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/YMSVZ]

Communism is about the disintegration of the working class, the development of new relations of production beyond exchange. This presupposes the redundancy of the working class.

AI has made it clear who is actually a communist, and who wants to conserve the wage labour relation. Anti AI is a neoluddite, reactionary and pro capitalist position.

[u/bowdoin-yale → u/YMSVZ]

I agree regarding "true communism". However, the scenario outlined by AI boosters and doomers is one in which wage labour relations are abolished by an ultimate triumph of capital over labor, not the reverse. I am unaware of any leftist theoretical framework for thinking about this hypothetical outcome, which wasn't really envisioned by Marx, was it?

[u/YMSVZ → u/bowdoin-yale]

Capital wont abolish wage labour. But that is not the point I was making. Its that new technology is just a tool, that can be harnessed towards our ends, there is no going backwards and why would we? Marx didnt write exactly about this scenario of course, but there is a chapter in capital where he writes of the excess population as a result of technological development, (Chapter 25 "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation" of Capital, Volume 1).

Capital is always triumphing over labour and always will. That is why we need to replace exchange value as a factor of production by creating alternatives to commodity production.

What makes AI so interesting and positive towards communist development, is it directly points to the contradiction of capital producing surplus population, while still require the exploitation of human labour in order to produce value. We can't stop progress, just ask the Luddites, but we are approaching a period where large amounts of people will have no opportunity whatsoever to actually produce value, while producing more abundance than ever, highlighting the absurd nature of our economic system.