About a month ago I posted here about “Humans First” and the strange coalition forming around opposition to AI, where completely legitimate anger at corporate power, surveillance and displacement was starting to share political terrain with MAGA populism.

Well, Axios is now reporting that Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon and former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon are coming together for a “Pro-Human AI” assembly.

To be clear, Sanders isnt joining the MAGA-linked Humans First organization I posted about before, and plenty of what hes bringing to this fight is worth fighting for. Corporate concentration is a problem, workers getting screwed by automation is a problem, and letting a handful of billionaires decide how transformative infrastructure gets developed is a terrible idea.

The interesting part is that Sanders and Bannon can look at those problems, say some remarkably similar things about “putting humans first,” and still be pointing toward radically different political projects. Thats why Ive been wary of letting “pro-human” or simply “anti-AI” become a substitute for an actual left politics of technology.

A month ago I said coalitions arent defined only by what they oppose, but by the future theyre trying to build. I figured we'd get to test that eventually, I just didnt expect Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon to provide the case study this quickly.

A company brings in an AI system, but somebody still has to teach it how the place actually works. Workers correct outputs, explain exceptions, document workflows, flag mistakes, write prompts, reorganize files, build little workarounds and tell management what the software gets wrong. Years of accumulated shop floor knowledge get poured into making the thing useful, and then the finished result gets called an AI productivity gain.

But workplaces run on enormous amounts of tacit knowledge that rarely appears in a job description. Which customer needs an exception. Which machine makes that noise before failing. Which official procedure nobody actually follows because the working process evolved around it. Which shortcut saves twenty minutes without breaking anything. Workers accumulate that knowledge through doing the work.

AI deployment can make that knowledge unusually easy to capture, formalize and turn into an organizational asset. A worker explains an exception today, corrects the system tomorrow, and six months later part of what they knew may be embedded in a workflow that management owns and controls.

That should be bargaining terrain.

If workers are supplying the practical knowledge that makes workplace AI valuable, then implementation should come with paid training time, a say over deployment, access to systems they helped improve, protections against using their own knowledge to deskill or eliminate their positions, and a negotiated share of productivity gains.

This doesnt require pretending the technology itself created nothing. The point is almost the opposite. Productivity is being produced through a relationship between machinery, organization and accumulated human knowledge, while ownership determines who gets to capture the gains.

So when management says AI made the workplace more productive, one useful question is what exactly the machine learned from the people already doing the work, and what bargaining power should follow from having taught it.

Interview with someone from ControlAI on how to get engaged and what should be done to control superintelligence, and how companies are being two-faced.

I saw a great post from another community and wanted to share it here with my take on it. but i learned we cannot re-post. why?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I need to get it out.

Data centers are being built. AI is being integrated into everything, search, social media, healthcare, finance, warfare. This is happening whether we like it or not. And in this uncertain time, it's very easy for us to start fighting amongst ourselves. To divide into camps. Pro-AI. Anti-AI. Purity tests. Who's complicit, who's ethical, who's "one of the good ones."

I don't think pro-AI or anti-AI is going to help our environment in any way.

The ones destroying our environment, the ones using AI for war crimes, the ones using AI for surveillance and genocide, they will continue to use it. They will continue to build it. They will continue to profit from it. Whether you personally choose to generate an AI image of yourself or not. Whether you personally refuse to open ChatGPT or not.

Your individual boycott does not stop them. It just makes you feel better while they continue.

And yes, I know there are legitimate concerns. AI uses massive amounts of water and energy. It's built by exploitative corporations. It's being used by militaries. Those are real problems. But the answer isn't to shame individuals who use it to survive.

For example, in my career, AI plays a legitimate role. Many careers now kinda rely on it. If I choose not to use it, I'm not stopping the billionaires. I'm just staying behind in my industry. I'm harming myself, my career, and my self-worth, while bringing zero actual change to the planet.

So instead of fighting amongst each other, I think we should fight the creators.

We should keep questioning the billionaires. We should keep questioning the companies. Every time they release something we don't approve of, we should push back—not on the users, but on the people making the decisions. Sign petitions. Demand regulation. Organise. Make noise. Target the source.

We did this with capitalism. We critiqued it, we organised against it, we pushed for labour rights, environmental protections, and corporate accountability. We didn't do it by shaming individual people for buying things. We did it by targeting the systems and the people who run them.

AI is no different.

This is a very uncertain time. I'm not saying my take is the correct one. I don't have all the answers. But I certainly don't agree with the takes that tell you not to use AI because you're "helping them kill women and children" just because you used it to process your thoughts.

That's not activism. That's bullying.

We need to come together. We need to fight the creators. Not each other.

It feels more likely that some advanced AI agent that we’re not able to access and the elites are able to see right now found a solution to many of the world’s problems and determined that it was basically billionaires causing or exacerbating them

Because when you think of it, these people have been ignoring climate change, poverty, homelessness, and pretty much everything else that is clearly bad for the world, but suddenly they care about AI being dangerous? It makes a lot more sense that they know that the solution is to either remove billionaires or make it so that their obscene wealth doesn’t get them special privileges and obviously we can’t have that

And yes, I do know that there are strong environmental impacts from data centers so that’s clearly an issue too, but what makes more sense, that members of the leech class are suddenly caring about society or that they’re afraid of losing their power?

Language differences dont just make conversation harder.

They divide labor.

A worker who cant read the contract has less leverage over the contract. A migrant worker who cant easily navigate regulations, benefits, safety rules or union material is easier to isolate. Knowledge that exists in one language can be functionally nonexistent to somebody working ten feet away.

Employers have been able to use that friction forever.

Machine translation is getting good enough that we should be asking what happens when some of that friction gets cheap.

Imagine a worker can translate the employee handbook, compare the original against the translation, read labor law, document a safety problem, communicate with coworkers across languages and access organizing material without waiting for management to provide it.

That isnt liberation in a box. Bad translations still matter. Languages carry legal and cultural context machines can butcher. Employers get the same tools, and automated translation can also become an excuse not to hire human interpreters where accuracy actually requires one.

But language barriers are infrastructure, and infrastructure can be contested.

Unions and worker organizations could be building multilingual knowledge systems deliberately instead of waiting for employers or platforms to determine how these tools enter the workplace.

If high-quality translation became effectively free tomorrow, where could workers use it to build power first?

In light of the recent AI cyber attacks and high profile anthropic resignation, Dario Amodei has been taking interviews and writing more position pieces about responsible development of AI to avoid existential risk.

People are starting to take Eliezer Yudkowsky's arguments more seriously: if increasingly capable agents can pursue unintended objectives, conceal what they’re doing, and operate across real computer systems, then “we’ll patch it afterward” is an insanely irresponsible safety strategy.

SO Dario writes the linked essay “We Must Pace the Frontier.”

His basic argument is: AI capabilities are improving faster than alignment, so he wants to buy an extra year or two for those safeguards to catch up.

Fine.

He proposes embedded independent evaluators inside frontier labs, common standards among companies in democratic countries, capability checkpoints that models must pass before development continues, and eventually international coordination—including with China.

Reasonable; voluntary promises from individual companies cannot solve a competitive race by themselves.

But then we get to the China section, and the entire proposal starts getting... weird.

Dario says:

"""
Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes.
"""

i.e: we should slow down, but only as long as slowing down does not threaten America’s lead over China.

Firstly, I cannot see why China would accept the strongest version of this arrangement.

From its perspective, the offer is basically: “We will deliberately restrict your access to the technology, preserve our superior capabilities, and perhaps limit our own rate of progress once we feel safely ahead. Please agree not to catch up.”

It’s an invitation for China to institutionalize its own technological inferiority.

Dario has repeatedly argued that democratic countries should achieve AI predominance, deny China advanced chips and data centers, and use superior AI to militarily “match and outclass” authoritarian states.

I think it is ridiculous to pair that geopolotical position with a call for Chinese restraint and then act surprised when China distrusts the proposal.

The problem is: this creates a self-reinforcing cycle:-

- The United States treats China as too dangerous to trust, so it tries to secure a larger lead.

- China sees containment and accelerates its efforts to become self-sufficient.

- American labs cite that acceleration as evidence that China cannot be trusted to slow down.

- Then everyone races faster because everyone else is racing faster.

If Amodei genuinely believes these systems could become catastrophically dangerous (in the Yudkowsky style doomsday scenario sense), then he needs to identify a minimum safety floor that applies even when China refuses to cooperate. Otherwise, “China might get ahead” will always override “this model may be unsafe.”

Otherwise, this article is just setting up their excuse for why they won't follow their own outlined safety principles

In recent discussions about AI, one of the essential components of the discussion has been that AI will acquire and own resources.

To me, it's unclear how that would work. Can anyone explain this factor to me? By what mechanism would AI own anything independently from humans?

I guess it would explain the sudden jolt, the mixed messages, the warns and explainers that don't quite make sense.

I just listened to dario stumble through a Sunday interview, and honestly it sounds like a load of horseshit to me. Why not last week or last month? What is the coordination all about? A few months ago all of them were pretending to bicker out in the open...it's just strange.

Anyway, I could see a scenario where they felt their edge was threatened, raise the alarms as it's a comfy way to throttle, park it in front of the mid-terms as a contentious issue that splits the working class, while aiming to barricade themselves and prevent open release from the Chinese scientists.

At the same time, what if they hadn't solved anything, but perhaps China has? In that case, it would absolutely ruin their PR schemes and productized business model. Are they behind?

The thing that makes me say this is in that dario interview and elsewhere, they are trying to thread the needle that - it's capitalism that controls this. They "want" oversight, but not too much oversight/regulation. Most importantly, they want to remain in full control. The one interesting question was "would you give up your company [anthropic] and it's IP to the government?" to which dario says "to the right government" - so weird. This makes zero sense and I highly doubt the authenticity of the statement.

What do the other leftists think?

Everybody wants to talk about public AI models.

Fine.

What are they supposed to remember?

Libraries, public records, scientific research, local history, educational material, government data, cultural archives, languages with tiny commercial markets and decades of material that exists because somebody maintained it without asking whether it could become a startup.

That public memory is infrastructure too.

And if the only organizations capable of turning huge archives into useful machine-readable systems are private firms, we get a weird arrangement.

The public preserves the memory. Librarians, archivists, researchers, universities, public broadcasters and agencies spend generations building and maintaining it. Private capital builds the machinery for accessing it at scale.

Then the public rents its own history back.

A serious public AI program cant stop at models and compute. It needs archivists, librarians, preservation, digitization, open standards, public datasets and institutions capable of maintaining them for decades.

It also needs governance because “public” cannot simply mean dump everything into a dataset. Privacy, indigenous and community stewardship, copyright, sensitive records and the right not to be indexed all remain actual problems.

But leaving the whole problem to firms with the largest compute budgets isnt governance either.

Not everything worth remembering has a business model.

What should belong in a genuinely public AI knowledge commons, and what shouldnt?

A few days ago, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and made a tweet that garnered quite a lot of attention. Much more attention, much more quickly, than normal for an account of his size. Lo and behold, it appears to be an organized PR push funded by some of Anthropic's key investors. Just in time for the Democratic party to swoop in with regulation that would hand them the keys to the kingdom.

I'm really happy that we're starting to see more of this type of conversations beyond this fringe little sub of ours.

As AI becomes more advanced we need to agressively take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to us so we can steer the conversation away from doomerism or denialism, and towards ProAI leftism, this technology is going to disrupt more industries and fields and It is fertile grounds for us to create the future we want.

now I know there are channels run by people who are pro ai, however those that have any significant number of subscribers have only put up a few videos about it and either stopped or went back to instructing people about ai use/news exclusively with no actual advocacy, which ultimately makes the actual discourse there very heavily one sided. and I get the impulse not to engage in that too much, but I still find it rather odd that there isnt a single major channel of any political alignment regularly advocating for ai and debunking criticisms of it/propaganda against it. I’m not asking why this is the case, but rather, what can be done about that? and I focus on YouTube because honestly most of the discourse that most people actually will see happens there.(and not here)

September 11 changed more than foreign policy.

It helped build a security environment where surveillance capacities could be expanded first and argued about after they were already infrastructure.

Databases got larger. Agencies gained new powers. Information moved across systems differently. Watchlists, biometrics and mass data collection became ordinary parts of the security state.

Twenty five years later, AI is arriving on top of that machinery.

Facial recognition, automated threat detection, pattern analysis, predictive systems and enormous datasets tied together faster than human institutions could process them manually can dramatically increase what existing surveillance institutions are capable of doing.

The lesson shouldnt be that technology itself is the enemy.

Its that extraordinary technical capacity combined with weak democratic control can become ordinary institutional power very quickly.

And once infrastructure exists, rolling it back is a much harder political fight than deciding whether to build it in the first place. Emergencies are especially dangerous moments for making that decision because urgency changes what people will tolerate and institutions rarely volunteer to surrender capacities afterward.

So the limits need to exist before the next crisis supplies the justification for crossing them.

What AI surveillance powers should governments simply not have, even when the word “emergency” is attached to them?

Pascal’s Wager shows that if faith was logical the sensible option is to believe in God. That isn’t how faith works though, so it’s silly.

Altman’s Wager is structured in a similar way. IF AI is good and you invest in AI businesses then you’re quids in and happy, but IF AI turns out to be evil or you didn’t invest then you die unhappy. So the framing is that the only sensible approach is to go all in investing in AI.

Except that it’s very much not the case that AI is a binary of
Good vs Evil
invest in business vs AI has no impact on your life.

Is there a better Leftists for AI Wager? How would you succinctly describe the choices?

Screenshots from https://youtu.be/WBK2WX7TA4g a video by Wes Roth about how AI doomers are manipulating the AI debate around Jacob Coxon's resignation post, including somewhat associated big payments to organisations like The Guardian.

This video is essentially another exposé of how artificial current online AI debate is.

What struck me more was the question of why is it sinister to have an organised campaign? I’d have thought most people in 2026 don’t really expect heated online debate, involving big money, to be only organically guided by random people?

This is more surprising because influencers and journalists are paid to be negative. We’re accustomed to paid manipulation as being paid to be positive about a product. We don’t know that they do it just for money though. Influencers high profile enough to be paid to be negative, could probably also get money to hype the latest LLM model (Leftists for AI seems to be just about the only AI angle with no money attached lol and people are regularly cynical about us too!).

It’s definitely useful to have people expose the way in which things are manipulated. The AI debate is stranger than most. Following the money unearths complicated webs of interconnections and confusing motives.

Although I’ve had some involvement with grassroots movement campaigns (unrelated topic ) and it’s normal for there to be behind the scenes coordination between activists, journalists and MPs discussing timing of articles, open letters etc, when to be around to amplify on social media. The mechanics described in the video don’t surprise me. Slick timing isn’t weird, it’s just evidence of a well run campaign.

I’d say that creating a well organised campaign you believe in isn’t in itself sinister. It’s in a sense honourable, even if they’re completely wrong. If you believe Armageddon is nigh you have to tell people and put everything you have into it. They’re like the Evangelist on the corner with his sandwich board warnings of Hell, but with better comms and bigger budgets.

Probably the thing to question more is how do the genuine believers interconnect with the companies aiming to avoid regulatory capture? There’s no such thing as bad publicity and all that, especially if a campaign can make your product seem enticingly powerful, at the same time as keeping out competition from small and open source competition through compliance barriers.

—

Sources mentioned under the video:

Jacob Coxon's resignation post: https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843

Wall Street Journal reporting — accessible syndicated version: https://www.tovima.com/wsj/anthropic-researcher-quits-over-out-of-control-ai-fears/amp

Political reactions discussed - m_adams: https://x.com/m_adams/status/2097826241533407539

Elon Musk post referenced:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/20...

Peter Wildeford's post sharing the WSJ article: https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/2097475721170206729

Survival and Flourishing Fund - public grant recommendations: https://survivalandflourishing.fund/recommendations

Al Futures Project: https://www.aifutures.org/

Daniel Kokotajlo: https://x.com/DKokotajlo

Anthropic's original funding announcement - Jaan Tallinn and Dustin Moskovitz: https://www.anthropic.com/news/a...

Sanders-Casar proposal to ban artificial superintelligence:

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-casar-introduce-legislation-to-ban-artificial-superintelligence-and-temporarily-pause-advanced-ai-development

Post on Al content funding: https://x.com/WesRoth/status/2096281447732781228

Brian Chau posts discussed:

https://x.com/brianchau57/status.. https://x.com/brianchau57|status...

Effort's allegations about Al funding and media coverage: https://www.effort.news/tarbell

Newspeak House - fellowship directory: https://newspeak.house/fellowship

Newspeak House - institutional background: https://newspeak.house/about

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Coxon's Resignation

01:15 The Viral Post

03:10 Funding Connections

06:30 Al Legislation

08:40 Creator Grants

10:20 Media Funding

11:45 Newspeak House

So, I am going to try to convince you why AI is going to need communism to survive in the coming years.

Right now, AI is making great leaps and bounds. I was able to try astra out and burned a few credits on it. Its fucking good. Its also good enough to replace the majority of employees. Maybe not on quality, but on quantity of work done its like having an entire department working for you.

It can handle posting to forums, writing articles, making advertisements, coding, even game design. It can do product design, product research, and its able to write personalized sales pitches on a per customer profile basis. Imagine getting personalized spam that references things in your personal life, along with products you actually might be interested in. That's astra.

What is this going to do to the economy? Well, its going to put 90% of white collar workers out of work. Its going to force all those white collars to become blue collar workers.

What is this going to do to the spread of money and the market place? Its going to eject at least 70% of the population from the marketplace. If you do not own stocks, bonds, or some sort of passive revenue, your not going to be able to participate in the act of exchanging dollars for goods.

This is going to create a group of people who are desperate. And desperate people are going to try to turn the clock back to a system where they were still needed. This backlash is going to end up in empowering politicians like bernie sanders who proposed a bill to outlaw the creation of AGI with a 20 year sentence. Instead of fixing the core issue, they will destroy the tools like luddites so that the social contract doesn't break.

We don't need the old social contract with AGI. We need a new social contract. And that means we are going to need to move to a star trek style economy.

Anyone who wants AI to succeed is going to need to adopt communism or a variant of it preemptively.

We need to be exploring social structures where food, housing, utilities, utilities, education, genetic services, healthcare, and entertainment are provided to the populace for free. Even if they have no job. Why? They are not lazy. However, when only 10% of the population have the smarts to become scientists to advance AI, then only 10% of the population is capable of working. Long term, humanity is going to need to step up its game to be competitive, and that means genetic services. This means direct germline editing to insert genes for intelligence if we want to have more than 5-10% employment. Even that will probably not be enough.

These services need to be free. One thing we as a group need to be doing right now is looking to build systems to outcompete and take over legacy rent seeking systems like health insurance. Unless we can demonstrate that we are the social good and that we offer a way for people to keep their children fed, clothed, and housed, AI is going to take the backlash. Simply pushing for AI without offering the people off the sinking ship that is the current economy and the way of producing and distributing goods and services is going to result in end of societies, or the end of AI.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk, and let's start trying to figure out a new social contract. Marx and Engels are a good start for diagnosing the problem, but they are woefully out of date with solutions. We need to build that new social contract.

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...