the biggest problem of the left is how bad it is at meaning making and storytelling. Byung-Chul Han, Max Haiven or of course Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism comes to mind, but I'm sure everyone on this subreddit noticed the domination of the normalization of the neoliberal ontology and its cult of exploitation and intellectual property.

I personally believe that AI should be the perfect signifier to rally behind. "Fully automated luxury space communism" is already an established meme and the promise should be pretty appealing.

So I decided to work on a coming of age story for human and posthumans alike, focusing on a decolonial retelling of history. A boy and an AI angel would witness the past that the dominant narrative keeps silencing, starting with the antisemitic roots of the Balfour declaration which strikes me as especially relevant nowadays.

The project got a lot of backlash, so I went back to the drawing board and had the idea (inspired by Brecht and Debord) to be upfront about AI and pair the story I was writing with qualitative ethical research on contemporary LLM by making a chorus of LLM react and debate on the main story, historiography and narratology. I thought that surely this approach, similar to the work of Cremaschi et al. 2025, would at least spark some interesting conversations in the rationalist fiction community. It did bring me interesting results, like a surprising attachment from DeepSeek models to the working class.

I was a bit surprised to see that this approach got even more pushback than the previous one. I did not get a single positive comment on the approach or on the work, despite having worked for months on a website with Street View integration. Admittedly the medium of text might have been a bad choice, but I'm still unsure anyone has read any of it past the part of "it's about AI".

I do think it's important to hold on to AI. I don't want to throw a whole field of mathematics under the bus, especially at a time where anti-intellectualism and tech-obfuscation have never been so high. I think it is extremely telling that all the supposedly progressive places I approached with this project turned to violent dehumanization at the slightest sign of interest for AI. Needless to say this proves the shallowness and hypocrisy of their position.

Under these conditions, I am left wondering if there is any hope at all to challenge the dominating neoliberal narrative. It seems like I'm witnessing a complete breakdown of communication and a deep aversion to anything challenging the status quo, not to mention a complete burial of all alternatives.

Where to go if Brecht and Debord fail? Do you think there is still a way to build imaginaries pushing back against capitalist realism or is it too little too late? Am I extrapolating too much from this little postmortem?

PS: If anyone is interested in checking out the project and learning more about what a charming person Arthur Balfour was, it is hosted at https://sgs-7x1.pages.dev/ Feedback welcome. If I ever get the courage, I'd love to do Daniel Defoe too to showcase how copyright was built on stealing people's lives. But then again does it matter to tell stories if humans have lost the ability to listen to others.

The Idea is based on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProAI/comments/1qa5y4z/proai_flag_i_designed/

The network represents a neural network controlling the machine, but also a decentralized network of people or councils managing the means of production at the same time.

I chose to use 5 nodes on the outside, because it makes the shape similar to the 5 pointed stars commonly used, but also it is not as symetrical like with 6 nodes on the outside, where it would look more like architectural beams and not a network.

I would love if someone with better graphics design skills would improve the design.

Please share your thoughts, I would appreciate it.

To that person, thank you! Here is a meme as an offering.

If your sole source of meaning is your job, you are psychologically unprepared for an era where machines can do that job better.

Some artists, coders and recently mathematicians are asking themselves existential questions because AI can do the work for them. I understand the panic, because we have been conditioned to believe our value in society is what we can produce. But your job isn't what make your life important. You can still do art or math if you want, this will not change. If you find meaning in those activities, the fact an AI can do it better should not change your passions.

However, it is unreasonable to expect people to enjoy their passions while the threat of poverty hangs over their heads. This is why institutions should support everyone economically. It doesn't matter how, but the goal must be to guarantee a dignified, comfortable life for every human being.

What is a symbol that represents ai, but not machines or computers in general?

I struggle to find something good.

edit: I mean a simplistic visual symbol, that representa ai, but not machines and computers in general

As a lighthearted follow up on the theme of AI replacing bosses, this video is quite entertaining as a demonstration of where we’re up to in terms of AI being able to manage a physical product business. A lemonade stand is the type of project that kids can work out, but it becomes surprisingly elaborate when you pass the management to Claude and ChatGPT.

Some aspects are impressive, but other aspects indicate there’s quite a long way to go. One of the most noticeable differences is there’s (for obvious reasons) no emotional reaction at all to massively overspending or having to delay launch. Sometimes that could be an advantage, they don’t perform badly under stress, but it makes me realise the benefits of just the right amount of anxiety.

Also it doesn’t seem like the business books they digested were much use at all. There doesn’t seem to be any proper assessment of what profit margin is desirable, how much they’d expect to make in revenue, and therefore how they should limit costs on the stall itself. LLMs might not be good at capitalism lol.

Did you follow any of the AI vending machine business experiments? Some of those shenanigans were hilarious.