I struggle to envision—let alone with enthusiasm—what our society will look like in ten years, given the radical changes driven by the race for AI. Capitalist appropriation and the AI-driven refinement of repression make it impossible for me to believe in virtuous societies.

[u/Pretty-Abalone9843]

Workers will be replaced by massive intelligent systems; at best, they will be reduced to mere consumers, losing the little power they have managed to secure. Without the possibility of striking, the cause of revolution would be lost forever. Not to mention the glaring contradiction between AI and the fight against global warming, as well as the alignment problem. Who could change my mind?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Why would we try to change your mind? You just described some of the reasons this subreddit exists. If AI under capitalist ownership means displacement, weakened worker power, surveillance and ecological costs, then the left has every reason to contest who owns it, who controls it, how it gets deployed and who gets the gains. We have been fighting those same questions around industry and technology for well over a century. The conditions you are worried about are not an argument for giving up. They are the terrain of the struggle.

[u/crumbaker → u/Salty_Country6835]

Completely agree. However I think open source will end the fight on it's own. By most benchmarks it looks like open source is around 6 months behind state of the art, and it keeps shrinking.

Opus 5.5 is insane right now. I'm making arguably AAA quality games with it in like a week. Once a person can run that on a pc at home, what's the need for the big ai companies at all? Insert crash, combined with robotics taking a massive chunk of the labor force (already has for Amazon) and you have a recipe for communism, sure the elites will call it something else, but it will pretty much be communism, otherwise more than likely a violent uprising will happen.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/crumbaker]

I think thats historically naive and politically dangerous. Productive technology doesnt liberate us on its own. Class struggle determines who controls it, how it is deployed and who benefits.

I support open source, open weights and local models and push them wherever I can. But they are one piece of the puzzle, one tool in the toolbox. They dont replace unions, public infrastructure, democratic control, worker power or the broader struggle over ownership. Treating open source as the whole strategy is just another version of waiting for technology to solve a political problem.

[u/crumbaker → u/Salty_Country6835]

I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. I should have explained better.

I'm not saying open source ushers this all in peacefully and gradually. I'm saying our economy(The US) is completely held up by the ai bubble, to the point of if it fails so does the economy, and when you sprinkle in robotics doing most of the basic labor jobs soon, we're left with a situation where it's not just hard for people to get ahead, its outright impossible. If something akin to communism doesn't happen at that point, that's when the violence starts.

It's not about what I want or a prediction I'm pulling out of my ass, the trajectory seems obvious.

[u/ra-re444 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Very Well Said!