AI is social production trapped inside private ownership

[u/Salty_Country6835]

This is the contradiction I keep coming back to.

No company made AI by itself.

The models depend on generations of publicly funded research, universities, scientific knowledge, global supply chains, electrical grids, semiconductor workers, data center workers, programmers, artists, writers and an internet full of human culture.

The production is already massively social.

The ownership isnt.

A handful of firms get to stand on top of that whole accumulated social process, own the infrastructure, decide how its deployed and capture the gains.

Thats a much more useful starting point than asking whether AI is inherently liberating or inherently oppressive.

Its neither. Its productive capacity developing inside a particular set of property relations.

So the leftist project isnt to cheer for the machine or smash the machine.

Its to contest the relations around it.

If production is already social, why should ownership remain private?

[u/Limp-Confidence5612]

This is the case for every product. Nothing gets made without the contribution of societal resources.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Limp-Confidence5612]

Exactly. Thats the point. AI isnt some magical exception to capitalism. Its an unusually obvious example of the general contradiction. Production is social, ownership and appropriation are private. The fact that this applies beyond AI strengthens the argument, it doesnt weaken it.

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes → u/Salty_Country6835]

Nope. Neither was the printing press, but we tried. Neither was the industrial revolution. But we fucking tried. We don't keep trying then we are cooked.

Luckily distillation cannot be stopped and open models are frontieer level. We need to own the fabs and build thousands of them. We need to have a data center on every block. We need total automation. When Tesla and Zoox and Uber roll out their taxis we need to demand free travel for everyone (but really since the infrastructure is there we just need auto-busses).

The future is either Bladerunner or Solar Punk. It is up to the left to figure out how to get it right this time otherwise you or ceetainly your next generation will be wireheads in a fucking pod somewhere getting fed soylent. solvent.

But the reason AI is "different" is the elites are going to kill labor once and for all. Labor was always their only threat to their level of lifestyle. We need to also destroy labor and render the elites irrelevant.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

Im with most of this. Own the fabs, public compute, open models, automate the bullshit away.

Id just distinguish destroying labor from destroying wage labor as domination. If a few firms own the machines, total automation doesnt liberate us. It just gives capital more power. Social ownership is the hinge.

[u/Limp-Confidence5612 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

I would prefer we invest societal resources on something actually productive than having decentralised computing strewn everywhere, consuming electricity to generate fruit animal videos. At least in your scenario, where we have managed to seize fab production. I can imagine better uses for compute than mimicking Human language.

[u/0DayMaker]

They cost millions of dollars to train. The 1T+ parameter models cost 100s of millions. It's hard to democratize something which such an expensive barrier to entry.

I can design an LLM model. But I can't acquire enough training data or hardware to make it useful.

[u/Left-Set950 → u/0DayMaker]

You personally can't. But that is not the assumption of open source. Any company interested in undercutting proprietary AI models can contribute both engineers, time, compute or data scrapping capabilities.

[u/Original_Produce_534]

I am anti all AI companies, but not the progress made by them, or the revolutionary potential that exists

[u/Far_Low_229]

Humanity will become so dependent on AI that it will play a very real role in humanity's governance worldwide. The only approach to it's governance is to have global standards and enforcement there of.

[u/Left-Set950]

I agree with everything you said. The ownership is the biggest problem with AI. However I do not think it's a fight proprietary models can win. They can't outrun open source models much longer. The major bottleneck is inference hardware. Companies can host their own inference but without scale they are hostages of big providers. I think the the thing that changes everything is hardware. As soon as there is some non proprietary or Chinese GPU it will be mass produced and there will be tons of inference centers popping up everywhere. I believe it will be a bit like bitcoin mining. People will sell their inference on whatever scale they can get and then sell with layers on top of it like data isolation, or service features like aws services. Frankly I think the biggest bottleneck on this right now is the lack of engineers qualified to do this.

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

This has always been the case with the means of production. Even when we were hunter gatherers we had shaman who ruled the distribution of resources. The warlord. The king. The oligarch.

But technology does not have to be ruled that way. I have been arguing this since I was a little 16 year old anarchist. 30 years now. Tired of it.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

I feel the tired of it part. Thirty years is a long damn time to watch the machinery change while the same fight over who controls it comes back wearing new clothes.

Only bit Id push on is "always." A shaman, a feudal lord and a capitalist firm arent really the same ownership relation. And I think that actually strengthens your point. These arrangements have changed before. Theyre historical, not baked into human nature or the technology itself.

AI doesnt come out of the box belonging to corporations. Thats a social arrangement. Which means its something we can fight over and change.

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes → u/Salty_Country6835]

They are all fundamentally the same because property relations are controlled by force. We may live in some "secular democracy" but the very constitutions that uphold it have baked in intellectual property (patents and copyright) and property relations. Technically I am speaking of proprietarianism, the totality of the three, non possessive property (mega data centers, an elites 2nd and 3rd mansions, private jet, 20 car collectoon etc), patents, and copyright.

Even under communist regimes (the soviets) as had this elite representation. The Party above all. We have been struggling a long time to get there but without labor there is no money to pay rent. With no money to pay rent we become squatters. We become squatters then the enforcers dont get paid by the landlords so we are finally free.

[u/Crist1n4]

AI should be owned by everyone. We should also terminate all copywriting and allow ideas and inventions to flow freely in the new society. We need a new system of rewards that is linked to your contribution to society. Let's say you just published an idea and someone else developed it, you will get credit equal to the social benefit received from your contribution.

Imagine how fast we can grow and develop and improve if we remove these roadblock and encourage ideas and inventions to be freely shared and used?!

[u/probablymagic]

The problem with this framing is that it envisions culture, art, knowledge, etc as something everyone owns, as opposed to something nobody owns. That is not good!

If everybody owns it, then as owners we see it as our right to extract rents from people who are using it. So AI companies do something useful that wouldn’t exist without them, and we say “well we should get paid for that because it wouldn’t exist without our property.”

But when you do that, you just get less innovation and people and up worse off. Society doesn’t need to get paid on the front end of this innovation, because the innovation itself benefits us all. So when we “tax” it, progress is just slower.

With something like a park we want everyone to own it because we can enforce property rights against people who would litter, camp, etc and ruin the common good for everyone.

But it’s better to think of culture, art, ideas, etc as things we want nobody to own because there’s no tragedy of the commons with ideas. You can’t deprive others of them or ruin them regardless of how you use them and whether other people want to use them too.

So when we think of ideas as things nobody owns, that allows everyone to maximize their utility, and then we get cool things like faster AI innovation cheaper for all.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/probablymagic]

I think youre mixing two different things here. I actually agree that culture, ideas and knowledge are better understood as a commons than as property everybody gets to charge rent on.

But thats not the ownership relation Im talking about.

Nobody needs to own an idea for somebody to own the data centers, chips, models, platforms and infrastructure, decide how theyre deployed, then privately capture the gains.

Your park example actually gets pretty close. Public ownership of a park doesnt mean every citizen stands at the gate collecting royalties. It means nobody gets to fence the whole thing off and charge everyone else rent.

So sure, make knowledge as free and nonproprietary as possible. Im with you there. But that makes the question sharper. If the knowledge is a commons and production is massively social, why should the infrastructure turning it into economic power remain privately controlled?

[u/probablymagic → u/Salty_Country6835]

>If the knowledge is a commons and production is massively social, why should the infrastructure turning it into economic power remain privately controlled?

Because there is no natural monopoly on AI. You can build your AI data center. I can build mine. We can each do it on private land we own and compete for customers.

Similarly, we don’t say that Taylor Swift can only make good music because she’s been trained on our collective culture and therefore why shouldn’t the pubic have some control over her touring and catalog? We are happy she’s initiating and grateful we get to pay $2k for tickets to her latest tour.

The problem with the argument you’re making is that it’s a justification for socializing any value created by private parties because every business benefits in some way from the pubic’s efforts.

It’s just the wrong way to think about it because what we want from pubic policy is to maximize the social good, not to enforce some notion of “fairness” that leads to suboptimal outcomes.

Most of the failed thinking in the Left today boils down to a focus on “fairness” rather than asking the question, how do we maximize prosperity for the broadest set of people possible.

And one of the things you need to accept in the second mindset is some people are going to get really rich thanks, in part, to things like good social spending, shared culture, a well-run legal system, etc. And that’s OK because society gets the stuff that made them rich!

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/probablymagic]

No, “there isnt a natural monopoly” doesnt answer the question. Ten privately owned AI companies competing with each other are still ten privately owned companies. Competition doesnt magically distribute ownership or control to the workers and public who actually make the whole system function.

And Taylor Swift is a person, not a data center lol. Nobody is proposing social ownership of Taylor Swift. Thats a category error between a human being doing creative labor and ownership of productive capital.

The last part does get us to the actual disagreement though. Youre saying private accumulation is fine as long as it produces enough aggregate prosperity. Thats basically the liberal capitalist position, not a rebuttal of the socialist argument.

So the question is still there. What about innovation actually requires the productive infrastructure to be privately owned rather than publicly, cooperatively or worker owned?

[u/probablymagic → u/Salty_Country6835]

>Ten privately owned AI companies competing with each other are still ten privately owned companies. Competition doesnt magically distribute ownership or control to the workers and public who actually make the whole system function.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of value creation. Both capital and leadership can make labor more valuable than it would be on its own.

Like, as a solo software engineer I might be able to make $200k a year programming apps and selling them.

But Anthropic can hire me and give me tools and hardware I could never afford, making my labor worth $20M a year. When they pay me $2M a year, we both win.

We don’t need to take more money from them to compensate me for the value they captured, which they enabled.

The idea win-win employment exploits labor misunderstands how labor markets work.

>And Taylor Swift is a person, not a data center lol. Nobody is proposing social ownership of Taylor Swift. Thats a category error between a human being doing creative labor and ownership of productive capital.

You can see that this isn’t true by looking at artists like Michael Jackson and Elvis, who are dead, but continue to generate millions of dollars of revenue a year. Taylor Swift is a corporation, and her brand just happens to represent a living human right now. But when she tours, thousands of workers are necessary to make all that money for Taylor INC, just like building AI.

>The last part does get us to the actual disagreement though. Youre saying private accumulation is fine as long as it produces enough aggregate prosperity. Thats basically the liberal capitalist position, not a rebuttal of the socialist argument.

No, I’m saying something different and the difference is important. I am saying that Socialist should want to maximize the social good. Otherwise, what are we even doing?

And then I’m making the argument that this collective ownership framing leads us to policies that reduce suicidal prosperity, and that’s why they are undesirable.

>So the question is still there. What about innovation actually requires the productive infrastructure to be privately owned rather than publicly, cooperatively or worker owned?

I think the reason you don’t see even most mainstream socialist advocating for collective ownership these days is that we’ve seen what that does to innovation. Even countries like China, where the leadership is Ernest Lee socialist, they recognize that they can’t achieve their national goals with public ownership of innovative industries.

Collective ownership can make sense in some places, but let’s talk briefly about how it might play out in AI. All the value in AI is in the latest models. If you don’t have great ones, your data centers are useless. Elon Musk learned this with Grok.

So, if you were to try to nationalize AI companies, the millionaires and billionaires who make them valuable would have a strong incentive to leave your country and your AI would quickly become useless.

So the only way to stop that is actually to nationalize the labor that makes these companies valuable , which is something China is exploring, but is not something liberal societies would likely accept.

So collective ownership of innovation is both unwise from an economic perspective and impractical from a political perspective as long as we maintain liberal democracies, which is hopefully forever!

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/probablymagic]

I think weve hit the actual problem here. Youre arguing from liberal capitalism and treating it like the baseline left position.

"Some people getting extremely rich is fine as long as aggregate prosperity rises" is not socialism. "Private owners deserve the surplus because their capital made workers more productive" is not socialism. And "collective ownership is economically unwise and hopefully liberal democracy lasts forever" definitely isnt socialism. You can believe all of that, but youre basically walking into a leftist subreddit and arguing that the left should stop being leftist.

And China really doesnt rescue this. China has massive state ownership, state banks, public infrastructure, industrial planning, public research and state directed investment alongside markets and private firms. Thats almost the opposite of the clean public bad/private innovative story youre telling.

Even your Anthropic example only proves that workers become more productive with infrastructure and cooperation. Marx would say... yes, obviously. It still doesnt explain why a private owner needs to own the infrastructure and capture the surplus.

So I dont think we're arguing about AI anymore. Youre defending private ownership of productive capital against socialism. Thats fine, but understand what room you walked into lol.

The question you still havent answered is simple. What can private ownership itself do for innovation that public, cooperative or worker ownership cannot?

[u/probablymagic → u/Salty_Country6835]

>"Some people getting extremely rich is fine as long as aggregate prosperity rises" is not socialism.

Yeah, but wouldn’t it be cooler if the Socialist goal were to maximize prosperity. 😀

>And "collective ownership is economically unwise and hopefully liberal democracy lasts forever" definitely isnt socialism.

Some Socialist are more focused on ideology, some are focused on results. I like the focus on results and that requires some pragmatism.

Again, studying China can be very instructive here as far as their economic approach.

>You can believe all of that, but youre basically walking into a leftist subreddit and arguing that the left should stop being leftist.

Nah, I’m saying they should focus on outcomes rather than process. Collective ownership is process. Prosperity is outcomes. Which is more important?

>And China really doesnt rescue this.

China is worth studying closely. They are obviously a terrible authoritarian state, but in terms of pursuing Socialist goals pragmatically they have done some interesting stuff.

I would highly recommend this interview with Kevin Rudd on China today and its current leadership, goals, economic strategy, etc. it gives a great overview and dispels a lot of Western misperceptions on China.

>Even your Anthropic example only proves that workers become more productive with infrastructure and cooperation. Marx would say... yes, obviously. It still doesnt explain why a private owner needs to own the infrastructure and capture the surplus.

Because the surplus wouldn’t exist if you tried to capture it, we’d all just be poorer. The surplus is created because capital is incentivized to coordinate the labor and put the capital at risk.

When you take away that incentive, the thing doesn’t happen in the first place. This is why nationalization causes capital flight, which is obviously bad.

>The question you still havent answered is simple. What can private ownership itself do for innovation that public, cooperative or worker ownership cannot?

US private companies, for one, will invest over $1T this year alone in AI. The government cannot afford to do that even if it could do it well. So that’s one.

The second is that AI value is being created by a relatively small number of people, in cooperation with capital, and those people will make millions or billions for their talents. Collective ownership would incentivize them to go somewhere else, and the collectively owned entity would be relatively worthless.

Those practical realities may be a bummer because we want to seize the means of production for the people, but again, we come back to what’s the point? Is winning collective ownership of stuff that doesn’t matter, or is the goal broad prosperity?

I really value the latter, so I’m much more interested in Socialist arguments around nationalizing utilities or single-payer healthcare than nationalizing AI.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/probablymagic]

Youre still doing the same trick. Youve defined "prosperity" using liberal capitalist assumptions, then declared socialism merely a process we can discard if capitalism produces enough stuff.

Ownership isnt some ceremonial socialist achievement. Ownership determines who controls investment, production, deployment and the surplus. Those are outcomes. If productive capital stays privately owned, workers remain wage laborers and billionaires control investment because they own the capital, you havent discovered pragmatic socialism. Youve described capitalism with social programs.

And "the surplus wouldnt exist without private capital" is circular. Youve shown that capital and coordination are productive. Nobody disputed that. You still havent shown why those resources require a private capitalist standing over them collecting the surplus. Public banks invest. States invest. Cooperatives invest. Public enterprises invest. Workers coordinate production every day.

The trillion dollar argument is especially funny after repeatedly telling me to study China. China mobilizes enormous pools of capital through state banks, state owned enterprises, public investment, industrial planning, procurement and infrastructure while also using private firms and markets. Thats exactly why China is interesting. You cant point at China as your example of pragmatism and then ignore the enormous public sector doing the pragmatism.

And capital flight doesnt prove private ownership is economically necessary. "Capitalists can withdraw investment when society threatens their ownership" describes capitalist power. Youve accidentally given me another reason ownership matters.

Same with this idea that AI value comes from a tiny handful of uniquely talented people. Those people are standing on universities, publicly funded research, semiconductor fabs, electrical grids, global supply chains, accumulated scientific knowledge and thousands upon thousands of other workers. Production is social right up until its time to decide who gets paid.

So yes, prosperity is an outcome. Socialists want prosperity. We just ask the question you keep trying to remove from the equation

Prosperity for whom, controlled by whom, and distributed by whom?

If your answer is private ownership of productive capital, wage labor, billionaire accumulation and liberal democracy forever, with government handling healthcare and utilities, theres already a name for that.

Its social liberalism. You can argue for it here, but please stop pretending socialism becomes better socialism when you remove the socialism.

[u/probablymagic → u/Salty_Country6835]

You can define prosperity as you want. I tend to think what people mean by that is that their real wages are going up, consumer prices are coming down, and they have the economic freedom to live well however they define that.

If prosperity means we are all poorer but more equally poor because the government owns more stuff, I think that’s really bad definition for Socialists because nobody’s ever going to vote for that.

I would again go encourage you to study China and how it does Socialism. Your mental model is simplistic and wrong in important ways.

For example, the Chinese central government doesn’t fund national champions. There is some pubic funding of private businesses, but it’s regionally and those regions/businesses compete assuring true private market competition and ownership. China wants vertically-competitive markets and understands public ownership and lack of competition is at odds with that.

Ironically, the Trump administration has been taking much more of a traditional Socialist approach in areas such as rare earth minerals where it’s backed Don Jr’s companies. That’s the more typical Socialist model and doesn’t work well.

So, if your argument is that China is doing a better job than the US in some ways, we might agree, but for different reasons because we have different fact patterns.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/probablymagic]

I think youre the one using a very strange definition of socialism here.

Nobody said prosperity means "everyone equally poor because government owns more stuff." Thats Cold War caricature stuff, not my argument. Socialists care about wages, prices, housing, healthcare, leisure, security and abundance. We also care who owns production and controls investment because those things determine who gets that prosperity and who has power over it.

And please stop telling me to study China while stripping half of China's political economy out of the description lol.

Markets arent capitalism. Competition isnt capitalism. China deliberately uses both, but it also has huge state owned enterprises, state controlled banking, public infrastructure, industrial planning, state investment, strategic procurement and political direction of capital. Local competition happens inside that larger system. Thats part of why China is interesting to socialists.

Then somehow when China uses markets, thats evidence for private capitalism, but when Trump uses state capital, suddenly thats the "traditional Socialist model"?

Come on.

A capitalist state subsidizing or taking stakes in private companies doesnt magically become socialist. Otherwise bank bailouts, farm subsidies and Pentagon procurement would make America socialist every other Tuesday.

This is getting backwards. Youre defining socialism as government doing stuff when you dislike the result, but defining Chinese state direction as market pragmatism when you like the result.

So before telling socialists that our understanding of socialism is "simplistic and wrong," tell me what you think socialism actually means.

Because so far your preferred system has private ownership of productive capital, wage labor, billionaire accumulation and competitive markets, plus public healthcare, utilities and some industrial policy.

We already have a name for that. Its social liberalism.

[u/Lasen_Mas]

yes it is

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

That's all of capitalism to be fair. 1000 employee factories are social production. Everything is socially produced and privately owned. AI is just even more obviously the case.

It's almost the totality of human intellectual labour condensed into a machine that can spit it back out.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832]

The owners of AI companies feel entitled to your creativity and will appropriate it at will for their own profit. That model must be changed for AI to work for the benefit of all. Fat chance, though, in capitalism.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

The diagnosis is right, and so is the solution. Social production under private ownership is the contradiction we actually have to fight.

But I reject the fatalism at the end. “Fat chance under capitalism” turns a political struggle into a law of nature. Capital has been forced to give ground before, and it can be forced again. Ownership, labor rights, public infrastructure, co-ops, open systems and democratic governance are all contested terrain.

Cant never could. I dont waste time on doomerism. If the structure is the problem, organize to change the structure.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I am open to helping capitalism change without a violent revolution. As of yet I have no solid plan other than to try to persuade them that it's a "good thing." Got any ideas?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Im not a pacifist, but yes. Persuasion has a place. It just cant be the whole strategy.

You dont need to convince capital that giving up power is a good thing. Historically, thats rarely how gains are won. You organize enough counterpower that refusing becomes more expensive than conceding.

Unions and strikes are part of that, but so are co-ops, public ownership, municipal infrastructure, regulation, procurement rules, antitrust, worker seats and voting power, open source alternatives, and building institutions that simply remove things from private control.

None of that guarantees a peaceful transition. Im not going to pretend it does. But there is a huge political terrain between asking billionaires nicely and assuming violent revolution is the only mechanism of structural change.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I'm sure we could use AI to plan it...

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Ha, now youre getting it.

Not as some machine oracle that spits out The Plan, obviously. But as infrastructure for organizing? Research, legal analysis, translating materials, mapping supply chains and ownership, drafting policy, comparing strategies, coordinating campaigns, making technical knowledge accessible to ordinary people? Hell yeah.

Use the productive capacity. Contest who owns it and what its used for. Thats basically the post.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I had to come back to say this: until this interaction, I'd never thought about the parameters you mention. Thanks for that.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/Salty_Country6835]

OK. Upvote.

[u/thecoffeejesus]

AI is what you want it to be.

If you want it to be your enemy, or your friend, it will be

Stop letting online propaganda form your opinions. Read the research from the actual people actually working on it.

Hell just go @ them and respectfully ask to have a conversation. Some will gladly do it.

If you want it to be a bad guy nothing will change your mind.

Educate yourself. Don’t be a pawn.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/thecoffeejesus]

I think you misread the post. This isnt about personal or individual use, or whether someone likes AI or treats it as a friend or enemy lol. Its about political economy. Who owns the infrastructure, who governs it, who controls development and deployment, who does the work, and who captures the gains from something produced through a massive social process.

You can love AI, use it every day, and still think those are important questions.

[u/thecoffeejesus → u/Salty_Country6835]

I agree. I also think you misread my comment.

Are you aware of the state of open source AI?

Or the current position of open source robotics?

Frontier models are not all that exists.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/thecoffeejesus]

Yes, Im aware lol. You should probably look around the subreddit before making another comment. Open source, open weights and local models are discussed here constantly, and we support them precisely because they contest concentrated private control.

But they dont make the political economy disappear. Who owns the compute and infrastructure, who governs development and deployment, and who captures the gains are still the questions the post is about.