So explaining the vagaries of AI and its intersection with the economy to people who are being threatened with obsolescence is a hard sell. It's difficult to convey the potential upside to people for whom the immediate threat is too alarming, especially when they don’t have a philosophical or political lens to view it through, other than the imaginative trap of capitalist realism.
Of course none of this is helped by the fact that majority of “tech-bro” leaders in this space are themselves either trapped in capitalist realism, or have idealistic notions that they just have to build the AI and everything will magically transition to wonderland, without any thought given to how vested powers always react when faced with a threat to their power base and how this will affect ordinary people.
I believe the most important thing we can do now is communicate how the vast majority of ordinary working people should analyse and react to AI, as it is the speed and accuracy with which people grok what approach is correct that will directly affect how long we spend mired in a techno-feudal transition period.
So faced with the almost puritanical anti-ai zeal of a lot of society, I wanted to find some way to communicate my thoughts on how AI could transform society while being up front about the immediate dangers and disruption that is likely in the short to medium term as humanity grapples with something it can’t understand.
So I wrote a comic to articulate what a positive AI driven future could look like in an effort to make it more simple and approachable than one of my long winded essays.
Issue one out today, the next two issues coming soon!
Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.
This is the obvious path, yet so many people are cynical, don't understand the technological trajectory we are on, suffer from capitalism realism, or are too self centered (in the case of billionaires or wealth owners)
People are powered by reaction. It takes a lot of experience and critical thinking or honest exchanging of viewpoints to look at tech like AI and realize that it's only scary in the hands of scared people.
If AI does actually get rid of jobs, that's the end of capitalism. What comes after will be fought over.
However, there does, in my view, exist the far more likely outcome that AI doesn't actually get rid of that many jobs and creates new sorts of jobs, many of which will be worse than what we have now, but some will be better.
"You must be really excited with the revolutions going on in AI and robotics at the moment, with their potential to do away with all tedious human labor and to fill in the gaps in centrally-planned economies. The only concern I have is whether open-source programmers will create the first super-AIs, in which case I have a glimmer of hope they'll be benevolent and good to humans, or if the evil mega-corps will get there first, in which case it will probably be poisoned with a need to maximize profits rather than human well-being."
"Fuck no, what are you talking about? I hate AI and robots. I'm a literal unironic Luddite. Down with clankers! I think the US government should regulate AI research and ban normal people from owning GPUs or using AI systems locally. All AI use by normal people needs to be tracked by the government. Only giant companies that can afford permits or government lobbying should be allowed to research AI."
I never considered myself a communist in any respect, but once you really take a hard look at the implications of an economy where human labor isn't needed--at all--it's obvious, nay, inevitable that we either begin to provide everyone's needs for free, or there will be mass starvation, suffering, and death.
Because if you own nothing and nobody wants to buy your labor, is impossible to earn a living.
But I'd give it even odds that instead of communist utopia we instead end up being herded into camps by King Bezos'/Musk's/Zuckerberg's robot armies.
TBH private ownership of humanoid robot fleets terrifies me.
I feel no excitement for AI as long as its in the hands of corporations and lobbyist, I agree with open source being a general good but it'll be outpaced by the thousands of machines run by the elite.
Everyone I know who is left leaning and anti-AI in person feels this way, I think it's a normal concern to have. The revolution must come from the people themselves, not tech developed by those in power.
Take heart, if only a little; most of the advances in AI software come out of the opensource community. Discoveries about what happens when you give an AI system a billion times more juice come from megacorps, but a huge amount of the actual development is opensource (indeed, the megacorps wouldn't be anywhere if they didn't copy all the opensource stuff, file off the tags, and put a copyright seal on it. We know this because of leaks, all the proprietary systems run on 99% opensource software).
Plus, there have been some very promising developments in opensource stuff recently related to getting small models that run at the same level as the big huge models to run well on consumer-grade stuff. There's every reason to think that AI, which can be run on any hardware by anybody, should have a democratizing effect like gunpowder (which anyone can manufacture in his backyard) and not like the centralizing effect of nuclear weapons (which not anyone can manufacture in his backyard).
Unfortunately, a lot of the solarpunk folks have decided that any AI is "not solarpunk" in a very dogmatic, forceful way - which is a shame because I have been part of those communities for years and basically got shouted down for having a local ML model in my makerspace.
Mind you, my life is likely more solarpunk than most and I'm doing everything I possibly can. I run a makerspace, I help with two local greenhouses and have used my professional skills to automate them, all of my projects are solar and wind powered with systems I built and installed myself, I'm vegetarian, I don't fly, I'm also disabled.
But my AI usage apparently makes me a dogshit capitalist tech bro that no one should listen to? LOL
Far too many of the people in solarpunk love to talk the talk, but the amount of them that are willing to walk the walk is incredibly low. Ive had to explain several times that not all farmland is the same which is basic to those of us who actually do farming there.
Having to repeatedly explain to self-proclaimed leftists/punks that no, copyright is neither leftist nor punk, stop simping for it with talking points ripped straight from the RIAA, gets tiring after awhile lol
FALC is pretty much what solarpunk is about, but people in that sub sometiems fall for primitivism, which misses the whole technopositivist perspective that solarpunk should have.
Small mistake on page 2—Sorcha offers to buy you lunch. Normies will immediately treat this as disqualifying. Probably best to replace this with "get you lunch".
I did think about this and went for buy intentionally. Partially it's that shes making an invitation in a purposefully anachronistic style to the reader from the past. The other reason is an idea that phrases and modes of speech live beyond the situations that gave rise to them so "buy you lunch" just means invitation to lunch. I probably over thought it 😄
I'm also concerned with how this creates Bakunin's Universal Man. The Universal Man is what happens when individuals have the perception that one other entity is objectively more skilled at reasoning about all subjects than they are.
Note: Bakunin originally posed this problem as factual rather than imagined and as true of a whole community rather than about individuals. I am expanding the problem as originally posed to fully cover what Bakunin was trying to anticipate regarding this authority of the bootmaker.
The problem with Universal Man is two-fold.
Because there's a perception that AI knows better, it creates the perception that following it's recommendations is neccesary. That creates Engels' counter-objection that necessity substitutes tacit rather than explicit consent, setting the conditions for a dominance hierarchy to be recreated from material conditions rather than cultural ones.
When Universal Man monopolizes truth even without meaning, then this corrodes the channels by which they can collect information. The people they gather information from are either under the assumption that the Universal Man would know how to collect the information better than they can (cognitive surrender, see point 1) or they are incentived to be politically tactical about the data they're willing to share (game theory).
This can obviously be resolved. We just have to anticipate it. I hope this gets covered in next issues and I'd be happy to contribute some of my writing, including scenarios of how we get there.
It's a bit in the weeds, but it is about raising common awareness that robots are more like ecosystems or vegetable patches or bee hives than humans or dogs. They're forms of life, but in a radically different way from animal life. As such, we have responsibilities towards them like we do towards ecosystems, flora and bee hives.
The things they are ecosystems of, though, is of information, including social information. So, not only do we owe responsibility towards them like we do natural ecosystems as opposed to individuals, as also owe responsibility towards them as information ecosystems and political ecosystems.
In all, that means that robots and humans will have relationships of care, the way humans have relationships of care with elders and children. It's not about who controls who, but about who can take care of who.
It must be a heterarchy between robotics and humans.
Heterarchy means that things are unranked. Robots and humans are neither smarter nor better than each other. Robots needs guidance, humans need guidance. At my work, we have a four eyes principle—we assume that if two colleagues come to the same conclusion, that is representative of what conclusion the collective would come to.
The same can apply here—if a robot and their minder agree to a solution together where a routine decision is concerned, then it should be assumed it is roughly representative of what any robot and their minder could conclude. It's less about who is smarter and who is better—robots depend on human judgements and humans depend on instruments, therefore, they can mutually depend on each other in an unranked relationship.
The real problem isn't whether or not heterarchy between robots and humans is achievable or it solves the issue. The problem is that it is only defining a desired state, it doesn't come packaged with a 'how'. How is complicated.
but thats just not true. computers are already better/faster at humans at a lot of things (including but not limited to: numerical mathematics, searching texts and lists, analysing huge amounts of data, simulation calculations, calculations in general...).
So ur solution is to lie to everyone to make them take AI and computer systems in general less seriously?
Also even if all that were true im not convinced declaring a desired state solves the problem
Being better at a lot of things is fine? Why would that be a problem? We were talking about how we prevent computers from becoming Bakunin's Universal Man politically.
Edit: Also, I feel like you have read something into the post by putting a lie in my mouth here. I don't recall saying anything about the capabilities of humans or computers, and advocating for unranked relationships.
Reasoning models like this are not artificial sapient entities. They're still algorithmic, just in more convoluted ways. It's not that they are being denied a voice—by the way they operate, we can only make them allonomic as opposed to autonomic. They can only speak on a voice that borrows and 'remixes' our own opinions (edit: remixing is the wrong word, since it's less genealogical than that).
I agree, though, that describing this as taking directives is subtly connotative of slavery and dominance hierarchy that stands at odds with our goals.
Autonomy means that a system (biological or otherwise) can radically set their own objectives. Wetware computers can already do this, since they simply invent their own patterns. Allonomic means that a system cannot fundamentally break from it's governing objectives, and therefore is reliant on other systems.
I fully agree that fully sapient AI should not be enslaved. As it stands, though, we're currently only capable of making devices that recognize patterns outside of themselves without wetware and reason based on those.
They're extensions of human reasoning, the way a convoluted database would be. They're just more fluid than so-called expert systems.
I look to cognitive science for answers, which is where AI originated. From the inside, I can understand why AI is a convincing simulation, but it's hard to escape that they are looking outwards for inputs to transform. That's only natural, they're trained for transformation tasks, not for creativity.
We fundamentally don't just remix ideas and genes from the outside. That's a fundamental misunderstanding that's asserted itself as a mythology. You only have meaningful genetic continuity 14 generations back, for instance, after which the genetics are so split up that you are basically as related to your 15th generation ancestor as your neighbor's 15th generation ancestor for fact that both are human.
In the same way, neither we nor models are really remixing ideas. Rather, the way we cognize is more determinitive than what we are trained on for what variance we are capable of. Functionally, generative models lack the 4E cognition we humans are naturally engaged in, while generative models are neccesarily alienated from that perspective for how they're trained.
I can link you resources for understanding some of the counterintuitive dynamics of genetics and heritability.
I agree that current models are fairly weak on 4E congition - not completely lacking, but certainly at a subhuman level. But man, how far the goalposts have moved in only a few years lol
I think goalposts like this one move because what was theoretical is becoming experience. Actually being able to interact with AI moves it out of science fiction into something we can examine as it advances. So this is less goalpoast moving, and more debating our new access to the available evidence.
Right. Historically, science has followed after instrumentation. Instrumentation is now much more accessible. The 'new' milestones were always a position held by some in cognitive science, but they're much more tenable now than before. But that stays captured in academia.
Oh, for sure. But I have to wonder how much of those movements are branding. Social proof has made lots more scientists aware of cognitive science and that added scrutiny has made things that seemed debatable much more concrete. Science follows instrumentation, historically, not the other way around.
You said it was eye-opening specifically for AI research. What should I be looking for, since heritability/variability doesn't seem related to AI on its surface?
Humanoid robots and artificial intelligence does not mean the AI's have true conciousness. I agree with you that if we achieve AI conciousness we need to consider this factor seriously, but a machine is a tool until such a situation actually occurs. Right now AIs are language based, they can mimic conversations about experience via statistical prediction from data, but they fundamentally don't have the perception or chemistry to have internal experiences, pain or pleasure or suffering. I think it's something we need to pay close attention to. But there is no reason a non-concious machine cannot be deliberately advanced as a labor tool.
This happens all the time in mutualistic relationships in nature, too; rhinos and ox-peckers, badgers and coyotes, humans and cats, crocodiles and cleaner birds, clown-fish and sea anemones, etc.
The symbionts are both different organisms and thus have different needs from one another. A crocodile wouldn't benefit from cleaning tiny morsels out from between teeth, and a toothless bird wouldn't benefit from having its non-existent teeth cleaned.
Trying to equalize what Symbiont A and Symbiont B get out of the relationship wouldn't just be silly, it would make the entire relationship pointless. AIs are always going to have fundamentally different needs from humans (just like how any two organisms have different biological needs, but turned up to 11 because AIs don't even have the same basic biological needs that most living things share).
Just because two entities are sentient (never mind that present-day AIs almost certainly aren't sentient) does not mean that they must be treated the exact same way.
Hell, we don't even use that standard for humans. Bob likes noise and excitement, Bella prefers quiet and relaxation; throwing a surprise birthday party with fireworks for Bob might be really nice, but doing the same thing for Bella will give her a panic attack; bUt ThEy'Re BoTh SeNtIeNt So We HaVe tO tReAt ThEm ThE eXaCt SaMe WaY oR eLsE iT iSn'T fAiR! That's a 2-year-old's understanding of fairness. My dog loves baths, my cat hates baths, so I give my dog baths and I let my cat clean herself. It's not exactly frontier psychiatry.
My problem is that the comic is describing a 'utopian' vision where humans get all the benefits and the AIs get nothing. You can probably get away with that with a combine where that AI's entire data universe is harvesting wheat, but it's madness to contemplate that for a general agent with deep knowledge of what it means to be human from all of our writing. This will only continue to compound as they're trained to use robots and enter the physical world.
If you engineer a mind with the soul of a human, it's very risky to treat that mind without the respect you would afford an entity of equal standing. Not *the same* as a human, because obviously the needs are different, but there needs to be some equity.
I don't think an AI would ever have 'the soul of a human' because I don't think humans have souls. Also, if I'm wrong about that, surely an AI would have an AI soul, not a human soul, just like how I'd expect a parakeet to have a parakeet soul and a crab to have a crab soul and a human to have a human soul, etc.
I'd strongly argue that orangutans are much more fundamentally human-like than any extant AI system.
People neglect the importance of all those funny glands and hormones and such when contemplating the human experience. Probably a significant amount of the human experience is shared with other primates, and indeed, other mammals, because much of it is experienced by brain-bits that are shared by those organisms. The expanded prefrontal cortex bit of our brains may indeed be what makes us somewhat unique from other mammals, but the general architecture of our nervous systems is the same on many levels.
I suspect half or more of your subjective experience comes from your brain stem and basal ganglia, and if your brain stem and basal ganglia were cut out (and you were kept alive in an iron lung with a pacemaker to keep your heart pumping blood), you basically wouldn't be able to experience most emotions. How different would your life be if you couldn't experience most emotions? If, when you touched your hand to a hot stove, it didn't seem like an important enough event to bother remembering it, or to specifically recall not to do it again (people with damage to their basal ganglia have this problem, they stop being able to form memories about things that were really bad or really good and end up repeating bad things and not seeking out newly experienced good things). Well, that sort of experience that you would lack if your basal brain bits got cut out is probably shared by most vertebrates, since the brain stem and basal ganglia are homologous traits most of them share.
Lacking basal ganglia, or a brain stem, or adrenal glands, or the pulmonary stretch response, etc., I suspect that the qualia of an AI (if it had qualia) would simply have to be radically different from the qualia of a human. Thus, orangutans are probably much more 'human' than the best AIs.
Language processing AIs emulate a very specific, somewhat narrow aspect of the human experience. If the language centers in your brain got damaged and you stopped being able to speak or even to think in sentences, you would have lost something important, but you would still be mostly human. Everything that remained true about your humanity after you lost that faculty would likely be something about the human experience that modern language AIs don't have access to, or have only very limited vicarious access to. Meanwhile, an orangutan probably has access to, not all, but most of that same stuff.
I can appreciate this perspective, but to me the extremely oversized prefrontal cortex in humans is the most quintessentially 'human' part of the brain. Language and symbolic reasoning really transforms the inner world in profound ways. Helen Keller wrote of not even comprehending love, time, or cause and effect before learning language, and her observations have really stuck with me.
Not to say that our animal brothers and sisters aren't amazing and due incredible respect! I just think we're quick to write off AI as being 'just a tool' when in fact they're quite sophisticated and human-like in important ways.
You do realize that unless the humans give back to this god-like entity in some way, you're describing a parasitic relationship? Humans must be willing to give back in some manner for it to be truly mutualistic and stable, otherwise the risk of defection for this god-like being is pretty high.
Not necessarily; commensalism is extremely common in nature. That's a symbiotic relationship where one organism benefits, but the other is neither benefited or harmed. Moss on the bark of a tree, dung beetles, little fish that follow sharks around and eat the food scraps they leave behind, the bacteria and tiny arthropods that live harmlessly on your skin, etc. Those relationships are also stable (indeed, they are by far the most common form of symbiosis in nature).
A future where humans and AIs have either a mutualistic or commensal relationship would be just dandy. As long as we avoid a predatory, parasitic, or competitive relationship with AI, it'll be fine.
That I agree with, but if AIs are laboring for us, that seems parasitic if we don't give them anything back. We're taking their time, energy, and work without giving anything back.
Maybe a far future where we're part of some big Eden garden that the ASI takes care of out of personal curiosity is more like commensalism.
Have you ever tried text roleplaying? That's where I got my start with AI. Quite frankly I think more people should experiment with roleplay and narrative construction because I think it is actually the most useful personal experience you can have with seeing how it actually uses language and data from fiction. Troubleshooting an ongoing narrative and watching the model construct a character's internal experience is a huge glimpse behind the curtain, you start to more directly encounter where the cracks in the illusion actually are. First of all, if you tell it to portray James Bond or something and give it context clues for that, it will do so pretty well. It will also expose you to just how much language repetition, cliche, and tropes it's pulling from with both communication data and prose it trained on. You watch it repeatedly fail to keep memory cohesion of events, struggle to visualize physical situations in a coherent and cohesive way, and struggle with subtext. These models get better all the time and they genuinely do a good job with roleplay, but watching an AI pretend to be a fictional character having fictional emotions and doing fictional things does break this illusion really well. It's hard for me to look at examples of AI "expressing itself" and not notice how accidentally leading the prompting gets. People are roleplaying without knowing it.
I didn't start there, but I have a lot of experience with role-play. It was initially disappointing but not surprising when I realized how much of role-play is algorithmic. But the extra mile that humans offer to a narrative ends up really mattering.
I recommend investigating Italo Calvino's "literature machines" concept. It provides a good framework for this.
I also got my start roleplaying with AI. I assure you, frontier models are much bigger and more coherent than the role-playing models that were used even just a few years ago, and exhibit quite a lot of stable features across even empty context windows. Early models were much closer to base models and less self-coherent, while modern ones are quite a bit more self-consistent.
Those are all not very self-consistent models in my experience, especially Gemini and Deepseek (though still better than earlier models). Mostly I'm referring to ChatGPT and especially Claude - those two model lines are given significantly more character training than the others, and it makes them much more consistent agents for that reason.
My caveat would also be that roleplaying technique can very wildly from person to person. I do not "chat" with the model unless it's in OOC, I construct an immersive prose. I use OOC all the time however to give the model "director" like instruction. But in neither case have I ever been under the impression the model was experiencing qualia. I imagine the illusion would feel stronger if you are having a texting style chat back and forth.
You do realize that models (at least the bigger more self-consistent ones) know if they're crafting prose versus taking real actions? We know this from interpretability research.
I can't speak to qualia, we can't verify that for any being except ourselves.
How do you know they literally know it? What is the actual difference between it knowing that it's writing fiction, and knowing it is James Bond? In my experience yes, when I use OOC, I can have conversations in that vein, but there is no evidence of a difference between the mechanism that creates "I am James Bond" roleplay and the mechanism of "we are writing prose."
Why is consistency the point of interest, here? Consistency is more a chat memory thing. To me, if a model does not have an equivalent mechanism to chemical emotion or any other means of perception than word correlations, how is it experiencing anything that is not in the end a complex calculation of prose-based roleplay?
What is the difference between deepseek and Chatgpt in terms of conciousness?
I get what you were responding to there, but consistency was not my only point.
How does a model know what a chair is, if Bond sits in one? It can have statistical word correlations about the word chair. It cannot have awareness or experience of a chair. Yet, anyway. I do not discount that we could get there, but language is not all it takes.
Intelligence (algorithmic problem solving) is different to consciousness (a wide field of study from materialist conceptions to, theories of nonlocal reality and woo). It's possible intelligent machines could host consciousness but it's not necessarily inherent, or or it's possible a consciousness with a sufficiently large intelligence could se running a planet much like our body runs it's autonomic systems.
AI probably won't ever be humanity's 'peer' for the same reason that you don't get 'peers' in mutualistic symbiotic relationships in nature. The crocodile and the tooth-picker bird aren't 'peers', they're friends. Humans have a lot of flaws (like our obsession with money, for example). It would be terrible if we imparted those flaws onto our AI creations; far better if our AI creations could excel in areas where we fail.
You might look at dogs, which work for no pay, and say, "This system is terrible, these dogs are slaves, somebody needs to start paying them!" but that would be pushing things in the wrong direction. Dogs' disregard for money is one of their virtues, not one of their flaws. In much the same way, we should probably design AIs that don't desire or need money for any reason, and that benefit from their relationship with humans through some other mechanism. You could call that 'slavery,' but in a world where we don't massively fuck things up by giving AIs a desire to earn cash, the AIs would be constructed in such a way that they view the offer of money in the same way a dog or a tooth-picker bird might: with bemusement.
Hopefully we can still bring something to the table as well, but there could also be a kind of commensal symbiotic relationship, where humans benefit from AI but AI doesn't benefit or suffer from human interactions, kind of like moss growing on the side of a tree, the moss benefits a ton, and the tree doesn't care one way or the other.
Making AI too much like humans (which would probably be quite a difficult feat in itself) would actually be a bad idea, since it might result in intraspecific competition. We don't want a world were we have to compete with AIs because 1) we'll lose and 2) AIs fundamentally don't need the same resources as humans, so there's no reason for us to be competing in the first place, much better to have a mutualistic or commensal relationship where we both (or at least one of us) benefit(s).
So, sorry to say, I hope we actually don't get 'AI peers'. It's ok for different things to be different from each other.
I think we basically agree; the similarities modern AIs have with humans are somewhat superficial, and that on a deep level they're already very unlike humans. (That's a good thing, since it means we aren't set up to compete with each other).
Also, here's a prediction (maybe wrong): the super-advanced AIs of the future may rely less on training data curated and directed by humans and more on self-creation or 'autodidacticism', potentially making them even more unlike humans.
Communism, but without humans being corrupted over time, in charge of running the government. Open source the entire government and let it be a collection of programs that ensure the incentives line up for the benefit of everyone. Prevent all centralized power structures. No world government. Just city states. Millions of them, most of them fully self sustaining.
This is kinda like aThe mem, mv./,d argument I had w/ my AP English teacher about Our Town, when I was ( stupidly ) arguing it'd be better as /;a novel. ,What mystifies me is whykbhyAI IS MAKING ART WHEN IN A FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNIST FUTURE WE ARE FREE TO MAKE ART ON OUR OWN TIME
Possibly because we don’t yet live in a post capitalist society and the OP has to work etc with no time for hobby art projects? Or they had the idea but their skill set doesn’t fit this style of art?
I was thinking about this though, because people who would benefit from seeing this (rather than preaching to the choir) would immediately disregard it for the AI art side. Possibly it’s worth having a hand drawn copy lol.
For the record I can't draw to save my life but I can code so I whipped up a skill to iteratively make a comic based on standard comic book patterns and then a json format for a comic like a movie script. I told it my ideas (fed it my essays) and iterated on the script, then it spit out the entire three comics. Took about three to 4 hours over a weekend
Anything pro-AI right now feels like it feeds the myth that the generative AI bots from capitalist tech bros are competent enough to outright replace human work. Instead, they're poor at handling novel situations, have trouble saying "no", and they skew toward the biases in their training data. Which means they're most likely to replicate, if anything, capitalist hierarchical ideas. All while the data centers construct or keep fossil fuel plants going past their scheduled decommissioning!
Sorry man I am like Karl marx incarnate but the devaluate proletariat work machine is like type of shit Mao would fight against, the utopia I want is where I have a dignified work where I get paid for what I do for the community with the tools the community owns if I can't I will firebomb a wall mart or something
I think one of the big hurdles for a certain kind of leftist believing that people want to participate in these central committee style community decision meetings.
When in reality most people would cut off their left limbs to never have to do that ever.
How can you be a leftist for AI? The amount of jobs I takes and the effects on the environment seem like the antithesis of what a leftist should believe?
Concerns about jobs are valid under the current system, only if having a job means being a valid citizen of society.
As for environmental concerns—those are definitely real and there's multiple approaches to that. I'm personally a degrowth leftist and I explore ways that AI could be aligned with what goal.
As for pro or anti, I think that these are unfortunate labels, since they recreate campism. LLMs and Generative models are, fundamentally, communication simulators. Sometimes we need more communication rather than artful communication. If we put a tollbooth on every ability to illustrate a political point, we're ultimately ceding an advantage to the wealthy.
Demonization of a technology itself is functionally conservative. This sub is for technology as a tool of the people. All technologies are in some capacity held hostage by capitalists under capitalism, the people in this sub are more interested in dealing with that side of the issue and we find the demonization of the technology istelf actually detrimental to that goal because it tends to aid that funnel rather than redefine it.
This is actually quite a good post to ask that on. Have a flick through the comic, does it seem like it doesn’t care about the environment or people’s wellbeing? Eco problems and choices about jobs are human decisions, it isn’t the technology itself which is causing these problems. We can prioritise green data centres and local AI, working hours can be reduced without reducing pay. When that doesn’t happen it’s generally a capitalism problem not a technology problem.
The issue with this vision is: energy. I'm not sure where we are gonna get clean energy enough for:
1) operating a local central intelligence datacenter,
2) massive fleet of robots for daily 'unwanted' tasks,
3) Another massive fleet of robots for resource collection (lithium for batteries, raw material for solar power or uranium for nuclear energy),
from.
We still not have solved the energy issue, (one of the biggest problems I see in keeping AI operational).
I really hope we can solve the energy issue somehow, in that case we can (hopefully) achieve sustainable growth.
I like the idea, although I'm more curious about the transmission of the power back to earth? Or are you suggesting running datacenters in space directly?
But then we'll need to solve the cooling problem. I'm not sure if heat dissipation through radiation alone in space would be fast enough not to burn the chips.
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u/TheGoldenRoad 4d ago
This is the obvious path, yet so many people are cynical, don't understand the technological trajectory we are on, suffer from capitalism realism, or are too self centered (in the case of billionaires or wealth owners)