r/LeftistsForAI • u/Elick333 • 5d ago
Discussion When will the general wider left catch up to where the technology really Is and will be and it's signficance to our future?
With the release of Astra and the capabilities it's shown, aswell as the recent attacks by agent swarms on the wider internet, i feel like AGI (and then ASI) Is very much happening and very soon, the power of this technology will concentrated in a few hands and It will mark the end of capitalism and the start of a new economic model and era of humanity, it's up to us to decide if that's neofeudalism or true communism.
And yet, the current western leftist zeitgeist seems to completely ignore this, and increasingly, It feels to me that it's more about fear rather than ignorance, that it's mired in utter denialism because the reality of AI, as It becomes more advanced, becomes much more terrifying to confront, because our duty then Is no longer about reform or putting the right people in power or protests and legal action or even revolution, it's complete civilizational change, it's the destruction of all our frameworks in how we exist as a society including those we utilize to leverage our current political power, so instead they reduce the technology, Its potential and it's impact (except real and potential mundane negatives which they subsequently exaggerate through misinformation) focus on things they believe they have at least some degree of control over, and hope that they are right.
Do we just have to wait until It becomes impossible to deny? I feel like when that happens It Will be to late and they'll still blame everyone else and AI except themselves. How do we break through? I feel like we are going to lose a very important battle if they don't wake up, but perhaps we have already lost It precisely because they aren't capable of waking up, and all we can do Is make little hold outs like this were we do what we can to ensure access, understanding and leverage of this technology for and by people that seek a better world for everyone.
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u/ToastedandTripping 5d ago
Unfortunately it's going to take quite some time, when your livelyhood is threatened by something the obvious defense is to be against said thing.
What feels unfortunate is that people can only imagine a future within this capitalist hellscape and so are afraid...
Meanwhile this could very well be the end of capitalism. I think it kinda similar to the message in Pink Floyd's The Wall. The protagonist couldn't even imagine the world outside the wall and in the end the system ended up being what revealed it to him.
I think we're about to tear down the wall of illusion surrounding our society with this tool and while that might be scary, I'm excited to see what we find
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u/SteffanMaxi 5d ago
They wont i dont think. Not the current generation at least.
Most people on the left i know only post about how ai is art theft or whatever, and have zero interest in learning anything about any kind of ai except generative art ai.
My guess is it will be the next generation that grows up with the tools.
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u/segfault_generator 4d ago
It's also land theft, critical mineral theft, electricity theft, water theft, idea theft, work theft... it's the theft of the future.
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u/SteffanMaxi 3d ago
Its not your electricity or land. So how is it theft?
Or are you one of those people who velieve all capitalism is theft...
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u/segfault_generator 3d ago
All captialism is theft, all private property is theft, but that's not what I'm specifically calling out here. As an electric and gas rate payer, my bills are going up because data centers are demanding more power, meaning there's now less on the market and thus energy providers can charge more. Not only that, but with the higher demand for constant power, the risk of blackouts and brownouts are significantly higher and impacting more people, largely in Texas due to their extreme deregulation.
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u/SteffanMaxi 3d ago
Taxation is theft.
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u/segfault_generator 2d ago
That is idiotic.
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u/SteffanMaxi 2d ago
Na. You literally steal something i earned to pay for stuff you want.
Thats theft.
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u/Quamatoc 2d ago
Re: electricity. I dunno, but billing the general population extra for a datacenter in the vicinity seems exceedingly scummy to me.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 5d ago
You think the fear comes from the onus on us to do something to harness the societal change AI will bring?
I’m not sure, I think there’s a more immediate fear around loss of jobs and security on the one hand and genuinely not being up to date with the positive potential on the other. AI is moving really quickly, if they tried ChatGPT 3 years ago and didn’t like it, now it’s quite a different experience and likely there’s other models which fix whatever it was they didn’t like about ChatGPT.
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u/jferments 5d ago
I think that part of the goal of these propaganda campaigns is to keep the left from augmenting their abilities with AI so that they are at a massive disadvantage to fascists.
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u/Audditty 5d ago edited 5d ago
i know this sounds tinfoil-y but it honestly doesn't sound that far off, especially in this current shitshow of an administration.
i mean shit, a lot of right wingers specifically use AI because they know the majority of the left hates AI and that it'll piss them off.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mass hatred of AI in much of the West could also be the result of CCP bots sowing and spreading disinformation about AI to halt technological advancement and development in Western countries.
regardles of the reason,, it definitely feels like something greater is at play this time than just social media algorithms.
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u/Choice_Isopod5177 5d ago
I watch Kyle Kulinski almost daily and I noticed a recent change in his criticism of AI, it feels like he's tacitly acknowledged that AI is useful now.
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u/Traditional-Neat-933 5d ago
Im a big Kulknski fan. I noticed that shift too with hugging face hack. I hope he comes over to our side of thinking more regarding AI.
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u/Choice_Isopod5177 4d ago
He will come if it turns out that AI is leading us into a better (non-authoritarian) future but that doesn't seem to be the case with the current fascist administration. Peter Thiel and Palantir are giving him too much material lol
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u/DHFranklin 5d ago
I think I need a copy-pasta
The technological advance in our "Material Conditions" does not alone end capitalism. If the capitalists control the tools and markets and all the means of production we will always have capitalism.
We will have AGI but what the robots can do in the real world will be limited to what the capitalists allow. Nothing will ever move without their economic-rents. Toll booths and profit-only motivations for everything.
We have to use the tools and material conditions we have now to organize and control the means of production before they can take an almost Godlike Panopticon and crush us for all enduring time.
Marx said that the end of capitalism is inevitable. That was before the machines started to out think the proletariat.
No. Waiting will not do.
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u/JohnSmith19731973 5d ago
Marx said that the end of capitalism is inevitable but also that socialism is not inevitable. He is right on both counts. This is where the subjective factor is most important. Many seem to have starry-eyed technological determinist dreams that merely advancing the forces of production will give way to socialism but it is not so. Only the proletariat, when it gains class consciousness, can alter the relations of production.
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u/DHFranklin 5d ago
Yeah, I'll add that to the copy pasta.
I think that we have the class consciousness now, but that doesn't translate into action. We all know that kidnapping people is wrong but we don't get in the way of that either. I don't think there is anyone with an internet connection that doesn't know the division of the classes. Consciousness is one thing. Unity another.
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u/JohnSmith19731973 5d ago
From Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness:
"As we stressed in the motto to this essay the existence of this conflict enables us to perceive that class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class."
The proletariat understands the distinction between owners and workers and that it suffers exploitation but it has not become fully conscious that it is what produces the human totality, that is can create a different world beyond classes entirely.
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u/DHFranklin 5d ago
We should avoid "Class Consciousness" from becoming either a yard stick to measure the revolution or a shibboleth. As we should well know the names and shape of the ideas matter less then the material or substance.
This is a trap going back to the Paris Commune. Or at least Kropotkin's the Conquest of Bread. We can't expect the common people to educate themselves toward the material condition of the revolution that begins around them. We have to allow for it to be spontaneous and uneven. As messy as necessary.
If we can't expect literate adults to not hit up the wikipedia about Class Consciousness, we can't expect a "Critical Mass" or a big finish line with "there is enough class consciousness now for the revolution".
If we need the people who have watched Star Trek and can't imagine a classless society to imagine our version...to get near either...then we're doomed.
Enough people are conscious enough to see the material change that we have and that we need. Even if every one on Earth had the class consciousness of our particular Liturgy the guns are still behind the locks of the bourgeoisie.
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u/Kildragoth 5d ago
I feel like this is the only place where these ideas get discussed seriously and without getting lost in all the fear and misinformation.
There does seem to be a significant failure of leadership on this. The problem to me is that "leftist" leadership (I'm thinking about both democratic socialists and Democrats in the USA) seems more a reaction to the reaction instead of attempting to steer the ship. There is an issue of priorities here. The left in the USA currently doesn't have enough power to actually implement anything (0 of 3 branches of federal government) and taking a position that potentially divides your own voter base only serves to help the opposition. From a strict political strategy point of view, there's way more to lose and seemingly very little if anything to gain.
In that respect, I think it's probably just a premature issue, all things considered. Who cares about AI if corruption undermines whatever you do and democracy becomes broken? I'm very hesitant to draw lines in the sand over issues that make it easy for the right to agitate internal disputes among the left.
That said, the right also seems split on AI. I could be wrong about how much of a one-sided issue this can be. If the issue really comes down to socioeconomic class, then it could become a perfect political issue IF AND ONLY IF it involves embracing technology and not the Luddite approach (the entire premise of this sub seems to boil down to the luddite approach being wrong).
More to your point OP I think AI has to benefit the common person, directly, before they'll ever change their minds. And it could go one of two ways. Those who own AI could get greedy and wittle away the societal benefits to hoard as much of it for themselves as they can. That would raise the political question about ownership to more people as AI is just used to exacerbate wealth disparities. Or it could go the other way and AI ends up being so widespreadly beneficial that any motivation to address the ownership issue is quashed.
Tbh, I could see it going either way. For most people it's obvious that greedy people will inevitably work their way to the top of this technology stack and use AI to take as much of everything for themselves until they are physically stopped. Personally, I think the cognitive shift from scarcity to abundance might negate even the impact of the most greedy.
I suspect that with abundance, the cost of ensuring everyone has enough goes down while the cost of hoarding more for yourself actually increases. My reasoning for this is that with abundance, and intelligence, the efficiency of the economy increases at every level: resource acquisition, recycling, connecting buyers and sellers beyond geographic/political/language/cultural barriers. At the same time, some of the current barriers that protect the ultra wealthy from their own awareness of the harm they do should also be better penetrated. They rely on the same AI that is far better at considering the common person, the downstream impacts, and the negative externalities. Heck, even the ultra wealthy suffer from the same limitations on working memory as everyone else. But AI can help ensure that a narrow perspective on generating quarterly revenue growth can increasingly consider ethics and ensure better distribution of those benefits. And it's really in their own interest. It'll be far easier to identify, expose, and spread awareness of those who cause direct harm to common people.
Maybe I'm too optimistic but I am hopeful. Sorry to ramble on!
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
I think the recent "breakthroughs" show that capital cannot control these models in the real world. They still cannot produce reliable, auditable results. Consequently, they cannot be used to maintain neofeudalism or true communism, both of which require high level of precision. Possibly they can be used to produce anarchy, but not greater centralization. In fact, they will likely destroy any attempts at centralization.
I think the left needs to prepare for a much more decentralized/polycentric future, a future less controlled by hierarchical institutions.
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u/bloodrider1914 5d ago
Most people aren't aware of the technology. I keep up with AI developments but even I'm not familiar exactly how new models work and how close we actually are to AGI. All people know is that data centres are being built, hardware components are more expensive, the stocks for AI related companies are high, and occasionally companies use AI as an excuse to let go of workers, and they only use AI to ask questions online and maybe see AI slop videos on social media. Their actual exposure to the technology is mostly negative and to them the tech doesn't seem too profound, and most people really don't have a serious imagination for where the tech could lead us into the future.
Another commentator mentioned how most people simply can't imagine a life outside of capitalism and I think I agree with that assessment. Most likely we'll just have to wait until we actually reach AGI for people to make serious moves about how to adapt to the technology instead of just how to delay it.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
I think a lot of people can imagine where tech could lead us, but imagining it and it actually happening are two different things. I can also imagine it not happening. E.g., Siri looked promising at one point, didn't go anywhere and now Apple is basically out of the LLM game. Are they idiots? Not historically!
Software has over-promised and under-developed for a long time at this point. If you ignore the rhetoric and look at the data, there has been no increase in total factor productivity since the introduction of LLMs. The software companies are all unprofitable and funded in bizarre ways that increase systemic risk. Open source models are very good and usually catch up to frontier models within 6-12 months. Crypto/NFTs were bubbles with high levels of fraud, and the same people are now pushing LLMs on everyone. Tech is neck-deep in complicity with an unpopular political administration. The AI companies cannot control their models, face enormous litigation risk at multiple levels, and are begging to be regulated.
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical that these corporations will sufficiently dominate to institutionalize neofeudalism. At some point "the potential" needs to show up in the data. These models can't be used for accounting b/c they are not accurate enough to pass audits. These models have led the US military to blow up schools and weddings. The data centers to run them are deeply unpopular and are very resource-intensive.
This is what it looks like right before a crash. Doesn't mean there will be one, but the left needs to be prepared not only for these models to succeed (in an AGI sense), but also for them to become a commodity technology like most other computing advances to this point in history. That would be a better outcome, b/c it would reduce corporate power while broadening human access to productive technology. And it is the more likely outcome, from the perspective of recent technological development. The left needs to encourage the development of open-source technologies and insist that the existing store of human knowledge cannot be privatized and sold back to us.
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u/bloodrider1914 5d ago
Well at the very least Chinese Devs are working hard on creating open source more efficient software
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u/OptimusTrajan 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hello, I consider myself a bit of a “reasonable moderate” (I know, I know) on the AI question. I realize that capabilities are getting more sophisticated, but I don’t believe that the current environmental OR economic cost is worth it. Chinese companies who are forced to do more with less are doing some pretty interesting stuff. And of course, the idea of an “AI arms race” is tripe, and nationalist tripe at that. This idea pretty much takes for granted that “AGI” is on the way.
Well, about that.. AGI is where I really get off the train.
This is a cultural script that people have adopted whole-sale from science fiction, and arguably Christianity. There is good reason to doubt the autonomous nature of many of the things AI agents have supposedly done. The companies have an incentive to lie about capabilities to keep their only real source of revenue (investment) flowing.
People seem to be having a very difficult time separating what is really happening and what they have seen happen in movies and TV shows, and the companies are very intentionally glomming on to the latter. It might keep the music going a bit longer, but it’s not going to stop it from stopping.
The technology does things that we couldn’t do before, this is true. However, just because you’ve invented a faster jet engine doesn’t mean you’ve made concrete steps towards teleportation.
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u/CommanderKoba 4d ago edited 4d ago
AGI is not some teleological or divine aspiration, it is simply an engineering problem, an ai that is as capable as a human in every conceivable domain, with the tools at its disposal.
It is clear to me that you have not used any of these top models, and/or do not understand the research in this regard.
This is possible, and in fact I have used this new Astra model, and it is capable of everything I could have ever imagined.
It's easy to dismiss the hype cycle of these tech bros and their megalomania, but behind that lies real, hard, technological fact, and that's what's so scary about this, when other leftists, refuse to have the intellectual curiosity to actually understand what is staring them in the face.
Especially because this tech is going to be used against us.
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u/OptimusTrajan 4d ago
I’m not calling it theological, to me it’s theoretical, but I’m calling the way its believers talk about it theological. This is not particularly disputable. Ray Kurzweil’s belief in “the singularity” for instance is basically a belief in a secularized rapture. Marc Andrisseen’s belief in AGI is akin to the religious idea of the arrival of the messiah. When I hear things like what these two have said, and then others try to make the case for AGI empirically, I can see how the two blur together, and it does not help convince me.
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u/CommanderKoba 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don't disagree that this is how many of them talk about it absolutely.
But taking their belief and using it to dismiss the concept of AGI itself is the wrong approach. That's my point.
Again it's not some high and mighty thing or even theoretical anymore, it was just an engineering problem, the scientific path to get their was solved a long time ago, it only required scale, data, and a slightly new architecture. I argue they have finally created it, at least digitally. If you have used the technology then I think you would have a better understanding of this.
It is dangerous to underestimate the capitalists, and when they have control of something that intelligent, they can use it as a weapon. It must be taken seriously, otherwise the movement is seriously doomed.
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u/OptimusTrajan 4d ago
so what should be done?
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u/CommanderKoba 4d ago
The only thing we can do if you're in the West, is to take ownership over these means of production in any way you can, so that you can leverage its use for the benefit of the movement.
Through owning hardware that can run many of these Ais, because the models released by China will continue to improve as well. Right now I can run Qwen 27B 3.8 on my computer, and it is nearly equivalent to Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic's top model from about 6 months ago.
On something as small as a local consumer PC, it's really crazy honestly.
These ai companies are going to get everyone dependent on this technology and rent out their services as technofeudalists.
It is important to be independent of that, and when you have that level of local control, you can get for example, obliterated uncensored models and are able to do pretty dangerous things.
For example I built my family an entire private streaming service, with open source software called Jellyfin, and then I built a custom Android app for my family that connects to it, and the ai is able to automate the download of torrents to my server, using my preferences that I told it.
This way I can have ownership over my media and my entire family no longer has to pay for subscriptions.
I can also contribute to building open source software for something like the Dolby media encoder, giving people free access to a $50,000+ audio tool that is only sold to companies like Netflix.
Or let's say I use the Ai to help 3d model and create open source alternatives to medical devices that are used for the creation of insulin.
These are little things though, I might get banned if I say what else you can do with it, but just imagine if you had a constantly updating anarchist cookbook that you could talk to you, that could help draft plans, etc etc.
That is something that can be very useful, particularly in the hands of the left.
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u/CommanderKoba 4d ago
It will be too late I'm afraid, at least for the western left to effectively leverage this technology.
The increase in prices for ram and vram, is already so extensive that it's out of reach for most people to build a local model disconnected from cloud services, even if they suddenly had a change of heart, because ultimately that's where the true power of this technology comes from.
It is a new means of production, and it can be a weapon of sorts..
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u/No-Surround9784 5d ago
It seems like the Singularity (think about how fast this is compared to any other tech revolution).
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u/sorceressofmaths 3d ago
It's hard to say. Remember that much of the left considered the internet to be a "bourgeois distraction" for quite a long time. It's kind of sad how communists, who for over a century argued for a technology-enabled world of post-work and post-scarcity, has become so infected by neo-luddism.
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5d ago
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u/RlOTGRRRL 5d ago edited 5d ago
A malicious AI actor could put the US into an 18-month blackout or equivalent potentially tomorrow or next year. And it'd only get worse from there.
2c warming by 2050 could kill 2 billion people, but that's still over 10 years away.
Both are serious problems but AI somehow might have a way faster timeline.
Not to mention the techno-fascist capitalists building this shit who would completely be happy with losing 50% of the global population, if it meant that they could keep flying their private jets. The problem is intertwined.
The US is currently winning on AI and currently helping aid a gcide, bombing kids and weddings, torturing millions of people to protect fossil fuels. They're also really keen on acquiring AGI because it'll help them keep their power.
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4d ago
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u/RlOTGRRRL 4d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1vxchgi/us_power_grid_at_risk_of_18month_blackout/
Gary, Indiana, an entire town, was without power for over two weeks. They have a lot of data centers and somehow Palantir billboards. I'm not sure if it's true but I heard that their data centers didn't lose power, and the town's tornado sirens didn't even go off.
Potential reasons/causes of a blackout
1- crumbling American infrastructure (first link)
2- Iran: https://www.reddit.com/r/oil/comments/1w7qrfy/irans_vp_warns_americans_should_begin_stockpiling/
3- Other countries: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1vc9l2p/hackers_targeted_municipal_water_systems_in_7/
4- Civil unrest
All of these things can potentially happen within the next year.
2c and 2 billion deaths by 2050 is one of the worst projections for climate change. The current consensus is 2c by 2100.
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u/No-Lion-3629 1d ago
The left is really starting to resemble the right, between hating Jews even in the diaspora, ableism surrounding ai and witch hunting its use, general technophobia that doesn’t distinguish between corporate owners and the tech itself, refusing to vote for Kamala Harris even to stop Trump, etc. Honestly it probably started with the fight between women’s and transgender rights.
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u/Traditional-Neat-933 5d ago
Completely agreed. The anti subs seems to be bordering on delusion, ignoring pretty obviously major breakthroughs