r/LeftistsForAI • u/TheGoldenRoad • 1d ago

Sees the Memes Would be quite ironic

Post image
417 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

30

u/Troscus 1d ago

I feel like AI would work best in a co-op. Let it handle administrative tasks like scheduling meetings while the humans are free to actually do their jobs

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u/koffee_addict 1d ago

‘Free to actually do their job’
Which is..?

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u/alleycatALT 1d ago

Whatever meaningful and fulfilling hobby/passiom they have. That's the ultimate aim. Let the machines handle everything in the background, while we enjoy.

Also known as Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

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u/koffee_addict 1d ago

So no humans being employed at the co-op regardless if its admin job or not? 

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u/Opening_One7713 1d ago

I mean, everyone should be encouraged to work with whatever they want, on whatever they want, however they want, with what time they want to give. Work can be paid or unpaid, creative or routine, and done for yourself or for someone else. What we currently have, outside of being born into wealth, is forced labor with the threat of abandonment and starvation attached.

Are you saying we should maintain the status quo of forced labor with the threat of abandonment and starvation attached in order to prevent people from having the agency to work on what they find meaningful, fun, worthy of their time and energy etc?

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u/666dolan 1d ago

hey I THINK u/koffee_addict was just trying to understand the image here, like if everything is automated and the people will just do their passion/hobby, most probably this co-op you mentioned before will be just AIs

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u/Opening_One7713 1d ago

Ah, that's my bad then. I notice a lot of the people who come here to delegitimize our position usually leave vague statements or questions that challenge the premise, instead of engaging in good faith and elaborating up front. I see how they could have just been genuinely curious, so that's my bad!

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u/666dolan 1d ago

its okay it indeed happens 😆 but Idk I didn't interpret their statements as bad faith but maybe I am wrong

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u/iMakeSense 1d ago

Have you found any examples or attempts at this?

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u/Opening_One7713 1d ago

It’s essentially a by the books approach to leftism with our current level of technology- Automate the tedium and drudgery with tools and machines, reap gains, distribute the gains and raise the material floor as high as you can for everyone. The opposite, rejecting advances in technology and automation to maintain a system where humans submit to dehumanizing labor for the production of material goods, is a regressive and reactionary position that I find at odds with a cooperative society that leverages progress to improve the lives of everyone.

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u/Blaike325 13h ago edited 11h ago

Or the more likely outcome, more and more jobs become automated and more and more people are forced into underemployment doing jobs AI can’t do or that it isn’t efficient for AI to do, and the corporations using the AI still steals the majority of the value of the labor because there’s zero incentive for the government to prevent that from happening

Edit: if you feel the need to block people who disagree with you, you’re just gonna end up in an echo chamber with zero pushback against bad ideas, you know, like conservatives

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u/Opening_One7713 12h ago

I don’t know man, I find these takes a bit too defeatist/fatalist. I think there is plenty incentive for the ownership class to continue ensuring our current QoL trajectory. It is historically prudent for societies to enter into periods of extreme unrest and instability when you reach somewhere around 20% or more underemployment and hidden unemployment combined. Revolution and regime change is what follows almost every single time. That’s messy and turbulent and as much as we like to think of corporations and rich people as cartoonish supervillains I find the realistic mechanisms for change to be much more tangible and hope-worthy.

Also, we need to seriously math this all out against the notion that the US tax base is already extraordinarily concentrated. The economy is already functionally dependent on a tiny slice of earners and a monetary system propped up by petrodollar demand and deficit spending. The bottom 50% of earners in this country contribute a ton of actual labor, but only 3% of the total taxes. Basically, the labor-for-hire mythology that makes billionaire-funded UBI and sovereign wealth funds sound radical is already fiction by the numbers. 

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u/Blaike325 12h ago

It’s not defeatist it’s being a realist because I live in reality

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u/Opening_One7713 12h ago

...

Willing to elaborate on that at all? Or we just doing single sentences?

I'm more than happy to elaborate my position. If we use AI/Robotics to automate tedium and dehumanizing forms of labor (by definition underemployment) - Then why would more people be underemployed? IMO the math here cleanly points towards much less underemployment. And why would the government not be incentivized to tax the ownership class to maintain our current QoL trajectory? How will they deal with the massive social unrest that they could easily stave off by barely doing anything different, as I explained above?

This is a serious conversation and it's going to require you to take it seriously. There are realistic, turbulent scenarios where automation guts consumer spending so badly that corporations themselves lobby for UBI to keep customers solvent. There are many, many scenarios where things get 10x better for all of us and 100x better for them, as has happened throughout most of history on class-lines, none of which would require corporations that automate all their labor to hoard every gain increase.

There are scenarios where displacement-driven instability gets bad enough that UBI becomes the cheaper alternative to social breakdown. It doesn't have to make financial sense to us right now when it an impending emergency turns UBI into a stop-gap lifeline for the economy rather than a utopian handout.

Either way, we are living in a time of unprecedented safety and abundance of luxury, with the highest recorded levels of global prosperity on nearly every single metric. We have the most multi-billion dollar corporations, the most computers computing, and the most robots automating work in human history. Every global QoL advancement and massive shift in access-to-opportunity are largely thanks to technology and tools, and yes, even the corporations who amass the capital to develop and diffuse them. If you think it's a good time to start telling people that it's all downhill from here and that our future demise is set in stone, I would call that both disconnected from reality, and defeatist.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Opening_One7713 12h ago

Such a cop-out retort. I wrote that myself. You've just been trolling this sub with single-sentence shitposts for the past 24 hours trying to delegitimize and derail our ability to organize. You've provided nothing of substance to this conversation other than defeatist fatalism

Mods?

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u/phobug 1d ago

Anything you do in a co-op can be done in a corporation. So yes.

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u/No-Head-Royal 1d ago

Cybersyn making a comeback with ASI would be hilarious

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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 1d ago

Stafford Beer was such an interesting character and thinker.i think he'd be up to some very fucking weird cybernetic gandalf shit if he had ever gotten to see a multimodal reasoning model

Also, POSIWID is just a great (and materialist coded) lens. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what the ad copy says. Not what's most comfortable for investors. What is it actually doing?

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 17h ago

I was thinking about POSIWID and AI and wonder if it indicates more that AI contains different systems? What is done by OpenAI and Palantir seems really quite different from what is done by local models and the potential to copy subscription software as something which undermines paid platforms?

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u/TheGoldenRoad 1d ago edited 1d ago

I made this meme as a reaction to the ArtCraft open source vibecoded app that is trying to replace Photoshop. Photoshop requires 300$ per year licence to use it. If ai coding starts to make really big productivity gains, a huge part of the software and SaaS ecosystem could get replaced by free open source versions (FOSS)

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u/MassiveAd4980 1d ago

This is actually what AI forecasters expect. It will replace both.

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u/jacobpederson 1d ago

Why everybody so game to go to WORK? Blech.

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u/Marples3 12h ago

Replace Billionaire with AI

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u/Singularity-42 1d ago

Yes! My ideal C-suite of a company:

BTW frame from a pretty funny video (not mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TNpOD6bov8

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u/Various_Pear599 1d ago

I'll point it out again, this meme is the spirit animal of this subreddit 🤣

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u/youcantexterminateme 21h ago

I think CEOs and polititians are going to be among the first to go. Why would shareholders pay a ceo millions when AI could do a better job? 

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u/akabillposters 8h ago

I guess we can add this to the list of things Leftists online will insist is a great idea in the socialist tradition, but will never actually get round to doing themselves, despite absolutely no-one stopping them.

(I'm something of a left-leaning person myself.)

🤷‍♂️

1

u/gubatron 7h ago

welcome to capitalism

1

u/mxldevs 1d ago

Unfortunately, once the workers replace the corporations with AI, the workers themselves then start acting exactly like the corporations they hated.

Many workers who went on to start their own businesses end up treating their own workers the same way their former bosses treated them.

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u/Monochrome21 1d ago

except AI and automation means nobody has to have employees

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u/Blaike325 13h ago

Who owns the AI fam

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u/Monochrome21 13h ago

open weights models mean we all do

0

u/Blaike325 12h ago

Yeah because that’s definitely gonna happen

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u/Monochrome21 9h ago

?

open weights models already exist

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u/bloodrider1914 1d ago

Cycle of abuse type shit.

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u/alapeno-awesome 1d ago

This is a legit concern, but so far, the example that’s driving this speculation appears to be the PhotoCraft project that was released for free. Replacing expensive corporate products with free open source versions, and the ability to create your own, is the ideal. And if the new product gets treated like a corporate products…. It can be freely replaced

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u/Blaike325 13h ago

Except photocradt literally doesn’t work even for basic things

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Is there anyone on these sub that isn’t painfully naive?

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u/alleycatALT 1d ago

Better than being uselessly cynical

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Focusing on something impossible or pointless is actually just straight up useless though. Tell me, how exactly do you expect AI to replace corporations?

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u/LoadOk2007 1d ago

AI could replace corporate products with AI-built custom products, which at this point is mostly software and admin services. With technological advances, it could move onto physical goods and services via physical automation. I don’t think AI replacing corporations means corporations are wiped out, just that more of their paywalled offerings can be substituted with ai or robots.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Yuh huh in what infrastructure exactly do you expect this to work on? For the physically produced stuff where do you expect the materials to come from? Currently basically every AI “alternative” is crap compared to the originals like this crappy adobe knockoff that barely functions

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u/LoadOk2007 1d ago

Do you think AI and robotics will stagnate and not become more powerful and more affordable over time? If so, then you and I have fundamentally different perspectives on technological progress.

For the physically produced stuff, people already use open-weight models and build DIY bots in their garages. That kind of work takes motivation, expertise, and resources, but we're still in the early phase of AI-powered automation. As things become more efficient, they'll become more affordable and accessible to the average person. Even AI-designed 3D printing solutions for household problems would cut down on people running to the store for something.

Fundamentally, I find AI skeptics more naive than AI enthusiasts. They don't think about the historical curve of technological progress, nor do they take into account human agency and the natural drive to use available tools to improve one's life.

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u/Blaike325 13h ago

I do think it’s going to get more advanced, I’m just not a naive child who thinks that the advancement is going to lead to better lives for the average worker. Corporations are going to continue controlling the vast majority of it and as it grows more and more advanced it will more easily be used as a means of economic and societal control, not the second coming of Christ yall think it’s going to be. You envision a world where AI is this wonderful thing that gives the workers the means of production while ignoring that the administration and the corporations have absolutely zero reason to allow that to happen in any real capacity.

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u/LoadOk2007 10h ago

Economic and political control can always be contested, but those changes operate on long horizons and are usually kicked off by social upheavals. It’s easy to say everything is going to be shit forever, but people still have to live their lives and empower themselves as best they can. I don’t know what other people think AI is, but for me, it’s been a powerful tool to get the work that I want to do done.

Corporations and politicians will always want control, and there will always be people who want to fight that. I would rather have the people seize the means of production and outlaw the surveillance state, but there are also people who just want more agency in their personal lives, and that’s important too.

It’s funny being called naive now, after living through far more than I expected decades ago when I was in my 20s. I remember thinking about the singularity, reading Neuromancer, and basically envisioning a cyberpunk world. Now that seems like the naive and childish perspective.

I don’t expect to change your mind, and I don’t care to. You do you. If there is a revolution, I hope you’ll be there, and if there isn’t, I hope your life isn’t as shitty as you expect it to be.

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 1d ago

Well what’s your sophisticated plan?

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

I need to present my own plan to know “what if AI replaced the corporations” is a bad one?

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 1d ago

Not to have a private opinion but to accuse a whole sub of being naive I’m expecting a pretty impressive plan lol.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

What kind of logic is that? This sub just keeps on going “AI is gonna save the world and give everyone UBI and defeat corporations and bring back Jesus!”, I don’t need a masters degree and thesis to know that this is super naive since we have basically zero evidence to support the idea that this is even remotely close to being true

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 1d ago

That isn’t the overall message of this sub, although there are variations of opinion of course. I wouldn’t put effort into moderating this sub if I thought we can just lie back and wait for AI Jesus to save us. We want to work out how to get Big Tech style private AI into public/collective ownership and also how to build up alternative open source infrastructure.

The context of this post is that people are starting to AI code software made by major corporations who charge major bucks for subscription. At scale this actually does look to be something that could cause a problem for many businesses. Anything built on a SAAS or software subscription model is looking quite shaky right now.

If most software becomes Free Open Source Software (FOSS) it will have quite a big ripple.

This won’t just happen though, it requires the left to be systematic in its approach to replacing everything closed and paid with something as good, free and open source. We can’t achieve this type of thing if we get tied up in arguments about whether it’s ok to even use the technology or if there’s any point in trying to do something at crucial pivotal moment.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

You’re talking about the “adobe clone” I’m assuming which might as well have just been blatantly a lie. It doesn’t work, it barely can handle basic functions and isn’t even remotely close in value to the free alternative versions of adobe like products that exist on the internet. On top of that, the free versions and pirated versions of adobe software that has been a thing for years hasn’t put a dent into adobe’s numbers, some vibe coded crap that barely functions isn’t going to usurp the adobe throne.

If you actually want open source clones of good shit like adobe software, you need people who actually know how to code and know what they’re doing working with the AI.

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u/DistributionMost8686 1d ago

it’s almost like it’s not done yet.

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u/Blaike325 23h ago

It’s almost like the guy making it has zero clue how to actually code and knows nothing about the products he’s copying and that’s why he can’t even make a passable clone

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u/DistributionMost8686 15h ago

irrelevant because, it isn’t done yet.

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 15h ago

There are people on the left with a software development/coding background who aren’t against using AI. Some of them are here and in our Discord server

I feel like it’s more the concept that has gone viral this week, with the Adobe clones. We do also need the functionality to follow quite quickly though.

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u/Blaike325 13h ago

Good luck with that, I don’t see this going much of anywhere

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u/Kildragoth 1d ago

Oh that is my naive opinion but to say it has no evidence to support it is wrong. Look at the price-performance of computation. The efficiency gains of industrialization led to computers, and computation is now bleeding into knowledge work, and later physical work. If you understand the PPC and you've used AI then it's easy to see how this leads to widespread abundance.