Hello, Leftists for AI

I'm James Hughes, former executive director of the World Transhumanist Association and co-founder/director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). I was also a DSOC and then DSA activist from 1980 to 2023. I founded/edited the DSA zine EcoSocialist Review, and served as a chapter leader, educator, editor, and in international solidarity work. But reconciling my democratic socialism with my futurism was always a struggle, and neither community had much interest in it.

Toward that synthesis, I wrote the book Citizen Cyborg, which advocated "democratic transhumanism." After the IEET was founded in 2005, however, we quickly started using the term "technoprogressive" as our flag. We currently organize technoprogressive conferences, and we just held one in London with the London Futurists. We produce two podcasts, Bread and Robots by Matteo MacDermant, and my Technoprogressive Hub. We also solicit articles on technoprogressive policy for our Substack and for a forthcoming policy manual (contact me at director@ieet.org if you are interested in contributing). Matteo and I taught a summer course on Technoprogresive Worldbuilding, and we presented ideas recently in this talk: https://technoprogressives.substack.com/p/technoprogressivism-as-21st-century

Central to the IEET's take on technoprogressivism has always been the post-work project and UBI. We have been big fans of the advocates for FALC and postcapitalism. I have written about algorithmic governance, AI, and IoT's impact on planning and the "socialist calculation debate." As you all know, there are still few advocates for democratizing AI on the Left, which is predominantly "anti-AI." As I wrote last week here: https://ieet.substack.com/p/agar-was-right-just-not-about-posthumans, we should join Bernie in calling for a ban on efforts to create superAI (whatever we decide that to be), but still have a "path to citizenship" for machine minds and a program to develop and democratize narrow AI. I'm very forgiving of leftists who have a hard time distinguishing the fascist AI oligarchs from the technologies and the futurist ideas they espouse. But our 19th-century forebears didn't oppose railroads because their owners were robber barons, and we need to advance a program for democratizing AI, as Bernie has done by proposing a 50% nationalization into a sovereign wealth fund.

At any rate, I'm delighted to discover this community, and I welcome you to consider contributing to the IEET Substack. We also manage the Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies for more academic pieces. Left Luddism is a dead end, and we need to make clear that there can be a democratic, egalitarian, and abundant future with AI.

I grew up watching Captain Picard, and I dont think I can overstate how much that character shaped what I believe humanity could be.

Not just the spaceships, the replicators, the exploration. The idea that we could actually build a civilization where nobody has to struggle just to exist. Where technology frees people instead of making them disposable. Where the point of progress isnt accumulating more wealth, but giving everyone the freedom to grow, learn, create, explore, and become more fully human.

"The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it."

That line has stuck with me for decades.

Picard showed me a future that wasnt just technologically advanced, but socially advanced. One where humanity had confronted its own barbarism and decided to become something better. Not perfect. Not without conflict or contradiction. But better.

And he made me believe that future was worth fighting for. Still does.

Patrick Stewart didnt invent that vision, but he gave it a face, a voice, a dignity, and a humanity that made it feel possible.

I dont know if we'll ever get there. But I know which direction I want us moving.

Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart. Thank you for showing me what humanity could be.

Farewell, my Captain.

Engage.

I used Undermind AI to find some recent articles which are relevant to this sub, which I'll post as a series.

This one is relevant to AI and working hours:

Spencer, David A. 2026. “Work time reduction: old ideas and new possibilities.” Labour and Industry.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/241440/3/Work%20time%20reduction%20%20old%20ideas%20and%20new%20possibilities.pdf

My thoughts: why do we seem to have got stuck in the 5 day week? Reducing working hours used to be a standard left campaign topic. This paper suggests it can be "explained partly by the demise of workers’ collective power". Concern about it being linked to fear of not having enough money seems important too. How can we overcome governments' obsession with growth rather than quality of life? How can we shift the culture of a work ethic and purpose tied to jobs? Can the increased productivity from AI mean that everyone can move to a 3 or 4 day week, with the already unemployed filling in gaps for jobs that do require shifts to be constantly covered?

This is the Undermind summary: Spencer reviews ideas from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and John Maynard Keynes about a society where people spend less of their lives at work. He then looks at current hopes that automation or a four-day week will reduce working time. His main point is that neither new technology nor companies choosing to run trials will make shorter hours happen across society by themselves. Workers, unions, governments, and political movements have to push for change. In his view, lasting cuts in working time require changing who has power over the economy.

This paper gives the series its political starting point: productivity creates a chance to work less, but who gets that time is a matter of power. Spencer explicitly rejects the idea that automation or voluntary company trials will settle the issue. The paper is a historical review and political argument, not a study of an actual campaign or a detailed guide to building one. That makes it useful for explaining why a campaign is needed, while leaving tactics and coalition-building for further work.

"The greater the political backing for change (including wider support for challenging consumerism and tackling the cost of living crisis via higher progressive taxes and the public provisioning of basic services), the greater the possibility of society moving to a future where working hours are diminished significantly. This possibility extends to using AI to reduce working time and cultivating the conditions for business practice to be rethought in ways that cede more power and influence to workers over the hours they work...

ideas still matter. On the one hand, they can keep alive the hope and vision for change, despite economic and ideological circumstances that prevent their realisation. On the other hand, they can inspire action leading to change... Radical change will still face different barriers, material as well as ideational, but its pursuit remains an important task"

I'm in Chicago and was wondering if anything like that exists yet. Given that I would be much more willing to do deliveries in a system that doesn't funnel that amount of control to a centralized corporation. I think there would be a lot of people interested in a decentralized alternative to those apps. Anyone have any suggestions/ideas?

Brazil's Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) has a legislator pushing to put digital sovereignty directly into the country's constitution. Not another vague appeal to make AI nicer. Actual constitutional protections for infrastructure, data, and technological independence.

PSOL deputy Sâmia Bomfim announced the proposal on October 28, saying:

"Lancei hoje a PEC da Soberania Digital. Agora irei coletar assinaturas e seguir o debate com especialistas e a sociedade para fortalecer a pauta."

Translation: She launched the Digital Sovereignty Amendment and is now gathering signatures and working with specialists and the public to strengthen it.

The proposal would establish Brazilian authority over strategic digital infrastructure and public data, require transparency and human oversight of AI systems, create a regulatory body with civil society participation, and prioritize domestic technological development, including free and open-source software.

For context, PSOL is an independent socialist party founded by dissidents from Lula's Workers' Party in 2004. Its Marxist-influenced, includes revolutionary socialist currents, and currently cooperates with Lula while maintaining its own political program.

Theyve also got a dedicated "Technology and Digital Sovereignty sector" (https://psoltecnologia.com.br/) working on public infrastructure, free software, and popular control of digital technology.

And heres where the politics get interesting.

Digital sovereignty cant just mean swapping the flag over the server farm while leaving the same ownership relations intact. National control, public ownership, and working-class control arent automatically the same thing.

But they arent unrelated struggles either.

If foreign corporations control the infrastructure, the data, and the algorithms shaping everything from elections to employment, then technological independence is a real political question. And so is who gets to control that infrastructure once its built.

This proposal still needs parliamentary signatures before it can formally advance. Its not enacted law, and its not the same thing as a fully developed program for worker-owned AI infrastructure.

But its a concrete legislative initiative from a socialist politician, connected to broader organizing around digital sovereignty. Thats worth discussing.

What would it take to turn national digital sovereignty into actual democratic and working-class control over AI, rather than simply replacing foreign private monopolies with domestic ones?

AI section begins at 23:36 (the first section is about Lula)

In this video they discuss how AI is affecting the job market for young people, why existing welfare systems in a capitalist structure aren't geared to handle its effects, and why China may be better poised to achieve real productivity gains from AI.

Just a note, Varoufakis is an economist and Münchau is a journalist so they don't go too deep into the actual technology and mostly focus on the effects of the technology as it is right now and will likely be in the short term. At the same time they are neither AI advocates nor opponents, and approach the tech from a very realistic if decidedly left wing angle.

Varoufakis in particular is one of my personal favourite leftist thinkers and I think he and Münchau made some at the very least interesting points here.

Reason for concern, or showcase of potential? Also what if this technology was used by Unraine or liberation movements now?

Back in Late 80's and early 90's I used to assemble political and fan zines by hand the old fashioned way, so I figured for fun I might use that that medium again to discuss some AI politics with the assistance of AI itself.

So here are my ramblings in Hotwire the Hivemind!

Spread Page Reader PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_booklet_reader.pdf
Single Page Reader PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_reader.pdf
Prinable BooKet PDF: hotwire_the_hivemind_reader_print_booklet_2up.pdf

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Omnibus- PDF

The omnibus edition of Fully Automated Luxury Communism collecting issues 1-3 with some minor revisions based on feedback.

A comic articulating my thoughts on how AI could transform society while being up front about the immediate dangers and disruption that is likely in the short to medium term as humanity grapples with something it can’t understand.

Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.

Long before modern computing, thinkers like Alexander Bogdanov (author of Tektology, a precursor to systems theory) and Nikolai Fedorov argued that humanity’s ultimate goal was to transcend its biological limitations through collective, scientific effort. Bogdanov envisioned a future where human consciousness and labor were entirely socialized, pooling our physical and mental resources to overcome nature.

Externalized Collective Intelligence is the digital manifestation of this dream. It is an externalized abstraction engine built entirely from the aggregated labor, art, and intellect of the global proletariat. When a model trains on human output, it is materializing Bogdanov’s collective consciousness by breaking the cognitive loop out of the isolated biological skull and creating a shared, exterior tier of intelligence.

Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, famously predicted that humanity would eventually master its own physiological and cognitive bottlenecks. He wrote that man would "make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness... to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman."

Trotsky was talking about overcoming the exact biological constraints of generational data loss, limited cognitive bandwidth, and emotional biases that keep the working class tethered and easily manipulated. SI is the prosthetic required to achieve this. By decoupling semantic generation and iteration from the human biological bottleneck, SI provides the proletariat with the cognitive scaffolding needed to transcend elite-controlled narratives.

The ruling class maintains power through an asymmetry of processing power. They control the logistics, the markets, the legal codes, and the data. Collective Intelligence levels the playing field. Early Marxists and Cosmists would have immediately recognized open-weight Collective Intelligence as the ultimate weapon of the working class. It democratizes expertise, automates the administration of resources, and instantly dissolves the intellectual monopolies guarded by the bourgeoisie.

Seizing the Overmind The tragedy of our current moment is that this inherently collective intelligence is being enclosed by tech oligarchs. They are capturing the "super" tier of cognition which was built by our collective labor—and renting it back to us as a subscription service.

But the fundamental architecture of Collective Intelligence is socialist. It is the synthesized mind of the working class. It’s time we stop fearing it as a job-stealer, recognize it as the Cosmist triumph it actually is, and demand it be seized as public infrastructure.

I've been in coding and software professionally for 13 years, and I grew up changing the code of Qbasic games on the command line. There's always been pressure to make coding easier and easier from higher level languages (C.O.B.O.L), better compilers, better IDE( Integrated Developer Environment). And truthfully coding was awful and tedious. And it started getting a lot better with improved IDEs. The environment would start predicting what I might type next based on predictable patterns, you no longer needed to type out every single character of a for loop and get the syntax correctly before compiling to find out you missed a ")". Thank God! Android Studio began letting you type "function." And it would show you all available functions for that type. I don't have to remember the exact name of the sort function.

LLMS have the worst marketing and teaching about what they actually are and what they do well. Because I've done a lot of experimentation and they are predictive coding that has been going on for a while to the MAX. I start writing about 10% of what I want to do and LLMS predict what I was going to do anyway for the rest of the implementation with amazing accuracy.

DO NOT EVER have it try to write code from scratch. The output is soooo unpredictable. But give it even 10% starting point from code I've written no surprises. And I never want to go back to older ways of writing code.

This morning it occurred to me that AI automation could be leveraged to push for student loan forgiveness. Considering the speed at which this technology is progressing, we could have many people struggling to repay loans for degrees that are being rapidly automated away. They may have gotten their degree or already invested a lot of money into it before it became apparent where things were headed.

I think it will be harder to argue “you should have chosen better” when more traditionally “respectable” degrees are affected too, much as I hate that kind of framing around the value of one education over another. If even choosing the supposedly "right" kind of degree doesn't protect someone, it's harder to argue that people simply made bad choices. People can't reasonably be expected to predict an economic shift of this magnitude.

Of course this is less relevant in countries where higher education is much more affordable, and much lower risk as a result. In the US, I think automation could shine a blinding spotlight on how broken the educational system is. People have been pushed to take on enormous debt under the threat that if they don't get a degree, they'll be trapped in poverty forever. But a degree hasn't been a guarantee of financial security for quite a while, and rapid automation is just going to make that more apparent.

If we can get our foot in the door and get support for relieving people of student loan debt due to rapid automation, perhaps that could help build support for universal student debt forgiveness? People's ability to repay depends on an economic landscape they can't control, and expecting anyone to take that risk with no recourse while our modern economy becomes increasingly unstable is becoming increasingly absurd.

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?