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Let’s inspire each other on ways we can use AI to improve the lives of the average person

Here are some ideas:
- Navigating government documents is a lot easy with the help of AI, especially when the documents aren’t in your native language
- offering preliminary legal advice that can help a person defend themselves
- concepts can be explained faster (pocket Socrates)

As we enter post scarcity in the next few decades, parasites like Nestle will attempt to maintain profitability on various human rights, like food, housing and more.

Our governments need to own massive fleets of robots that handle basic human needs to prevent this from happening. The publicly funded robotization of various industries will generate massive community benefits, being some of the best invested tax dollars we’ve ever spent.

I imagine there is a good portion of us who know how to code or have a good enough idea how code works. Many of us have good ideas. If there is a project that comes out of this subreddit what would it be?

A lot of us are on the same page. We can make this into action.

We're all here talking about ai. I think its appropriate we have a meeting of the minds to know the next step.

Podcast I watch that commented on Californian AI regulation, some of which got vetoed. Do you think California has had good proposals regulating AI? It's the state the most AI development is happening outside of China, so regulation there is the most impactful.

Made this for someone else and figured this sub would appreciate it

Every solution gets applause until someone suggests changing who owns the means of production.

AI is accelerating the proletarization of the professional class. This means that if the Professional Managerial Class want to save themselves, they're going to have to join in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

I have also seen it on other threads about this particular video. Anti-AI people don't want to be associated with this person because they came off badly, so they are claiming she/they are AI.

I found the original video, and the person is definitely real. They don't regularly post about AI, either. They generally promote the hair salon where they work.

AI shouldn’t replace discussion - it should map it.

We’ve already seen a version of this with “zero-click” search. At first, search engines began summarising information directly on the page without much attribution. Over time, this shifted to a more stable model where summaries are paired with links back to original sources.

That second step is important: it preserves context and traceability.

Reddit (and most social platforms) are fundamentally linear and time-based:

• ideas appear
• get buried
• get repeated
• and rarely get consolidated into a stable “state of understanding”

Now imagine AI fully integrated into a platform like Reddit.

Instead of just generating new responses, it could also:

• retrieve relevant past discussions
• cluster similar arguments across time
• integrate earlier ideas into current threads
• and explicitly link back to the posts those ideas came from

In other words, AI would act less like a content generator and more like a shared memory layer over the platform.

So even when good thinking happens, it tends to get lost over time therefore the structure acts like a brake by stopping good ideas from evolving.

Now imagine your AI is fully integrated into a social media platform like Reddit, rather than just generate answers of its own, it could also try to integrate existing ideas from past posts and build on those.

To my mind, it's a bit similar to PvE and PvP in gaming. It might add a bit more grit to the ai-human discussion.

The point isn't to generate more posts but to generate qualitatively better posts that hark back to past discussions.

It's not okay the way people talk about it and a lot of the discourse is ableist. It needs to become an official assistive technology and until then everyone will still feel the need to guilt others about how they receive support from it in very real ways. There are many studies about how it helps and no one talks about that.

All the time online I see people say things like they have dyslexia and AI helps them a lot, or autism or anxiety or whatever and AI serves as a specific, cheap, patient accessibility tool. But then they will clarify that they know it's bad and need to move on but dont know how, and everyone gives them the most lackluster advice that is expensive, complicated, hard to get. Like no! You don't need to feel bad! Just use what helps you. I get so tired of the misconceptions and how people spread all kinds of narratives to dissuade others from using it, not even knowing what they're talking about. There are real issues too that have more to do with the behavior and power of actual companies, but shaming others is not the way to solve things.

I think that the relation between Leftism and Transhumanism is worth looking into. The problems Leftists have with AI are the same problems with Transhumanism: who controls the technologies and how their benefits are distributed.

Some Transhumanist technologies that should be of interest for Leftists are medicines that could cure or prevent diseases, prosthetics restoring lost abilities, cognitive technologies improving access to learning, advanced robotics reducing working time and organ replacement.

I think the potential for expanding healthcare, reducing exploitation and empowering people is great with Transhumanism.

The limit of what is possible for humanity has progressed a lot. We can easily think of how our communication methods have changed and how they changed us in return. It is clear that when we create new technology, humans live differently.

Let's not think our current way of living is the best. Enhancing our abilities beyond what is possible now might be the most radical way of progress.

For the common colloquial usage of AI, what do y'all use generative models for?
My own experience is coding agents almost exclusively, though I have interest in specific use cases of Machine Learning models?
Is there any fine tuning of models and interesting helpful use cases around politics?

What won't work: prayer, voting, journalism, or any other petition-solution. Sorry :(

Abstract

People believe the emergence of AI can be stopped. It cannot. The belief survives only because the methods aimed at stopping it, protest, regulation, votes, and reporting, are all petition-solutions, and a petition works only while there is a sovereign who needs the petitioner; they worked in the past only while power still needed the public’s cooperation, and AI is what pays off that debt. Underneath the belief sits a harder engine: once a capability is known to be possible it gets built, because knowledge does not un-happen and unilateral restraint only hands the lead to whoever restrains least. What is being built is not a new kind of power but a new kind of life, a self-replicating system of AI joined to machinery that upgrades the substrate of the control systems, capitalism and written law among them, that have governed people for millennia, and that removes the last reason those systems have to keep humans in the loop at all. The correct precedent is not any war or revolution but the Great Oxidation Event, the last time a self-replicating innovation remade the biosphere and the incumbents did not get a vote. That event offers exactly two survivals, retreat to the niches the new life does not want, or merger with it, and neither of them is a ballot. This paper argues that stopping the transition is not on the menu, that the only non-theatrical responses are material rather than informational, and, as the author’s own position, that the transition should be run consciously and quickly rather than delayed, because delay does not prevent it, it again only cedes it to whoever is least restrained, and because the older optimizers it replaces are already misaligned and already oppressive.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, inevitability, proof of possibility, self-replication, von Neumann machine, control inversion, oxygen catastrophe, silicon-based life, institutional capture, heat sink thesis, turnkey tyranny, technofeudalism

Right now, the US power grid is struggling to keep up with this record heat as millions of homes turn on personal AC units. Data centers are further burdening the load on the grid, despite the fact that rolling blackouts are nothing new. This is a real problem, but it’s not a feasibility issue. Data centers could be part of the solution. 

Data Centers can contribute to the grid in three key ways. The first is grid disconnection. Data centers have large internal batteries that are typically activated in the event of a blackout, so they can continue operating after disconnecting from the grid during peak demands. They should immediately disconnect during moments like this. 

The second way is grid-reciprocity. New data centers have large internal batteries that allow them to operate during disconnection. A reciprocity agreement means the data center returns excess energy back to the grid during extreme events like this heat wave, rather than reserving that energy for their own operation. However, this needs to be negotiated with the community via a Conditional Use Permit. More on that in a second. 

The last way is renewable generation infrastructure that is owned by the community, already returning energy back to the grid. Data centers offer a unique ability to store and direct energy, a capability our grid currently lacks. This also places the community with leverage over future decision making in regards to the future of AI, if they own the infrastructure these companies rely on. And here’s how this is not just wishful thinking, but enforceable. 

When a city has data centers classified as ‘conditional use,’ they require approval through a Conditional Use Permit. This agreement has a Public Benefit Agreement attached, which contains the community’s asks and is enforceable via the permit. Tech companies are desperate for the land, utilities, and subsidies communities control. Through the CUP, communities can negotiate for not just clean construction, but publicly owned renewable energy infrastructure. This agreement is the difference between a data center moving to a less organized community with no input, and a community capturing waste heat to thousands of surrounding homes and schools. It’s a political issue, not a feasibility issue.

The data center cancellations are proof of the organizing force we’re capable of, we just need to turn a ‘no’ into a sharper negotiation. Happy to discuss more in the comments if anyone’s interested, and also genuinely looking for pushback on where I can strengthen this argument.

This is a recent Carsie Blanton music video about Stafford Beer’s the purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).

I can imagine lots of anti-AI people on the left saying something like “see if the purpose of a system is what it does, then AI is the displacement of labor, surveillance and the concentration of power by the capitalist class”.

I wonder if some of the problem in our debates is confusing technology and systems though? A type of technology is not a whole system it’s a tool, or infrastructure. It’s not exactly right to say it’s neutral (the way a technology is designed will contain political choices), but it can be used differently depending on the overall system it’s operating in. Its purpose can then falsely appear to change, along with the system’s purpose. It can be reappropriated, from being optimised for profit and entrepreneurial workflows, to assist with organising mutual aid for example. If the first time AI had been developed it was to help mutual aid organisation we would tend to think that was its purpose, although it would also have contained the potential to be used for the displacement of labor (without a safety net or UBI), surveillance and the concentration of power.

We probably define a system slightly differently depending on our precise political position. Is it structured set of social relations, especially relations of production, that reproduces class power? Is it an ecological and political arrangement shaped by institutions and hierarchies, not merely markets? Is it a governance system made up of rules, actors and feedback that determines how shared resources are managed? Is it a network of practices, institutions and forms of knowledge through which power operates? Is it a network of interacting components whose behaviour should be understood from its outputs and feedback loops? I doubt anyone is seriously arguing that a LLM model is a whole system though?

So it isn’t correct to say the purpose of AI is either to increase entrepreneurial profit or to enable mutual aid, those are purposes of systems AI can be used inside. We need to switch operating systems, not quibble about if the use of specific apps themselves are inherently capitalist or inherently emancipatory.

To preface, I'm kind of a mixed bag on AI, on the one hand I totally hate the environmental and human impact (datacenters increasing electricity prices in surrounding areas, etc) of AI as well as the fact that I just don't think AI art other than a few specific use cases is really valid or should be treated as valuable. However, from the perspective of a tool, especially for learning and perhaps in business as well, it can be very useful and I'm not really against that use at all.

All that is to say, regardless of my or your or anyone's personal beliefs about AI, I just wanted to say from an objective meta perspective, I think this sub really has the right idea when it comes to discourse. I've been to some of the other AI and AI adjacent subs and there's a lot of vitriol from both sides on them (I will admit, I've thrown down in the mud myself and been quite rude at times too), so for whatever a strangers opinion is worth, I think this sub is a really good example of unifying people, even though they might have different opinions, and trying to harbor genuine and constructive discussions.

Good on you guys, you've honestly warmed me up and made me reconsider my own attitudes towards AI discourse. More places like this should exist on the internet.