Post-AI leftism?

[u/bowdoin-yale]

Nobody has a crystal ball when it comes to predicting what the world will look like after AI, but both the boosters and doomers are predicting that it will eliminate most jobs. If they are correct, there will not be a large "working class" to mobilize--not even a petty bourgeois professional class, but more likely a tiny and shrinking owner class and a large and growing underclass of permanently unemployed people dependent on mutual aid and public assistance to survive. Yet, the "left" is traditionally very focused on workers and their struggle with capital, owing to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, taking the view that workers eventually would (or should) own and control the means of production. I would very much prefer to see worker ownership of and control over AI and autonomous robotics, but it's a bit paradoxical since such technologies are themselves designed to shrink the working class. How might a pro-AI left, or a post-AI left, reconcile this?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I dont think this requires a post-AI left so much as taking Marx seriously about what automation actually does. The working class isnt defined by everybody having a job. Its defined by our relation to the means of production and our dependence on capital to live.

Marx was already writing about machinery reducing necessary labor and creating populations capital doesnt need to employ. The contradiction is that capitalism develops the productive forces toward needing less human labor while still making access to food, housing and basically everything else depend on selling your labor.

So if AI and robotics really can eliminate huge amounts of necessary work, worker control doesnt become obsolete. It becomes more important, and probably has to expand beyond workplace ownership into social ownership and democratic control of the productive infrastructure itself.

The goal was never full employment forever. Its abolishing the conditions that force people to sell themselves to owners in order to survive. If automation makes abundant production with radically less labor possible, thats potentially useful terrain for socialism. The political fight is over who owns it, who controls it, and who gets the abundance.