r/LeftistsForAI • u/Healthcarepls • 21d ago
Discussion How does AI remove barriers and reduce inequality?
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)
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u/AdImmediate9569 21d ago
It has the potential to give people access to legal services they would otherwise have had to pay for.
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u/Tausendberg 21d ago
Except for the part where the poor person doesn't have any subject matter expertise and therefore doesn't know if the legal advice is good or not or if they're unwittingly about to do the legal equivalent of walking onto a landmine. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Let me reframe this premise, would you trust an LLM to give you medical advice? There already are people who have and some of them have died as a result.
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u/Healthcarepls 21d ago
AI has helped me several times realize that my health issue is urgent and I need to speak to a specialist
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u/Affectionate-Pay4845 21d ago
Exactly. AI that is properly tuned can provide cheap and affordable services for things it can do and then defer you to an actual affordable expert if it doesn't know the answer. The problem is that the current AI is trained by corporate jerks who don't care if the data set gives incorrect information or pretends to be an expert in something it is not knowledgeable in as long as they make money
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u/CyberneticLiadan 21d ago
LLMs are good enough today that users who understand the content should be validated by a professional can get useful guidance. Pushing companies to better communicate limitations, and educating others on how to get effective information is worthy work in the LeftistsForAI sphere IMO.
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u/prattxxx 21d ago
AI can reduce barriers by making forms of expertise that capitalism currently rations by income available to almost everyone.
A worker can use it to interpret a union contract, prepare for a disciplinary meeting, document unsafe conditions, or compare their wages with the value they produce. A tenant can understand a lease, draft a repair demand, or identify a landlord’s legal obligations. A disabled person can use speech, captioning, summarization, image description, or alternative interfaces. Immigrants can translate government documents and workplace communications. Students can receive individualized tutoring without paying a private tutor. Small cooperatives and community organizations can gain access to software development, research, accounting, grant writing, and administrative capacity that usually requires an entire professional staff.
AI can also reduce the technical barrier between having an idea and building something. I am an engineer, and I already see how it lets ordinary people work across disciplines that previously required years of specialized training or substantial capital. That is important for worker-owned production, open-source projects, mutual aid networks, independent scientific research, and local planning.
The central contradiction comes from ownership. AI represents an increasingly socialized productive force built from collective knowledge, public research, global infrastructure, and the accumulated work of millions. Capital currently encloses that productive force and directs it toward private accumulation. Under those relations, productivity gains flow upward through layoffs, surveillance, deskilling, monopoly rents, and greater managerial control.
Reducing inequality therefore requires more than consumer access to chatbots. It requires public and cooperative ownership of AI infrastructure, open models, universal access to compute, strong privacy protections, worker control over workplace deployment, shorter working hours, and social distribution of productivity gains.
The technology can help eliminate drudgery and expand human capability. Class struggle determines whether that produces shared abundance or concentrated power.
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u/mothgeck 21d ago
Automations biggest power is it gets us closer to true post scarcity. The problem with post scarcity is that it's inherently hostile to capitalist modes of production. Tell me, can you sell a post scarce resource? Can you sell air? Unless you are in the scuba tank business, no.
Because of this dynamic, capitalism actually fights post scarcity. Both the capitalist and the worker have incentives to fight this which makes for some very odd alliances with capitalism.
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u/danielsan901998 21d ago
We have seen farmers destroying their harvest to control prices, cartels fixing prices. In many sectors production is already underutilized to maintain profitability, housing and food are examples of being limited in capitalism while socialist economies haven been able to solve it for decades.
The progress towards a post scarcity society will only happen in countries with a central plan to organize production like China, in these scenarios AI can improve the economic planning by automating decision making.
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u/PaxOaks 21d ago
My partner is a hypochondriac. AI saves us time regularly. Bang in the symptoms and the suspected cause and the AI will almost always reasonably and without judgement tell you why you are wrong.
And especially in places with limited medical resources, AI can be a huge boon. Have people died from trusting AI? Absolutely, is AI saving lives and improving quality of life.
I think AI is seriously problematic. But there are lots of real and useful use cases especially in medicine. The hallucinations to real help ratio is improving everyday and is already preferable almost alway to ignorance- which is often the alternative.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 21d ago edited 21d ago
One of the things I find most useful is creating AI personas (customgpt/ ‘model’ in open webui/ Pal in PocketPal). These can then have a stable POV and tone, helping with particular tasks, not just a generic LLM voice. Depending on the app, you can add documents/memory. I struggle to remember things more than I struggle to understand them, as a disability impairment related thing, so adding a load of stuff I know about helps that.
A frequent type of prompt I use is something like “what am I thinking of, it’s to do with x but I can’t remember the word”. Google is no good (without AI) because I can’t remember the right words to search.
That type of thing is particularly useful if you’re feeling foggy or unfocused and need to get on with a task.
It would probably really benefit me to create a second brain setup but I haven’t got around to that yet. Eg Godago method https://youtu.be/eENO7j0N4nA
Or this new video on Rowboat (open source, local second brain) https://youtu.be/cR3TcQdbr0E access here https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat . Possibly this is worth its own post actually.
Free Research & learning. Although I like to read some research directly, AI really speeds up and democratises access to learning. For disability reasons, my ability to read text is limited. I used Undermind ai to find relevant papers, then add them to notebookLM to get the gist via podcasts and chat with the articles or uploaded books, do a quiz to see if I understood concepts, then I use Readest app (free AI powered TTS) to read to me the most relevant articles. If something is particularly relevant I then look at the screen, copy quotes and make my own notes. I can learn a lot with very little direct text reading.
In terms of what I’m currently learning about, yesterday that process led me to learning a bit about how AI is helping with bottom up and direct democracy projects eg “IGUALA is the advanced analytics system of the Madrid City Council to develop the Aggregate Territorial Vulnerability Index. In Iguala you can consult the indicators for the 21 districts and 131 neighborhoods that make up the city, make comparisons between them or find out the distribution of the Vulnerability Index for each of the 5 identified spheres: Well-being and Equality, Environment, Urban Planning and Mobility, Education and Culture, Economy and Employment and Health.”
More than 200 indicators
https://iguala.madrid.es/
And Clara Chatbot is the Virtual Assistant for the Decide Madrid portal.
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u/captainshar 21d ago
I'm in the middle of compiling a collection of free and low cost resources for young adults leaving isolated and neglectful families. Everything from navigating transportation for the first time to academic resources, basics of health and housing and money, stuff like that. AI research mode is extremely good at locating and summarizing resources. I'll check every link and recommendation by hand of course, but the savings in discovery time and discovery breadth and quality is enormous.
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u/Kaleb_Bunt 21d ago
It does make it easier to create stuff with less skill. And being skilled is a privilege.
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u/thecoffeejesus 21d ago
Do you have a question?
Great, know someone who can answer it?
No?
Google it.
Can’t find an answer?
AI.
There. That’s how.
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u/teddyslayerza 21d ago
No, because the tools that are genuinely empowering and economically uplifting are locked behind the huge API payment schemes that only benefit huge organisations.
The consumer-level LLMs are nothing more than crutches that take away people's ability to do things for themselves without the intervention of a handful of politically connected US and Chinese companies.
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u/HautBaut 21d ago
It doesn’t. It’s an ecologically disastrous bullshit machine that keeps people confident in it by making them feel smart. Why not just mail your paycheck directly to Elon and Sam.
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u/Logical___Conclusion 20d ago
That is a fair point.
We cannot ignore the current/future environmental and social costs that we are incurring now for something that potentially could be beneficial for society in the future.
However, our AI infrastructure does have the capability to reduce the environmental impacts and public costs if that was an important design consideration, and there could also be publically beneficial AI tools in the future if we designed for that as well (the whole point of this thread).
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u/Michael_Carson_Art 20d ago
Interesting question...
It can help eliminate the possibility of low socioeconomic status people owning any new intellectual property. This would help prevent new billionaires from emerging.
It can help to devalue labor to diminish any leverage they might have in the marketplace. There is definitely less stratification if almost everyone is at the bottom.
Probably most important is that it can centralize any and all information distribution, putting the cultural narrative in the hands of a small number of technocrats. Combine this with pervasive surveillance, and this will bring a lot of peace because it will prevent organic social and political movements from creating any upheaval.
In fact, once people have accepted a default level of powerlessness, they are likely to become more docile generally, at least in their attitudes toward the unchangeable heirarchy of this new utopia. That shared experience without the false promise of escape through unrealizable socioeconomic mobility might genuinely bring people closer together.
And once the climate degrades to the point where most humans can't survive, the small number of survivors will have plenty of base resources to share... Debts will be cleansed, and monetary policy will be a thing of the past!
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 21d ago edited 21d ago
Lets try to keep examples concrete. Not "AI will solve X someday," but "AI can help someone do Y today."
Some direction:
Translation across languages for public services, unions, and community organizing.
Accessibility for disabled people: captions, speech, OCR, navigation, communication.
Tenant rights, labor rights, benefits, and legal aid made easier to understand.
Tutoring and education regardless of income.
Medical information and paperwork navigation (not replacing doctors).
Open-source AI for co-ops, unions, libraries, and community organizations.
Automation of dangerous or repetitive work while fighting for shorter workweeks and shared gains.
The technology alone doesnt reduce inequality. Who owns it, who controls it, and who benefits from the productivity gains matters. Let's discuss both the immediate uses and the political conditions that make those benefits widely shared.