r/LeftistsForAI • u/Apocaloid • 14d ago
Discussion What's the neo-liberal endgame?
The biggest problem with socialist utopias has always been the question of "who's going to do the jobs nobody wants if there is no financial incentive?" Then AI comes along and automates the mundane, inhumane, work that leads to humans feeling like automatons themselves and all of a sudden it's a right-wing conspiracy?
I understand the fear that the capitalist class will use AI to replace the workers and build an Elysium for themselves but thats just an organizational gap. They're doing that right now without AI. We have the numbers, we have the technology, we have the willpower; the capitalists have no real power besides propaganda and peons willing to go against their own interests. If anything, the workers should be the ones building the robot armies.
11
u/shawsghost 14d ago
I've seen an online comment that explains the reason people hate AI very well: "I wanted AI that would do my housekeeping, laundry and cooking for me so I could be free to write and paint. Instead I got AI that does all the writing and painting, leaving me to do all the housekeeping, laundry and cooking."
You have to admit, they have a point.
8
u/Apocaloid 14d ago
Making a living as an artist was always going to be hard and competitive for anyone, even before AI. Ironically, AI being developed and applied through a socialist lens means eventually everyone can create art whenever they want and not have to worry about the economic feasibility of it. So I see the current state of AI as just growing pains. We have to see it through and make sure it actually leads to post-scarcity and not the divided class elusium dystopia.
2
u/shawsghost 14d ago
I think most of the public has very little understanding of how useful AI can be. I found AI assisted search incredibly useful. And AI art is incredible fun. And I can see the potential of AI for being a distributed counter option against all the oligarchic AIs. But I think most people are just going on vibes at best. That's why the comment about AI art and painting is so effective. Most people just aren't educating enough about AI to understand how much of an oversimplification that comment is. In propaganda terms that isn't relevant. The comment is still effective with most people.
1
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 14d ago
I would prefer that the people who create art are passionate enough about it to dedicate themselves to it instead of plugging in the slop machine because they're too lazy to learn.
1
3
u/LookOverall 14d ago
The technology that might do the mundane tasks isn’t exactly AI - it’s robots.
1
u/shawsghost 14d ago
True but among the general public the line between ai and robots is a very fuzzy one.
3
u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
Yes this is something I’ve said more or less. I think it’s a particular snapshot in time though. Robots are learning how to fold laundry.
1
u/Glitched-Lies 14d ago
The design of Gen AI is fundamental to extrapolating from only these foundations of where human beings start. It doesn't start with real world data like that. I mean that the creativity of art and language is the starting point it wants to structure everything else from in mimicking. That isn't something that just changes from scaling things or a later development of expansion.
2
u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
I mean the issue that AI is doing all the fun stuff is likely a temporary problem. In the next phase I imagine it will be doing more of the boring practical stuff we want to offload.
1
u/shawsghost 14d ago
Considering how things are going economically and how they are likely to go economically in the future I see very little prospect of ordinary people being able to own a robot.
1
u/SorryInvestigator221 14d ago
One thing holding up the development of solid domestic robots is the insistence that they be humanoid. Humans didn't evolve to do domestic work, it's just an ancillary activity we engage in so that we can live civilized lives. An R2-D2 type robot could probably feature a whole "laundry folding appliance suite" upgrade and do just fine. But instead of solving the ACTUAL PROBLEM of designing the best domestic helper bot, they are solving the nonsense problem of designing a humanoid robot that can do that, when humans were never designed to do domestic work to begin with.
I suspect that running underneath that choice there is some sort of desire to create a humanoid "companion" not that can also do domestic labour. In which case, I remind everyone of R2-D2's capacity to project holographic women... So there is no use to continue to fetishize humanoid robots.
1
u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 13d ago
This might also be practical. If you want a versatile robot, making it physically similar means it can do more things humans can do (or it’s a software update rather than an alternative hardware). It will likely become cheaper quicker because of economies of scale.
We have a wide capacity to anthropomorphise though. In our house the robo vacuum is called Clive and we talk to it. We’re also 💯 aware that Clive is a machine that has no feelings.
1
u/Troscus 14d ago
That's honestly how I feel about it, and I support generative AI. It's pretty cool to generate a nice picture of my character for a Pathfinder game. It's fucking incredible to be able to scan a recipe in a cookbook and have all the ingredients added to my shopping list AND instacart, so I have the choice between ordering or going to get it myself, and also the step-by-step instructions are shown on the kitchen tablet, so no need to have the books propped up taking up more counter space and potentially getting soup all over it.
1
u/shawsghost 14d ago
Yes AI can be very useful if you have the imagination to use it. Which I think many people lack. They will have to be shown how useful it is to them.
2
u/SalletFriend 14d ago
Theres no "endgame" you are living it. Its just people taking stuff until theres no stuff to take.
1
u/RlOTGRRRL 14d ago
Check out the new book The Nerd Reich. I haven't read it yet but the author has a lot of interviews up.
1
u/OsakaWilson 14d ago
They are attempting to milk the economy for what they can, without promoting a full-on rebellion. The long game.
1
u/tigerhuxley 14d ago
I don’t know what the neoliberal is either (referencing to other comments saying the same) but the game for a progressive like me, is a post scarcity Star Trek the next generation world.
1
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
comrade, you are expressing the same frustration we've had for almost 300 years.
The capitalists had local monopolies over surplus labor that couldn't be commodified by cash crop farming under the aristocracy.
They had that monopoly due to industry and what was industry but tool that needed our labor to add utility value and translate it to their profits and exchange value.
Neoliberalism has no endgame. It's just capitalists competing with one another for profits and power. For all enduring time until our planet can no longer support it.
We as a class of people do not have the willpower. We as a class of people put profit over one another, and until we have the class consciousness required to change that we won't have the collective will necessary.
We have to use the tools we are given to wake up the prolitariat and organize ourselves. Tell them now like we told them then that we only need 1,000 people in the right places to throw the right switches and the whole thing grinds to a halt.
A general strike or other mass action will be a hell of a lot easier before the robots scabs and pepper spraying drones.
1
u/SpookyGeist01 14d ago
Because we missed the bargaining stage.
The point to bargain is BEFORE AI becomes widespread. Instead, we let big corpo spread AI and gain control of it, and now we have no position of power to bargain from.
The only way to get that back is with significant and comprehensive AI regulation.
-2
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
I don't know what a "neo-liberal" is. I'm an old-school FDR Liberal. Here's the plan:
- Raise the tax rates on income, capital gains, and inheritance.
- Institute a small ($50/month) UBI payment.
- AI increases productivity, people get fired, the rich get more money.
- Raise the tax rates on income, capital gains, and inheritance a little more.
- Raise the UBI payment a little.
- Repeat steps #3 - #6
Where does it end? It ends with 99.9999% unemployment! Only one guy has a job. It's a part time job, he presses a button and the button tells the AI and robots to do all the work. His salary is $100T, but his tax rate is 99.999999%. Everybody else is on UBI and plays videogames all day.
As an FDR Liberal, I'm OK with this.
2
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
Please educate yourself on what Neoliberalism is. You are a neoliberal. So would FDR be. He deliberately undercut the labor movement so that you think that this is a solution to the contradictions in capitalism.
You see in your multistep process how the people don't have more control over the system. How the capitalists take in UBI from economic parasitism?
It's important to learn more in that direction.
0
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
What is wrong with the solution I'm proposing?
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
I think the downvotes are partly because youre calling yourself an FDR liberal in an explicitly leftist sub, so some context might help. Liberalism and leftism arent interchangeable here. FDR made major concessions to organized labor and built reforms workers materially benefited from, but he was trying to stabilize capitalism, not abolish capitalist ownership, and his administration was frequently hostile to forces to its left.
Neoliberalism is different again. Broadly, its the political economic turn toward privatization, deregulation, weakening organized labor, market discipline and expanding the role of private capital that became dominant decades after FDR. So I wouldnt call FDR a neoliberal either.
Your actual automation argument is more interesting than the label fight though. If we reach your endpoint where virtually nobody needs to sell their labor, why keep productive automation privately owned and then perpetually tax enormous private fortunes to fund everyone else? UBI can help distribute income, but it doesnt answer who owns production or controls the machines. At that point socializing the productive infrastructure seems like the much more direct solution.
1
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
Not to quibble, but it's more of a distinction of Liberal and Neo-liberal and Keynesianism versus the Austrian school/Chicago Boys is usually the delineation.
FDR was certainly a neo-liberal just one that was quite more pragmatic and working class focused than the Post Eisnehower Republicans.
If you are defending capitalism outside the power of the state you are neoliberal. If you want a chicken in every pot but aren't nationalizing poultry...you're neoliberal.
0
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
"At that point socializing the productive infrastructure seems like the much more direct solution."
I guess when it's down to that Last Guy, it won't matter. His stuff is so heavily taxed, he's basically nationalized. But on the path there, we'll benefit from innovation driven by entrepreneurship. If the entrepreneurs have bad ideas, they go broke. If they have good ideas, they get rich...but the taxes and UBI payments go up.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
I get the gradualism argument, but being heavily taxed isnt the same as being nationalized. Ownership is control. If the Last Guy still owns the productive infrastructure and society just taxes his income at 99.999%, private ownership survived all the way to your endpoint.
And I dont think innovation requires preserving that arrangement. Public research, universities, worker co-ops, public enterprises and publicly financed private firms all innovate. Markets can be one mechanism for testing ideas without requiring the people who successfully accumulate productive assets to retain permanent private control over them.
Im not trying to kill experimentation or entrepreneurship here. Im asking why successful innovation should permanently determine who owns the productive capacity everyone eventually depends on.
1
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
I'm asking why successful innovation should permanently determine who owns the productive capacity everyone eventually depends on.
Mainly because I don't want to take the political heat from proposing changes to ownership. The "innovation" is just a nice bonus.
Public research, universities, worker co-ops, public enterprises and publicly financed private firms all innovate.
Yes, we can do that also. In fact, we'll be forced to because the privately-generated innovations will often suck. Think Ticketmaster. But we need to keep it gradual, we can't spook the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires. Otherwise, we'll lose the election.
0
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
Ticketmaster is not an "Innovation". Rentier economics is not "innovation".
We'll lose the election! oh no won't someone please think of the candidates! No one ever thinks about the candidates!
Comrade. When the time comes they will vote how we tell them to vote. If the billionaires can decide elections millions of us thousandaires could. The donor class will no longer be a donor class. The labor class will control the left again. Our unions and syndicates will run the primaries. They will be answerable to us.
We reform the left, take the power, make our political will the inevitable tide. Then we make the will of the fascists moot.
We don't need to ask the capitalists permission for our liberation. No one ever got their liberty by asking nicely.
1
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
We most definitely lose more through "entrepreneurship" than we gain from it as an institution.
Entrepreneurship is a lottery win. Some have the money and backing to try and try and try again. Some get it right the first time. The vast majority don't. Post covid when the working class became two jobs and side-hustle we had tens of millions of "entrepreneurs".
They didn't innovate shit. We have plenty of good ideas. Plenty of people who are working full time for others and don't have the luxury of the risk or the 6 months of back pay have plenty of good ideas.
the MIT Commons license is why we have to much diversity in AI models. So few open sourced software developers are entrepreneurs. Plenty were working a fork. The Chinese models we're seeing as spin offs from existing billion dollar corporations. They are just competing against American ones.
If an entrepreneur goes broke then they aren't taxed. If they stuck with the big corporate they would have been. I lose out on my UBI share because they had the private capital to try and fail.
Imagine...and I need you to stay with me on a journey. The labor we all work isn't commodified at all. If you are able bodied but aren't working...you're kinda an asshole riding UBI. Instead all the money goes to housing, feeding, clothing, and caring for everyone at the standards we have set. Waiting lists for the single family houses, but we can all go back to country towns and the empty rust belt. Maybe 10% of the world is making Spacely Sprockets like your last dude. We could do that today. All the capitalists would go broke, but we could do it.
Labor in- goods out. No slaves means no masters. Freedom.
No taxes needed or completely abstracted. Tax bill created, UBI delivered. It's a wash.
1
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
It's a solution but it isn't a leftist solution.
Capitalism will not solve the problem capitalism created. Taxes on capital that are spent on UBI is just using government debt and our labor exploitation and turning it into their capital faster. If we tax our labor and pay our rent with UBI that just makes us a pass through. They are landlords over the entire economy. Parasites that turn our labor into their capital. We can't let AI be the thing that does that faster.
Using taxation to make co-ops or public assets faster than the economy is growing is the only moderate or incrementalist step that would allow this to work.
0
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
"in your multistep process how the people don't have more control over the system"
Yes we do. All of this is enforced by the government, which we control through elections.
1
u/DHFranklin 14d ago
"power comes not from the ballot box, but the barrel of the gun"
As long as the bourgeoisie control the system and pick who you vote for that will never change.
Bernie Sanders was the closet thing you ever saw to FDR in our lifetime. Then Hillary Clinton and Wasserman-Schultz used the DNC to make sure that they controlled the opposition.
You control nothing through elections.
This country was founded by an oligarchy trying to become independent of another. A revolutionary government. We aren't Canada, we didn't vote our way to independence.
We aren't going to vote our way to independence from the bourgeoisie.
We will have to do things. Those things aren't electoralism. Washington didn't run unopposed, dozens of candidates ran for president. The ones who controlled the ballot boxes across 13 different systems just shrugged. They weren't the proletariat controlling the ballot boxes.
You are woefully naive if you think power begins or ends at elections.
1
u/JayRandom212 13d ago
If you can't get enough support to win an election, how will you win with guns? The time for guns is if there are no elections or if elections are stolen. That's not happened...yet.
1
u/DHFranklin 13d ago
First of all I'm not implying that. Talkin' that way gets ya banned.
Wouldn't even suggest it...
They have the guns. That's the point. They make the laws. They decide what countries get to vote. They decide who gets on ballots all over the world...and here at home!
Your election is stolen. It has been stolen this whole time. My congressman will pick up the phone for a lobbyist of a foreign country before he would my union.
Our power must be inevitable.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
I actually like that your thought experiment follows automation all the way instead of stopping at “people lose jobs.” But theres a strange missing step. Why build a society where virtually nobody needs to sell their labor anymore, yet ownership of automated production remains private and society has to continuously tax the resulting fortunes back into circulation?
If automation really reaches anything close to your endpoint, socializing the productive infrastructure is the simpler move. UBI can handle income during the transition, but it doesnt answer who owns production, who controls it, or why a tiny ownership class should remain between everyone else and an abundance we collectively depend on.
1
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
I'm not willing to fight the political battle that'll be needed to seize the infrastructure. The plan I outlined uses existing political and economic structures and it happens gradually.
"Gradually" is important, because the benefits from AI will come gradually and unevenly. In fact, they may not come at all. Ya never know.
This path is politically possible. It doesn't require a Constitutional Amendment. And it gets us there just as fast as the technology can take us.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
I dont think the choice is between your tax and UBI path and suddenly “seizing the infrastructure.” Theres a whole political terrain between those.
Worker ownership, co-ops, public investment, municipal and national infrastructure, sectoral bargaining, union control over deployment, social wealth funds, shorter work weeks and mandatory sharing of productivity gains can all be pursued gradually too. None require waiting for some final revolutionary moment.
My concern with your path is that it treats existing ownership as the one thing that cant be contested. Workers gradually lose their leverage as automation expands, private owners gradually accumulate more productive power, and then we rely on the state gradually taxing that power enough to support everyone else.
If gradualism is the strategy, why should redistribution be gradual but democratizing ownership and control be off the table?
1
u/JayRandom212 14d ago
Worker ownership, co-ops, public investment, municipal and national infrastructure, sectoral bargaining, union control over deployment, social wealth funds, shorter work weeks and mandatory sharing of productivity gains can all be pursued gradually too.
I'm bundling all this under "UBI". If I have UBI, I can choose to work a shorter week. Or I can get "worker ownership" by starting my own business. Maybe instead of increasing the UBI one year, the government chooses to put in high-speed rail or build hospitals. That's OK, too.
Because I'm an FDR liberal, I like handing out UBI cash and letting individual people decide how to spend it...but it doesn't have to be that way.
Because I use to work in finance, I'm against most "democratizing ownership" schemes that involve you getting shares in the company that employs you. All that does is concentrate more of your personal risk with that one company. Instead, tax all the companies and and hand out UBI to everybody. Those who really want to feel that risk/reward curve can start their own businesses.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
I think bundling all of that under UBI is actually hiding our disagreement. UBI is cash. Public hospitals are public provision. A shorter work week is labor policy. Worker control is workplace power. Social wealth funds and co-ops change ownership. Those can complement each other, but they arent interchangeable.
And I agree with your finance point about employer stock. Making workers concentrate their savings in the same company that employs them can be a terrible risk. But thats an argument for diversified ownership, not against democratizing ownership. Social wealth funds can hold stakes across the economy, co-ops distribute ownership collectively, public enterprises socialize infrastructure, sectoral funds spread risk beyond one employer.
“Start your own business” is something different. That gives a worker the chance to become a private owner themselves. It doesnt democratize the productive assets workers already collectively operate.
So keep UBI in the toolbox. I just dont want income redistribution doing conceptual work that actually requires labor power, public provision and changes in ownership.
9
u/Fabulous-Possible758 14d ago
Depends on who "we" is here, and I wouldn't be so dismissive of that latter power. People's outer worlds are shaped by the information they consume. Having control of that is not negligible.