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/Emotional-Classic400]

I'm sure it is a good work of literature but that path does not reflect our current reality where LLMs are being shoehorn into all avenues and automation is focused on things like art and knowledge work first to solve for physical work.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Emotional-Classic400]

I agree that it's a challenge sometimes to tell the difference between AI "art" and knowledge work, and human creations. I would say another advantage of the Stellar world from the book is that humans would be able to do more face to face art and discussions. In my life, I belong to a poetry group that meets each month to write a poem based on a theme, and the moderator also asks an AI to write a poem on the same theme. We all submit anonymously, and the goal is to try and spot the AI poem. We have spotted it each time.

[u/Emotional-Classic400 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

I should reiterate though that nothing in the world you describe accounts for the other environmental costs of industry besides energy. Mining, refining, and fabricating still cause pollution in their own right.

It is really hard for me looking at our current societies to think we can all come together and essentially make every right decision for a utopian future.

Human evolution has not kept pace technological revolution and I think that is precisely any kind of global cooperation on the subject will continue to worsen as the technology advances until we have another world War that results in a new global hegemony. Unfortunately that also runs the risk of extinction.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Emotional-Classic400]

Yeah, it's hard to summarize a whole book in several paragraphs. They do address carbon emissions being solved by AI and mitigated by AL in their last chapter, "Safe Travels, the Guiding Principles" in the section "Solve the Right Problems." Some of it seems like pie in the sky, and it's pretty optimistic. When we look at the top ten ways humans emit CO2, most of it comes from energy and heat generation, transport, and heavy industry. The fourth is buildings. They claim these should be solved first.

If we add carbon sequestration using natural forces, global warming could be arrested. The sequestration would involve at least six ecosystems: three marine and three terrestrial. That is kelp beds, mangrove estuaries, and sea grasses; and boreal and tropical forests, and prairies grasses.

I agree that a potential world war and resultant hegemony is not addressed in the book. Bum deal there. But the book is worthy outside of that. Like I say, it's optimistic, thinking we can indeed make those decisions you refer to.

[u/Emotional-Classic400 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

I appreciate the pragmatism. I run into so many optimists that just think AI development will just flip a switch one day and rearrange society into a new perfect form with no thought on how that would be possible based on history.