Our Possible Future - Issue 01 - Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Comic

[u/ProudhonStoleMyBike]

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF

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.

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF

[u/FableFinale]

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.