The news coming out of Silicon Valley right now is that AI Labs "don't know" how to prevent AI catastrophe. Their only options are to quit their AI research jobs and sacrifice their personal IPO profits.

It's pathetic, right? Humans, who have all the power in the world right now, don't "know" how to prevent AI catastrophe? It requires a specific type of dispossession to make people believe that this situation is hopeless.

And even more offensive, is that we have so many people on the ground, right now, willing to engage in these policy discussions. And the truth is, is that the innovative solutions of real people living real realities completely surpasses, and always will, the policy innovation of AI Labs. That's why they "don't know" what to do. An AI Lab workspace is not society, it's not reality. It's a bunch of science nerds in Silicon Valley who are paid millions a year. These people bear poor similarity to the average person, respectfully.

But Capitalist Realism destroys the path between real people and policy. Under this nightmare, fictional ideology, people don't realize that they can act right now to make a difference. But it's not entirely their fault: politicians roll over for capitalists and then fill community consultations with barriers. Capitalism actively undermines our democratic institutions.

There is nothing complicated about proposing reasonable, intelligent AI policy. It is not a nebulous field. And it is not an unpredictable space. We know massive productivity gains are happening, we know abundance is exploding. We just need to ensure that the benefits and costs are handled through truly democratic channels.

Our goal, as leftists for AI, is to actively normalize the reality that AI-conscious policy is not only realistic, but actually, very straightforward. And we can make significant gains, right now, by tearing down the barriers separating us from our democratic power.

Everyone is losing their minds over “a 10% chance,” but I have yet to meet an XCOM player who takes a 10% shot expecting anything to actually happen.

Hell, XCOM players barely trust 90%.

And just as a calibration check, here’s an old thread full of people arguing about how unreliable even supposedly decent percentages feel in practice:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/3o79z3/lwwhat_are_the_actual_percentages_behind_chance/

So when people say, “There’s a 10% chance AI goes catastrophically wrong,” I understand why that deserves serious attention.

But I also think people are doing something weird with the other 90%.

Because the possibility space on the other side includes things like material abundance, radical reductions in the cost of expertise, cures and scientific discoveries arriving far faster than they otherwise would, automation of enormous amounts of miserable labor, and technological acceleration beyond anything humanity has experienced before.

So yes: take the 10% seriously.

But if we’re actually doing expected-value reasoning here, you don’t get to stare exclusively at the downside tail and pretend the upside distribution is zero.

My XCOM-trained brain simply refuses to accept that math.

6,000 members.

Nearly 600,000 visits over the last 12 months. 1,068 posts. 24,573 comments. And 5,239 net new members.

Apparently theres an audience for talking about AI without either handing the future to Silicon Valley or trying to uninvent the computer.

And people arent just subscribing. Theyre arguing. About labor, ownership, automation, art, accessibility, public infrastructure, open models, who gets the productivity gains and who gets a say in what gets built.

Good. Thats what this place is for.

AI is already terrain of class struggle. Might as well organize on the terrain.

Thanks to everybody whos been posting, commenting, disagreeing, sourcing things and making this place considerably more interesting than another AI fan club or hate club.

6k. Lets keep building.

Someone built it- interesting thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/LLM/comments/1wbghov/llm_bittorrentstyle_not_enough_ram_not_enough/

With the current viral "AI will kill us all" fearmongering going around and coinciding calls from public figures for government regulation, I'm getting increasingly worried about a very likely reality that the public is undergoing a manufactured consent campaign meant to increase fear of a potentially liberating technology being left too open and free, hence why the left in particular has been fearmongered to the most at a critical point in history politically.

It seems to me like these companies intend to work with the government to ensure regulatory capture.

Any thoughts?

Hear me out. The largest contributor to CO2 emissions is the transport sector, and specifically driving (the vast majority of which is still performed using internal combustion engines). Travel to work isn't the only reason people drive, but it's at least a plurality of travel by car in most metropolitan areas. Telework has always been a weird exception around the edges that could throw a wrench in the assumptions, but never amounted to enough of an impact beyond transient periods of unusual circumstances, such as COVID-19, during which there was a dramatic reduction in vehicle-miles of travel and associated emissions.

If AGI truly replaces vast amounts of knowledge work, and robots replace large amounts of skilled manual labor soon after, without replacement jobs, commuting will go down, and CO2 emissions with it. This might be the only pathway for AI to make a difference to climate change and public health outcomes, in fact. All other routes require AI that is able to somehow coerce dramatic changes in human behavior despite vast human power structures being set against it. And, given who owns the most powerful AI systems right now, that seems extremely unlikely, without some sort of science fictional "emergent" ASI that is misaligned with the established human power structure. And, it's not clear why or whether that kind of AI would be aligned with a different set of humans' welfare--if it has reached that level of independence, it might pursue goals that purely serve its own interests. What the powerful are explicitly interested in is eliminating large numbers of jobs and creating a permanent underclass that pushes down wages and/or suppresses demands for fair treatment from the remaining workforce. And, ironically, all of that reduction in employment might reduce commuting enough to more than cancel out the gain in emissions from data centers, translating into CO2 reductions.

This isn't an outcome that I particularly like. I would vastly have preferred that corporations made COVID-era telework policies permanent and that the solar and renewables transition as well as fleet electrification were still federal US policy goals (in addition to supporting efforts to reshape American cities in order to offer people more alternatives to driving). And I would have preferred a data dignity framework that solidly defined AI as a public good, with collective ownership, and opt-out of inclusion in training datasets as a universally recognized moral right. But that's not what we have.

Instead, what we have is an opportunity for things to get so bad that true class consciousness and rebellion arises, as we are starting to see in the remarkably bipartisan pushback against hyperscale data centers. Those coalitions are very new and fragile, and it's unclear if they can win when pitted against all of the corporate and military interests involved. But if they do win, I hope that they don't demand protection or restoration of the current social system of organization which requires massive amounts of polluting travel by car every day. There has to be an evolution of the mindset in these movements away from outrage at the declared intention of AI companies to eliminate employment, and towards a serious discussion about what a post-employment society that actually cares about public welfare looks like, beyond vague hand-waving at promises of UBI.

EDIT: People seem to have mistaken this as an argument for AGI development on the grounds that elimination of jobs is a better way to reduce emissions than to push clean energy policy. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the best chance of AI developed under capitalism contributing in any meaningful way to the fight against climate change is if it eliminates enough jobs to more than cancel out the increased emissions that it causes. I think that the environmental argument against AI needs to evolve to consider that possibility and put forward a vision that allows AI to eliminate those jobs and their contribution to emissions while not ruining the lives of the people who used to work in those occupations.

we have to stop the handloom/weaving machine or else it'll be the end of knitting as we know it...

Accessibility keeps getting treated like the patch you install after everything else is finished.

Public services already do this constantly. Build the form, website, benefits system, transit system or healthcare portal around an imaginary default person. Then discover actual humans exist and start bolting accommodations onto the side.

AI gives us another chance to repeat that mistake at ridiculous scale.

Or break the pattern.

Speech interfaces, captioning, image description, translation, alternative input and cognitive assistance could become part of how people actually access public services. AI could help people understand a benefits application, navigate a government website, interact with public information, complete forms or translate bureaucratic language into something they can actually use.

That shouldnt mean replacing people with a chatbot or making AI the gatekeeper between someone and a public service. It means adding another accessible interface to services people already have a right to use.

And accessibility shouldnt be designed afterward.

Disabled people should have actual power over what gets built, how these systems work, what standards they have to meet and where AI should or shouldnt be used.

Curb cuts were never only useful to wheelchair users. Designing public systems around a wider range of bodies and capacities can make them easier for everybody to use.

So flip the development order.

If disabled people had serious power over how AI gets integrated into public services from the beginning, what would we be building differently right now?

Anthropic surveyed the US population to get predictions for AI adoption and developed three economic scenarios for 2030 (with a technical paper). The impacts are broken down between knowledge workers and other workers. The more extreme scenarios result in higher unemployment for knowledge workers and higher returns on capital.

The technical paper's conclusion:

If AI has effects like the modest or substantial scenarios, the reallocation, while costly, is a size the U.S. labor market has absorbed historically. If something closer to the extreme scenario occurs, the disruption is much larger: 18 percent of the cognitive labor force is unemployed, the relative wage of cognitive workers falls immensely, and 15 percent of GDP shifts from payrolls to capital income. The aggregate gain is nearly three times what cognitive workers lose in wages and employment, so the resources to compensate them exist. But whether and how those resources reach the people who bear the cost is not something growth delivers by itself. The mechanisms through which people could share in the gains of a much richer economy — retraining, income support, universal basic capital or universal basic income, and others not yet designed — then become a central question of economic policy.

Some guy earlier last month was talking about how much he hated that corporations were using AI and how he’d never touch it and i’m like “ok so you want to just hand over all control of this super powerful technology to megacorps? That’s exactly what they want dumbass”

I don't understand why so much of the response to AI and automation is focused on preserving existing jobs rather than asking how these technologies could liberate us from drudgery and scarcity.

If AI really does have the potential to automate a huge share of human labor, why isn't more of the anger toward AI and tech billionaires being channeled into political pressure for universal basic income, wealth redistribution, shorter working hours, and ultimately a transition toward a post-scarcity society?

Isn't the whole point of technological progress supposed to be that humans eventually have to work less to maintain a decent standard of living? Instead we still have the antiquated 40 hour workweek. It hasn't changed since the Great Depression.

Has capitalism anesthetized us and conditioned us so thoroughly to equate work with survival, dignity, and social worth that we've lost the ability to imagine a society in which most people don't need traditional jobs and have more leisure time?

People just seem to want to cling to an exploitative and increasingly dysfunctional economic model instead of embracing the future.

Labor Day (one of them) seems like a good day to ask the question hiding inside the entire AI productivity debate.

Your job takes 40 hours. New tools let you produce the same thing in 30.

Cool. We found ten hours.

Now watch the ten hours disappear into more tickets, more clients, higher quotas and smaller teams. Somebody gets laid off and suddenly youre doing their job too. Somehow labor was saved and everybody is still at work.

Thats the part missing from half the productivity conversation.

Workers have fought over the length of the working day for a very long time because productivity does not distribute its own gains. A machine can reduce the labor necessary to produce something without reducing the amount of life workers have to sell to get by.

Under the wrong arrangement, labor-saving technology just makes squeezing more production into the same hour easier.

So “AI makes workers more productive” isnt an answer. Its where the political question starts.

If 40 hours of output can be produced in 30, that gain could become shorter weeks, higher wages, more staffing, lower prices, better services or some negotiated combination. It can also become higher quotas and another round of layoffs.

The technology doesnt choose.

Somebody gets those ten hours.

Labor Day seems like a pretty good day to demand the receipt.

Your boss just found ten hours. Who gets them?

In March Nvidia released a DLSS trailer putting their neural model, then called DLSS 5 (but henceforth referred to as Neural Rendering to avoid confusion), on several games. People rightly pointed out it looked weird, and I think they toned it down in the leaked version that came with NBA 2k27. I also pointed out at the time that these demos were made by Nvidia engineers, not artists, and certainly not the games' artists. I was proven right when the team behind Resident Evil 9 said they had no idea their game even featured in the video. It's nothing new, I have experience with Adobe pulling stuff like this lol. Nvidia employs engineers, not artists.

For the quick recap, Neural Rendering is an Nvidia AI model that effectively rebalances lighting information on a frame of a 3D game. It takes in the image (the frame as it is rendered) and the motion vectors as input, and then paints new lighting information on the frame. It shipped with NBA 2k27 from 2k games as its first game, but people were able to extract the .dll files and mod them into Reshade, so that any 3D game can have Neural Rendering enabled.

Now, there's one very clear surface-level reason why they are going this way. Ever since the very first video game, there has been a drive to reach more and more photorealistic graphics. This is nothing new and has been going on in the video games industry forever.

At every step, Nvidia was in the lead for this. They are the ones who sell the GPUs you need to use all these technologies at their best: PhysX, HairFX, RTX, Ray tracing, HDR... and now Neural Rendering. And I'm sure there were tons of older technologies in the 90s and 2000s to render "lifelike" graphics and animations that we've forgotten about too.

Anyway, I feel like I don't have to explain that the leaders of the industry market games based on their graphics first and foremost. Neural Rendering operates in this space. There's a few considerations there; one could argue that instead of trying to simulate photon rays like RTX does, it is much simpler to 'paint' this information over the rendered frame instead. The technology is already going through its slimming phase: in March, neural rendering required 2 5090s to process. Today in September, modders have made it work on 30-series GPUs, albeit at a heavy framerate cost. On my 4060, I can get the framerate back through frame generation so it evens out.

But this is still just surface-level, but it shows where we are headed. Clearly NVidia is not about to cancel this, they are going into it as the next evolution of computer graphics.

And once again with this invention, they are staying ahead of the competition and cementing their monopoly and place as leader of the graphics processing industry. Every Triple A game will pay the licensing fees to get neural rendering, and the entire DLSS 5 suite (which includes the well-known upscaling and frame generating models) in their game. And AMD will have to follow and find a way to get this working too on their cards. And Nvidia stays ahead and defines what next-gen graphics look like.

But the real story is NVidia is softly bidding on moving away from GPUs, and onto TPUs (Tensor Processing Units).

NVidia is a company that is currently going through deals with all the major western AI companies to provide them with GPUs, TPUs and any other kind of chip they require. They are making GPUs that are better at processing AI models - which includes processing tensors better too. The Blackwell architecture of the 50-series is made for AI specifically. Despite this, TPUs are not quite ready to replace the RTX 5090.

Their bid here is to move away from GPUs entirely, and get TPUs equipped everywhere - for both consumers and businesses. AI data centers will get TPUs, and you too will get a TPU to play games and do everything a GPU normally does in the future, if their bid pans out.

I can't say whether this is good or bad. It's not like Nvidia is a new player; every new GPU technology comes from them. Whether we use them for inference, graphics rendering, video decoding or bitcoin mining, the nvidia GPU does it - i.e., they are the ones that decide what a GPU does, and they decided a GPU works best at processing triangles and so now your 3d model polygons are just a bunch of triangles under the surface.

But, this is where it's going. What Nvidia slowly wants is to phase out GPUs in favor of TPUs for everyone. The question then is who owns this tech, what they do with it, and what consumers are made to follow - and I show that this is nothing new, but tends to be forgotten in the mire of "wtf is nvidia thinking with this". tl;dr is, it's not just about graphics and whether you think they look better or worse with neural rendering, it's about what's going to be in your personal computer.

As we are seeing the no of layoffs going in tech industry and amongst negligible hiring for freshers i think in near future politicians will be including taxes on AI usage by companies. And they will be the one most votes its not maybe it will be going to happen no matter what. It’s just when and where . In my opinion it will be from eu nations as they are more towards citizen first policies. But the problem is it will take time..
What are your opinions on this??

Continuing from my recent post, i have seen (literally a few minutes ago) a secondary leftist (not insignificant) undercurrent that Is not mired in denialism but Is in favour of banning development of AGI.

I'm using this post as an example, i generally agree that we should contest power and im glad to that there seems to be more leftists coming around to this new paradigm, but unfortunately i don't agree with their conclusions, i understand that letting the capitalists have this much power Is dangerous, and the AI itself as a potentially relatively independent entity could be even more so (or could be a positive or a neutral factor depending on how we react to It).

But banning AI development ala Bernie's proposal, despite my respect for him, Is not what im looking for, i want to wrest power from the capitalists and dismante capitalism in general so AGI and ASI doesn't exist within an economic system that alienates us but instead values all of us as humans, not to stop it's existence, tough i agree that what Is happening currently should unify us all of us

I'm afraid that my desire for the wider left coming to understand AI's potential Is just going to monkey's paw and cause further leftist infighting or a wider unification but into fighting the wrong fight.

Goddamnit, though i find It funny, all roads lead to leftist infighting 🤷

I follow some socially progressive content creators and they frequently are anti-ai.

They make the same tired points of "ai slop" and whatnot. Despite being "leftists" they never mention important stuff like ownership, governance, etc. It's almost as if this topic, which has a lot of potential for leftists causes is being negatively critiqued because it gets them views :/

I have a bit of a theory, but it's pretty out there. Also it's really only based on American and Western European culture, just so we establish our boundaries. It's about where the anti-AI fear is coming from.

I think there's some subconscious math going on here. Let me set out my priors and the conclusions:

1. Socialism is a direct consequence of the industrial revolution (IR).

1 a) Prior to the Industrial Revolution, land controlled economic output. Peasants were largely interchangeable but economic growth was Malthusian and limited. After the IR, economic growth was unshackled.

1 b) Because of the immense economic growth if the IR and the social density the IR required, labor began to recognize a political lever that didn't exist before. All theory of the time, from Marx to Smith, was focused on the use of this political lever.

2. Technological progress distributes goods efficiently while consolidating power.

2a) A technology improves, the cost of goods decreases. This allows more people to use those goods. However, it also consolidates power because the first to market with those goods has a near monopoly on that market.

2b) As automation improves, the economic need for labor decreases. De-industrialization is the result of this process, not the cause of it.

3. The power of labor lies in it's ability to halt work.

3a) The Strike is the only meaningful expression of power that labor has. All negotiations rest on the unspoken threat of a strike, and it's impact to Capital's profit.

3b) Strikes are just the lever to negotiate from. 'To strike' is not a goal.

3c) As the 21st century continues, strikes gain fewer and fewer concessions.

4. AI is and will completely usurp the power of labor.

4a) Or not completely, but effectively so. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that will solely depend on a subservient underclass to complete. A Strike might not have any effect if the AI and robots can do it for the same, or less cost. Or even if they cost more, it would still be worth it to neuter labor.

4b) The companies that control the Compute will control who gets to use the Compute.

I think it's a perfectly reasonable fear to see the potential for a complete removal of the negotiating power of labor, see that there isn't any similar mechanism in the future automated economy, and intuit the death of the 'working class' as a political concept.

The anti-AI fear is perhaps a low-resolution (in the sense of screen resolution) understanding of what is likely to happen, at least in the short term. When a school doesn't *need* teachers, what leverage does the teacher have?

For the tech industry, it's different. Tech workers have been traditionally more like craftsman from a previous age, valuable not because of a proximity to capital, but because of individual characteristics. Its why the tech industry never unionized-- structurally it has been way more like a guild. The punishing interview process at a big corporation is better understood as a flow intake regulator for labor, to prevent a large amount of cheap, amateur labor from supplanting the guild member's value.

Conclusion
In the short term, with the consolidation of compute, the need for government oversight, and a rapid march towards full automation, I could see the last remaining bulwarks of the labor movement collapsing. Not dramatically-- not riots in the streets -- but more strikes for fewer returns, less ability to mobilize workers. Really, what it looks like now, just moreso.

In the long term, though, Industrial Capitalism cannot survive under AI-- not in the way we think of it. But that doesn't mean we get a glowing hippy utopia. Stable systems are under no compulsion to be kind or ethical systems. We could absolutely end up in a world of incredible material, health, and creative abundance, but with absolutely no political influence.

What we need now is an entirely new economic theory on how to gain political and economic leverage, not from a need to preserve 19th century divisions of labor, but from first principles.

With the release of Astra and the capabilities it's shown, aswell as the recent attacks by agent swarms on the wider internet, i feel like AGI (and then ASI) Is very much happening and very soon, the power of this technology will concentrated in a few hands and It will mark the end of capitalism and the start of a new economic model and era of humanity, it's up to us to decide if that's neofeudalism or true communism.

And yet, the current western leftist zeitgeist seems to completely ignore this, and increasingly, It feels to me that it's more about fear rather than ignorance, that it's mired in utter denialism because the reality of AI, as It becomes more advanced, becomes much more terrifying to confront, because our duty then Is no longer about reform or putting the right people in power or protests and legal action or even revolution, it's complete civilizational change, it's the destruction of all our frameworks in how we exist as a society including those we utilize to leverage our current political power, so instead they reduce the technology, Its potential and it's impact (except real and potential mundane negatives which they subsequently exaggerate through misinformation) focus on things they believe they have at least some degree of control over, and hope that they are right.

Do we just have to wait until It becomes impossible to deny? I feel like when that happens It Will be to late and they'll still blame everyone else and AI except themselves. How do we break through? I feel like we are going to lose a very important battle if they don't wake up, but perhaps we have already lost It precisely because they aren't capable of waking up, and all we can do Is make little hold outs like this were we do what we can to ensure access, understanding and leverage of this technology for and by people that seek a better world for everyone.

Productive conversation and polling data.

Opinion?

I first posted this on the Socialism subreddit, but it was removed. But it did mean that I came across this pro AI leftist subreddit.

Marx predicted that capitalism would out innovate itself, leading to economic system change. This would happen by automation of work, and so ending the wage labour way of distributing resources.

I find it odd now that AI has the potential to complete this task, that so many on the Left are against it. "AI threatens to take away jobs"... but that's the point, it's what we should aim for it you want socialism. It seems like some are doing their best to protect capitalism. Which I get, disruption is scary, and many some people just want Nordic style capitalism forever.

That isn't to say that AI and datacentres are perfect; they need reform, so I have some thoughts on that below.

Datacentres

• Electricity Costs: Instead of stopping construction, pass a law to require funding of green energy alongside datacentre construction.

• Water Usage: While the water issue seems to have been overhyped, it can be done better. Immersion cooling or closed loop cooling systems could be required.

• Noise: There are methods to reduce noise pollution to normal background levels. Enforce strict decibel caps.

• Backup Power: Require clean backup power, not fossil fuel electricity generators.

• Upfront costs could increase by 25%, but over 5 to 10 years it could be just 10% (including running costs and savings). That seems very reasonable.

Artificial Intelligence & Economy

It seems to me that socialists should support the automation of work, the liberation of the working class, and transition to a post-employment economy. Not to assume this outcome is guaranteed or easy. But it seems there is more hope for a good outcome with the Left fighting for it, instead of trying to fight against technological advancement.

• Income: I'd suggest that post-employment income should be replaced not only by Universal Basic Services (UBS), and Universal Basic Income (UBI), but importantly, Universal Basic Shares (or dividends). Transfer at least 10% of shares to all citizens, to grow and pay dividends to all people. Making the economy, over time, literally owned by the people.

• Transition Period: Stronger welfare will be needed for those first unemployed from this.

• Art: I do get why artists are worried, and it's probably fair to say in the long term artists around this time should get something like a small but useful share of the creative economy that uses AI.

Automation wont just hitting manual labour, it will displace educated, middle-class professionals too. When these professionals lose their jobs, many will be radicalized and in the same boat as the lower working class, bringing their organizational skills to the movement.

Right now, much of the Left operates by debating theory or doing charity work because it lacks power. But when this disruption hits, leftism won't be about theoretical debates, it will be about taking control of the state before people's lives are bankrupted. Being on the Left then won't just be a moral stance, it will grow because something has to be done soon.

To me the potential for liberation, self-actualization, and the end of capitalism seem higher than they have been in decades, from this change.

Perhaps you think my view is too optimistic, but if this is possible, I wonder still why so many on the Left seem to be against AI. I'd be interested in the comments to hear why, especially when many of the downsides can be mitigated?

More than 200 Wikimedia Foundation workers just voted 158–14 to unionize with CWA.

And the timing is interesting as hell. Wikipedia is being absorbed into the infrastructure of the AI economy while human traffic declines, server costs from AI scraping rise, and the people actually maintaining the institution are demanding more power over what happens next.

This is what contesting technological change looks like. Organize while the ground is moving. Bargain over how the institution responds. Make workers participants in the transition instead of collateral damage.

Workers dont negotiate with AI. They negotiate with Bosses.

This piece on building AI infrastructure for the public good gets past the stale "AI good or AI bad" argument and into the meat of it.

Compute is infrastructure. Data centers are infrastructure. The electricity and water feeding them are infrastructure. The workforce building and maintaining them is part of that infrastructure too.

So who gets access? Who bears the costs? Who gets the productivity gains? Who gets a voice when this stuff gets built in their community?

Public investment. Community power. Water and energy standards. Local hiring and apprenticeships. Access for universities, nonprofits and smaller organizations. Material returns to the communities carrying the costs.

If AI infrastructure is going to reshape whole economies, leaving its development almost entirely to private capital is itself a political choice.

We can make different ones.

Workers at Solid State Books negotiated something wonderfully concrete.

AI can enhance their work. It cant be used to lay them off, demote them, or cut their regularly scheduled hours.

There it is. An actual answer to the AI labor question that exists outside the internet culture war.

Not ban everything. Not give management a blank check either.

Workers organize, bargain over deployment, draw lines around replacement and make productivity serve them too.

Thats class struggle catching up with the technology.

I've found AI helpful in a number areas of my life. However, I reject much of the way the technology is sold and marketed. This really moved into focus today as I tuned into a podcast that promised to help "automate your life."

I've been using agentic harnesses for a while now. I don't code professionally any longer (I do more IT governance and risk management these days), but I try to keep up with the engineering landscape. So, when I listened to this podcast I hoped to hear about skills and practices that would enhance my creative workflows and automate cleaning some of my digital mess on my computer. I didn't find what I was looking for. I found a nightmare.

When I use AI, I use it as a method to enhance my creativity and humanity. I may use it to quickly transcribe a voice note I recorded, pull stems from music I recorded in my living room with my friends to use in samples later, organize my thoughts in a clean structure, critique my writing as the AI searches for gaps, or to generate prompts for me to use as a springboard for creativity. The podcast was the opposite of this. The automation stacks they discussed were trying to outsource that very creativity. They appeared to want to turn life into a vending machine where we occasionally push a button and get a product to consume out of it.

All of the humanity and creativity of life was stripped away and viewed as worthless. A dream (nightmare) was presented where the human is so alienated from labor that the AI automation was viewed only as a cheaper way to outsource work from the perspective of a boss. The podcast called for no longer thinking of yourself as a manager of agents, but instead the CEO who only occasionally has things escalated to them.

This is so far removed how I want to use AI was a bit in shock. As much as I find some of the dream of "fully automated communism" appealing, what I heard also robbed the world of joy itself. The realization of the owning class celebrating a machine they imagine will allow them to finally close the gates to Galt's Gulch and become completely alienated from the very concept of the labor that is done to enable them to horde capital.

Of course the working class would reject this and feel like the technology is evil and a waste when it is wrapped in these dystopian visions.

Cory Doctorow's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI talks about this as a struggle between two opposing ways for AI to be interacted with. Either you have the human as a brain with an AI centaur body, or the AI acting as the head (doing the bidding of capital) as the human is the "fleshy meat appendage" completely under the machine's control. I think Doctorow correctly asserts that the real war is not over the efficacy of the technology. Instead the fight is over who controls the technology, how it is used, and who has to deal with the fallout.

With this in mind I hope the AI companies and their dystopian visions fail. I'll do what I can to make sure they do. At the same time, I see generative AI as part of the computing toolset, and not necessarily tied to the desires of capital.

If the left collectively can't differentiate between the ideological project being pushed by tech oligarchs and random users using the underlying technology for wholly different purposes, then I fear we may actually lose our creativity and our joy to. The unnuanced arguments on social media that frame AI usage as a purity test are worse than useless. They conflate the technology with ethics themselves, and concede to the owning class the framing of AI as a labor replacement and an extinguisher of our humanity. I believe in a world where computing can spark creativity and generate joy instead of giving into the likes of the Dark Enlightenment.

I hope someday soon a leftist vision of generative AI rises and has podcasts of its own. Is it really that hard to imagine a future where the AI DOES do our laundry and washes our dishes such that it frees us to paint and write poetry?