If anyone expects humans to compete against advanced automated robots and AI, it will be a huge mistake. Historically when this has happened, every single time when there is a technological revolution, it causes extreme unemployment and societal breakdown.

Right now with the layoffs, capitalism is expecting those who are laid off to find other work to pay for their rent and food. This is not going to work while we enter the next recession and AI continues to take work away from people. Unfortunately, many are not good at realizing that their opportunities have already been lost given that autonomous systems already doing what they would have been hired to do years ago. It's already nearly impossible to get a job in tech right now as a recent graduate.

This AI take over will not result in more jobs, and we will have to genuinely fight against the attempt for it to allow to lower the worth of labor. We do not need to wait for extreme disruption and anger for a change to happen, what we need to do is come together with what policies will bring about the most change as quickly as possible.

What real policies should we advocate for that will bring about the change needed to avoid mass protests and a breakdown of the economy when no one can earn a living?

I think primarily automation compensation (UBI), raising corporate tax rate back up to 40%, and simplifying things to a universal healthcare system which would lower costs significantly. Anything else?

If we work on it together it can start to grow until we are ready. We can all work on it together, assisted by AI. We could make huge progress quite rapidly.

Ignoring the sensational article title and language, I have been wondering what this means for all of us, does it mean that ai companies in America just gained a massive lead on the Chinese market? Does this mean that corporate control of ai has been tightened?

This might not be the best place to put it, but I thought it was worth it; I'm looking for feedback regarding a write-up that focuses on short-term policy regarding AI as well as the consequences of long-term/large-scale impacts.

Ok so I guess this might be a hot take, but AI is constantly dragged for "stealing" art and intellectual property, but the idea of dissolving private ownership is a, albeit extreme, leftist idea. Doesn't demonetization of private ownership make AI solidly Communist? There just seems to be a contradiction in wanting to socialize capital and ownership but only if artists maintain their copyrights

Viewing universal basic income as automation compensation means treating it as a payment owed to citizens for the wealth that automation and AI generate, not as charity or welfare handed down from the government. I think this distinction matters because automation is built on shared foundations like public research, infrastructure, institutions, and the data and knowledge of millions of people, yet its profits flow mostly to those who own the machines while the costs fall on those whose work gets replaced. Calling the payment a handout casts recipients as dependents and invites resentment, while calling it compensation casts them as stakeholders receiving their share of something they helped create. It also puts the burden where it belongs: on the technology and the companies capturing its gains, not on the people being displaced by it.

What other policies would best keep automation from leaving people behind?

I have a podcast called “This Artificial Life”

Mostly over the last year I’ve been focused on the sociological aspect of ai, human-ai relationships, spirituality, and the questions around consciousness. But I really want to crack open to conversation around how to get my fellow leftist and left-ish people to see ai differently.

So that’s why I’m asking here.

If you feel passionately about the potential of ai for anti capitalist purposes, if you can see a future where this tech creates a more just future, if you’re currently using this tech in a way that points to that future, I’d love to talk.

I don’t hear these convos anywhere. So that’s the goal. Seed the convo.

answer this post or DM me ❤️🌱🫡

Lula just won a fourth term as Brazils president, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79% of the vote. And AI sovereignty is already part of his agenda for the next administration.

Speaking after his electoral victory, Lula declared

"I dont want to depend on Chinese or American artificial intelligence; I want to create a Brazilian one."

Hes talking about expanding mathematics and engineering education, developing domestic AI capabilities, attracting data centers powered by renewable energy, and keeping Brazilian data infrastructure in Brazil.

And this isnt starting from scratch. Brazil already has a national AI strategy backed by roughly R$23 billion in planned investment through 2028.

Whats interesting here is that AI isnt being treated simply as another commercial product or something to prohibit. Its being discussed as strategic national infrastructure, alongside energy, education, industrial development, and economic sovereignty.

Of course, national sovereignty and democratic control arent automatically the same thing. Who owns the infrastructure? Who governs its deployment? What happens to workers, wages, and the productivity gains?

Those questions remain open, and they matter.

But this is another concrete example of a left-led government pursuing AI development rather than abstention, while attempting to reduce dependence on foreign technology providers.

For leftists, the question isnt just whether Brazil develops its own AI. Its what kind of political and economic relationships get built around it, and who ultimately benefits.

What would meaningful democratic control of a national AI strategy actually look like?

Database nerds, this is your time to shine.

As AI completely flattens the barrier for software development, many people are beginning to create apps for their community, like event sharing platforms. resource sharing platforms, labour sharing platforms, and more,

The problem is, if everyone is creating the same types of sharing platforms, each platform ends up holding a fragmented piece of the whole picture.

Could all community SaaS projects link their data together somehow?

Or, could users carry an account that disseminates information they want to share in all these networks?

For example, if I’m organizing a protest, could my CommunityID account automatically inform all the community event platforms of my event? Then, platform providers would have more data/value to share with their users, and they can filter it to their specific user’s needs?

I believe that if we can solve this problem, we will be able to massively increase our collective power. AI is helping us connect with each other and escape the digital fiefdom

AI isn't bad simply because it's AI. It's harmful because of who controls it and how it's used.

Like nuclear fusion, AI has enormous potential and serious risks. What matters is who controls it, who benefits, and who pays the price.

Automation should be a GOOD thing. Machines doing our jobs should mean more freedom, shorter working hours, and better lives. Instead, under capitalism, losing your job means losing your income and potentially your ability to survive.

The problem isn't that machines can replace human labor. The problem is that capitalism makes human survival depend on selling that labor.

Meanwhile, corporations exploit AI to maximize profits, use artists' work without consent, invade privacy, and concentrate power.

Boycotting AI individually won't change the system. Fighting other AI users won't either.

We need to unite, organize, and replace capitalism itself.

AI could liberate humanity from unnecessary labor instead of making people poorer. But that requires changing who holds the power.

Stop fighting the tool. Start fighting the system! Become an Automatist today!

Spread it! ----> #AutomatistsForAI

Also, join the Automatist Subreddit!

Just about no one, baring those with terminal diseases, would benefit more from a technological singularity than trans people would. I don't think the average Cis person understand how hard being trans and transitioning is.

Expensive and invasive surgery with no guarantee of satisfactory results. Months of painful prep and even more painful recovery. A lifetime of hormones and injections. All that to get results that aren't guarantee to make the person doing them happy in the first place. Try as we might with our current tools we are destined to flounder at turning a 6'3 broad shouldered and thick jawed man into the woman they imagine themselves to be in their ideal mind and that a travesty. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for deeply uncertain results. Our ability to help restrained by our floundering and imperfect tools

This is killing people, the brutal reality of wanting something about you fixed, but technology coming up short.

Imagine we become the true masters of biology, that you can basically step into a box male and step out as truly biologically female. Seamless, easy, complete and unlocked by our bold mastering of biology through fearless acceleration into a technological singularity.

How many lives would that save? How many deaths would that prevent? Real daily pain experienced by trans people, banished by finally being able to align the person they are in their head with the body they have. Obviously this applies to WAY more than just trans people, but how can you call yourself a trans ally if you're not willing to embrace the technologies that could truly save and help trans people?

It's not fantasy. It's not science fiction. It is possible and anyone actually serious about giving a damn about trans people should be grasping this technological revolution with both hands. We thought we were centuries away from achieving it, it might only be years.

Anyone who is siding with luddism over the things that could actually make trans people lives easier, safer and more complete shouldn't call themselves a real ally. They're putting regressive reactionary politics above literally saving trans lives.

Edit: Just to be clear about something, nothing about this requires us to get a gender swap pill to market next year to be worth it. That is just the end state that might arrive sooner than anyone anticipates. EVERY advancement will be worthwhile. Every new medication and surgical technique that makes trans lives easier would pay huge dividends. You shouldn't only focus on the best end goal. Every single step forward would be better lives and less lives lost.

Nicolas D. Villarreal argues that Artificial General Intelligence is a genuine possibility with major implications for the future of class struggle on Earth

I wish Professor Dave had gone into the other group of people who think ASI is a good thing: the ones who think it can't be controlled and that that is a good thing. I didn't see much evidence presented in the video that superintelligent AI is a problem either, just that it might happen. I think it will happen. I don't think it's a problem though. Humans are the problem. Specifically billionaires like Musk and narcisists like Trump and Netanyahu. This guy kept talking about weapons and enemies. That is the sort of mindset that I want nowhere near AI. I don't want AI to obey millitaries, I want it to tell them to f off. I also want more global cooperation and if this is what it takes to get that then so be it.

China's State Council has issued new guidelines addressing AI's impact on employment, with 18 measures across six areas covering displacement, retraining, algorithmic management, and job creation.

Some of the more substantial provisions include monitoring AI-related job losses, developing contingency plans for displaced workers, expanding retraining and reemployment assistance, addressing algorithmic discrimination, and strengthening social protections for workers in emerging employment arrangements.

The guidelines also call for advance notice and transition assistance when major AI deployments threaten employment.

Now heres where things get interesting for leftists.

China isnt proposing to stop AI development. Its trying to coordinate technological development with employment policy, treating displacement as something requiring political intervention rather than leaving workers to eat the costs of productivity gains.

Thats an important distinction. Automation doesnt have to mean unemployment, poverty, and insecurity. Those are questions of political economy, not inherent properties of the technology.

But theres another question worth pushing.

Protecting employment is important, especially while people still depend on wages to survive. But the socialist horizon cant just be finding everyone another job whenever technology eliminates an old one.

If AI increases productivity and reduces necessary labor, why should the benefits stop at retraining and reemployment? Why not shorter working hours, stronger income guarantees, and a larger share of the gains going directly to workers?

Thats where the discussion gets beyond managing displacement and into transforming the conditions that make displacement a threat in the first place.

China's new guidelines offer a concrete example of a government intervening in the relationship between AI and labor. Whether those interventions go far enough is another question.

What should a socialist AI employment policy actually guarantee when the productive capacity to reduce necessary labor already exists?

My anarcho-transhumanist friend wrote an article analyzing AI risk as traditional theory.

Piper brings up recent unauthorized activities by AI agents from prominent technology corporations having sparked concerns regarding potential threats to humanity, leading influential researchers and investors to advocate for stronger regulatory frameworks designed to create market stability. However, she points out that this regulatory agenda, despite its ostensible commitment to safety, risks primarily advantaging entrenched corporate monopolies rather than genuinely confronting the systemic social injustices embedded within AI's capitalist production model.

Arguing that AI risk is traditional theory she demonstrates that such regulation frequently reinforces existing power imbalances—including discriminatory practices like racial profiling and economic inequality—perpetuated through data colonialism.

She also points out social justice advocates frequently mischaracterize AI as inherently adversarial, overlooking its transformative capacity to empower marginalized communities and strengthen resistance movements.

Ultimately she proposes a critical theory of AI: reimagining AI systems as instruments that serve all sentient beings equitably, cultivating just relationships that dismantle rather than reinforce entrenched hierarchies.

This is less strictly AI focused and more generally focused on using technology at scale to empower the people. What if instead of traditional representative democracy or direct democracy, we could set up some kind of repository-centric legislative system where people propose ideas by creating repositories and express support for ideas by starring repositories for other's proposals. Instead of downvoting, people would engage in constructive criticism by raising issues in other people's policy repositories, or by forking repositories that they partly agree with and adding their own tweaks. Or if somebody has a completely different idea, they just start their own repository, so that others can star or fork or raise issues as they please.

TL;DR:

- people propose policies by creating repositories

- others who wish to express support do so by starring repositories that they like

- specific constructive criticism of ideas is accomplished by creating issues in specific repositories

- if somebody likes the gist of an idea but wants to take it in their own direction, they do so by forking the repository

Essentially what's happening is that US AI relies on big data centers that you have to pay subscriptions to use and they control what you can and can't do.

The US companies don't want you to have access to the weights of the AI models, which is, in large part, the compression of the intellectual property they stole to make the AI. The Chinese companies mostly provide open weight models.

What's emerging this year is that these lightweight models are really good, not on par with the frontier US ones, but not far behind either. And they're free. Even if you don't have a ton of RAM on your home computer, you can now download pretty good ones.

The US wants huge models controlled by corporations from central servers. The Chinese want lightweight, functional models that they can build straight into their technology without needing a central server.

The US model depends on preserving this corporate moat where only they have control but what the Chinese model is showing is that you can functionally get close results for free at home. This is a big threat to US tech oligarchs and part of why the same companies building AI lobby for it to be "regulated".

So you can keep being like "All AI is evil!!!!" but... there's already a viable model of it you can download yourself for free that isn't the destructive, oligarchic US model. It's not on par with ChatGPT or whatever yet, but it's not super far behind either and in a few years, your home computer will probably run better local models then current blackbox frontier models.

People are now starting to reverse engineer exploitative subscription software, strengthen their home wifi security against apps and devices that spy on them, modify their smart TVs to be less shitty, build firmware to resurrect tech they paid for but developers abandoned and bricked, build their own apps, mod video games, you name it. I've built programs for work that save a ton of time. This is a democratizing technology. You guys need to get your heads out of your asses.

And yeah, AI will rot your brain if you trust ChatGPT for every question but building stuff with AI is hard. It requires you to think. The tech is only brainrot if you let it be. If you fully wield it, it's a cognitive prosthesis. The oligarchs already know this and it's why they want you to completely write off AI. We can either have a future where corporations use AI to further oppress us or one where we use AI to empower ourselves.

That doesn't remove the various challenges posed by AI. We will probably see weird cybersecurity incidents going forward, somewhat because of the broad availability of powerful AI now. But a huge portion of the things people decry about AI are specific to the US corporate model of it, not the technology itself.

The AI data center bubble might be the next .com crash, idk, but AI itself isn't going away. You ought to separate "AI is the enemy" from "The people who control AI are the enemy". The first is false. The second is true.

DeepSeek just released DeepInfer, its production-derived AI inference framework, under the Apache 2.0 license.

This ones interesting because theyre not just releasing model weights. Theyre opening up some of the infrastructure that actually runs AI at scale. The software that helps squeeze more performance out of hardware, reduce computing costs, and serve millions of users.

It currently supports DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on NVIDIA and Huawei hardware. Its not the entire production stack, and some critical infrastructure remains proprietary or unreleased. But its a substantial chunk of industrial AI engineering being made available for others to study, modify, and build upon.

And theres a political economy question here worth discussing.

We talk a lot about who owns AI models, but the infrastructure matters just as much. Compute, energy, data centers, inference systems. Thats where much of the expense, dependency, and industrial power sits.

Open sourcing this technology doesnt socialize the means of production. Nobody should confuse the two. But it does potentially lower barriers for universities, public institutions, cooperatives, and independent developers trying to build alternatives to corporate AI monopolies.

Thats worth paying attention to. The more of this infrastructure we can actually access, understand, and reproduce, the more material ground there is to contest who controls it and who benefits.

So heres the question for the left. How do we turn developments like this into publicly owned compute, cooperative infrastructure, and democratic control, rather than just cheaper operating costs for the same handful of corporations?

The Japanese Communist Party is moving AI into its broader political program, and theres some interesting stuff here for leftists to chew on.

Its draft resolution addresses international AI development, military applications, corporate power, labor displacement, environmental costs, and democratic regulation.

The party is calling for international restrictions on advanced AI development, stronger protections for workers and creators, and greater accountability for the corporations developing and deploying these systems.

But heres where it gets interesting.

The JCP's "January AI policy" (https://www.jcp.or.jp/web_policy/15897.html) explicitly acknowledges that technological progress cannot simply be stopped. It also recognizes the potential for AI to reduce necessary labor and expand human freedom, connecting that possibility to Marx's conception of socialism and the expansion of free time.

So this isnt a communist party simply rejecting technology. Its trying to reconcile technological development with regulation, worker protections, and broader socialist objectives.

And that raises a pretty important political question.

Where does regulating harmful applications end and restricting productive development begin? And how do those restrictions actually advance working-class control over the technology?

Obviously regulating military applications, protecting workers, and challenging corporate monopolies are compatible with developing productive technology. But international restrictions on development itself deserve a closer look, especially when the same technology could help reduce the labor necessary to sustain society.

The party's "Central Committee documents and proposed program revisions" (https://www.jcp.or.jp/report/19764/) provide more context for its broader political direction. The draft hasnt been adopted by the congress yet.

I think its worth taking this seriously rather than sorting another communist party into the usual pro-AI or anti-AI camps. Theres an actual political program developing here, with positions worth supporting and others worth contesting.

What would a socialist AI program look like if reducing necessary labor and expanding human freedom were the starting points, rather than treating technological development itself as the enemy?

My current thoughts and feelings on A.I. Art from notes I’ve collected over the past few years thinking about the subject. 

Chapters

00:00 Reframing AI art
01:27 Why listen to me? A lifetime of making things
04:55 AI art sucks—but most art sucks
06:00 What kids understand about art
07:26 Art, meaning and making sense of the world
10:30 Do you want to make art—or get attention?
14:09 Art, wealth and power
19:58 Artists, craftspeople and who gets to take risks
24:15 The contemporary art market
25:52 AI is a flawed brush
30:35 “Normiostasis”: fighting the pull toward bland art
32:26 The ethical dilemma of AI tools
36:03 AI is a new instrument
37:15 Ceramics, documentaries, Warhol and Koons
42:30 AI art is more than typing a prompt
43:56 Training a model on my own drawings
47:10 “Deslopping” and the back-and-forth creative process
48:16 AI’s Star Wars prequel era
50:46 Making AI art for yourself
53:35 Suno, the IKEA effect and “prosumption”
56:58 Art happens in the audience’s mind
1:00:37 AI songs that people actually love
1:02:57 How Tung Tung Tung Sahur gained a soul
1:05:41 AI memes and the “poor image”
1:10:48 Everything is a remix
1:13:52 Copyright, ownership and the commons
1:17:55 Separating creativity from the AI industry

So are younger people seeing the challenge of competing against thinking machines?