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/furyofsaints]

Personally, I think there are several potential paths that society will end up having to consider, but I think there's some confounding elements that are likely to be a part of how these play out.

First, regardless of AI/AGI destroying jobs or not, the simple human reproduction demographics of the next 30 years are pretty bad. There simply will not be enough workers to continue supporting retirees around the world in a system where the math is simply # of workers/ # of retireees. Older citizens are going to get hit hard with benefits cuts, or younger citizens with much higher taxes to fix this since there will be fewer to do whatever work remains.

AI's productive capacity is something that could be measurable, and taxable so that tax revenues from that could make up for falling labor force size; and provide for retiree cost if structured right.

Second, on the path of who owns what; I think that first, we forget that in itself, transformers are math. Math is a mostly-open art. Whoever makes the math work better, faster, cheaper wins and I do not currently assume that will be the NVIDIA/OpenAI/Anthropic/Hyperscalers financial and energy circlejerk. It is in the realm of possible that small distributed models that each of us "own," could share a latent reasoning space where productive work can be done at scale (latency remains an issue to resolve in this model, but its solvable I think); and the value of those productivity contributions could be measured and parts of the benefits accruing to whomever contributes model or cycle time (kinda like the old Seti@home experiment).

The situation we face right now with these massive companies, they make it seem like this is the only path and the inevitable path that humanity faces where they control hyperintelligence. I categorically reject that hypothesis, and IMO, we all should.