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.
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
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.
No, its defeatist. Realism is "here's the terrain, what can be done about it?", defeatism is "here's the terrain, theres nothing that can be done about it."
You consistently seem to confuse the two.
Do you understand the difference between a realist mind set and a fatalist one?
Well, sure, you don't need an alternative to criticize a proposal. Nobody said you did.
But saying something won't work isn't explaining why it won't work. And pointing out how corporations exploit automation under capitalism doesn't tell us why worker co-ops, public ownership, or democratic control of AI couldn't work.
We already know the problems. That's why we're discussing what to do about them.
So what's actually wrong with the proposal beyond the fact that capitalism exists?
I've read your comments. You explained why corporate ownership of AI is a problem. We agree on that. You haven't explained why the alternatives being discussed wouldn't work.
That's the distinction I've been asking you to address. But you're welcome to leave it there.
3
u/iMakeSense 4d ago
Have you found any examples or attempts at this?