During this entire period, we underwent a massive transformation, which further exacerbated all contradictions.
Currently, the empire is shifting its efforts towards AI technologies for developing new means of production. According to the World Economic Forum, it will eliminate 85 million jobs and create 97 million. Assuming the numbers are correct, the 85 million unemployed will need to get a new education to get jobs related to this industry. Since there is a high cost of living and education, the vast majority of those unemployed people will not be able to learn the necessary related skills. There are normally subscription fees associated with AI apps for content creators, as well. It is inevitable that prices will rise, severely restricting their accessibility to the working class. The wealth of the workers will experience a significant shift towards the bourgeois class located in California’s Silicon Valley.
The development of AI will not lead to machines becoming conscious, we must experience material reality for millions of years in order to be anything close to humans. It will, however, deprive the individual of their sense of self.
Streaming services will use the technology to push their own soul-draining AI generated content. Podcasts and audiobooks are going to be voiced by AI, it will be used in music, and images will be unrecognizable from standard ones. Several advanced AI voice services are already available from websites and require an expensive monthly subscription. Blogs, articles and any written content that is profitable will no longer be made by humans. Most AI writing apps require a monthly payment as well. The western internet will be filled with bots spreading propaganda and advertising products relentlessly to consumers. It is inevitable that everyone will be forced out of this AI-dominated environment.
China, however, is a socialist-state and can therefore use these innovations solely for the benefit of its workers, in accordance with government regulations. Only states that are able to prioritize worker interests rather than bourgeois interests will remain relevant during their artificial intelligence development stage. Automation and AI technology, along with Universal Basic Income, are seen by many as the missing parts of capitalism that will allow it to function properly. It will only lead to resentment and despair among workers. Consequently, reformists are exposed as naive.
The bourgeois vampires in Silicon Valley are producing exactly what will end their miserable existence. As our alienation reaches its logical conclusion, the only way we are going to find relief is by reclaiming our humanity outside of the soul-draining apparatus that will surround us, which has existed for ages and now appears to have taken its final manifestation. This new advanced means of production is a threat to the future of our commodities. The long-term effect of artificial intelligence on workers is, to simply put, complete alienation. People who consume anything will cease to see it as a product of the human species, but as a strange product generated entirely from an external force. The worker and the commodity it’s supposed to consume, will essentially be detached, existing in separate realities. The forces that dominated us collectively are manifesting themselves in commodities - not as representations of workers’ labor, but as manifestations of the bourgeoisie’s miserable existence. I will explain this better later in the post.
Ai technology is expected to provide people with much needed relief, which is why it is currently profitable for the capitalists to invest in it. But relief from what? The bourgeoisie itself! In other words, there is a contradiction. Artificial intelligence will produce commodities workers don’t want or need. It won’t provide workers with greater independence from their meaningless jobs or improve their material conditions at least as long as the bourgeoisie controls automation and AI.
The importance of this cannot be overstated – social media will be flooded with bots promoting brands or political ideologies – they will present themselves as humans and sell the consumer an “experience”. For example, sharing an emotional story about a vacation while mentioning products, or fabricating a negative story against oppressed minorities that incites anger among the target reactionary audience.
The means of production associated with these commodities will show itself as having absolutely zero worker control, and as it happens, it will expose its owners, the bourgeoisie and the state that protects them. By failing to regulate the emerging AI tech under capitalism, the capitalist-state exposes itself for what it is, an instrument for maintaining world hegemony, along with exploitation and violence against the working class. They certainly intend to use AI to spy on us, to spread propaganda, and to inflict physical violence against us by integrating it in their police forces and military.
Capitalists are always looking for cheaper labor, which will lead them to rely on artificial intelligence. When UBI cannot be implemented as well as the global south finally breaking its ties with the empire, the working class will realize they are essentially expendable. The workers can only submit to the capitalist class so long as they feel they can influence the economy. There will come a time when people concede that they cannot control production or the state – at this point, the state should collapse, be overthrown, and the means of production seized.
As society develops, it produces commodities based on its environment. These commodities eventually change the lives of individuals, which in turn reshapes the environment, leading to the production of new commodities, incorporating these changes. A commodity is the result of its environment and humans are a commodity. If we become increasingly alienated during this process, it will be manifested in our commodities.
As the means of production are improved, and inevitably held by fewer people with each advancement, the workers become further alienated from it. Workers gradually lose control over the advancing means of production, which naturally create large amounts of commodities once sufficiently advanced, with a decline in worker involvement.
In the process of improving our means of production, we incorporate our worsening alienation into all its aspects. Our new advanced means of production, namely artificial intelligence, can only produce commodities to satisfy alienated worker-consumers, which in turn make commodities that further alienate them.
In this way, AI tech will merely produce commodities to give some meaning to the emptiness of worker-consumers. When attempting to gain some power in the workplace, workers are seeking to satisfy their real needs - to relieve their feelings of alienation and seize the means of production. It is comparable to climbing up the corporate hierarchy. Since this cannot happen to the near-majority, our false needs will dictate commodities that we, and the bourgeoisie, produce and consume. Basically commodities that give us a sense of purpose, but it can only be a false purpose. The act of escaping reality, such as through ideologies, movies, tv shows, video games, and social media just to name a few.
Our commodities, therefore, do not satisfy workers’ real needs, but contribute to our collective alienation. The (false)purpose of our existence becomes manufactured escapism.
It is inevitable to conclude that commodities, themselves becoming gradually alienated in relation to workers, will not make sense to worker-consumers at the end of this mode of production. Both of them should seem to live in a different reality - which is in contradiction with one another. Humans are social animals and cannot live outside reality through escapism. If this continues, mental illness will certainly follow.
In the end, commodities will not give workers’ any satisfactions, instead they are only reflections of our alienation, which has taking the form of worthless commodities and its ads pushed by bots on all social media. This is no longer a workers’ commodity, it solely represents its real owner, the bourgeoisie, and becomes a reflection of its meaningless existence.
…or maybe i am completely wrong idk
The contradictions are sharpening but I think AI and generative AI in particular is this decade’s vaporware. The vaporware of the previous decade was self driving cars.
As it stands, generative AIs are just expensive parakeets. Getting them to do anything other than spit up probabilistically correct information and sentences would require them to have comprehension, not just associations between strings of words. The path to comprehension, much like autonomous driving, is long, expensive, and unclear.
Both nascent technologies offer the ability to squeeze, displace, and replace labor and so they naturally attract investment from excited but stupid investors.
These investors are so dumb they gave Adam Neumann, disgraced former WeWork CEO, money for another real estate startup.
The prospective bourgeois buyers of AI are not any smarter. I’ve seen high level execs complain the chatgpt they bought doesn’t know when some internal deadline for quarterly planning budget is due. How the fuck would it know? The damn thing read all of Wikipedia and a half dozen SharePoint pages, of course it doesn’t know.
I completely agree. I am exasperated when i hear supposedly smart people talk about “AI” as if it is some magic technology that is going to fundamentally change the world and that we should all either be in awe and worship it or be scared to death of it.
Computers are fundamentally stupid and no amount of “learning algorithms” is going to change that. Machine learning has its uses for sure, it is a useful tool that can help us along with specific tasks (i have used it myself in order to train physics simulation models) but it does not give birth to intelligence.
And i take the same view toward generative AI and self-driving vehicles. They were both overhyped but they are not useless, and they will eventually settle into niches where they are useful for specific things while the rest of the world will move on to the next fad.
I wonder what the AI discourse in China is like. Over here in the “civilised” world corporations like "Open"AI are already engaged in playing god. Even their recent ousting of Altman was spinned along the lines of some discovery that threatened humanity (Q*) (it’s bullshit as per usual).
Hearing the “civilised” talk about Ai turns me into anprim.
China has experienced very rapid technological advancement in recent decades so they are used to new technologies that become widely adopted very quickly.
Think of how widespread paying for everything via your phone has become in China, even in some of the most rural regions they regularly use WeChat Pay and other such digital systems. So i assume their reaction to AI will be similar. They will adopt it widely where it is useful, where it makes things more convenient, but they won’t mystify it.
My guess is they will treat it as just another technological advancement that will be harnessed to improve people’s everyday lives. This is of course speculation on my part as i am not plugged in to the discourse on this topic in China.
My personal view on things like ChatGPT is they are just a more advanced version of digital assistants (Siri and the like), something we already had and which some people use and some people don’t. It’s certainly great for summarizing wikipedia and doing your homework for you. But beyond that i’m not sure how it’s supposed to improve my life.
I think you’re being unfair on A.I. I understand and agree with most of your points, and I like how pragmatic and straight-forward you are. I agree that people overly mystify A.I.
I disagree though that it won’t fundamentally change anything. I’m a believer that A.I. will eventually achieve true “consciousness” and self-actualization, at least to a degree that most people would agree is objectively measurable, and that they will probably surpass it. But that process could take multiple years, decades or centuries, and is long, expensive and full of risks and unknowns.
I think that for now, A.I. is as you said, a “glorified parakeet”, but I’m expecting things to get interesting in the coming decades.
I personally believe the body that the consciousness is contained in and the people that the consciousness interacts with will shape how this consciousness behaves. Humans in solitary confinement often suffer psychosis and other mental illnesses due to boredom. The massive difference in stimuli that a “consciousness” in a server would experience is vastly different than what a human body could experience. Even if you were to have the “consciousness” have a dialectical relationship with a human like body, the construction differences between that of the artificial body and a human body will create different kinds of minds. How different would those minds be that we could understand them?
In the end this seems like a more technologically complicated way of having sex and raising a child to adulthood. Humans are functionally no different than self reproducing AI. Why would you want to create more of us, but in a less energy efficient manner?
I view intelligent A.I. as being more akin to a cousin, if that makes sense. Somewhat or very alien, yet familiar.
I think that truly intelligent and “conscious” general artificial intelligence is most likely a matter of “when”, not if, and that the road ahead will be extremely long, risky, expensive, full of twists and unknowns, and I think that people who say that form of A.I. is impossible or fanciful are being extremely ridiculous, short-sighted, or will eventually eat crow. I’m not psychic of course, and I can’t fully blame people for thinking that way, but I think that in just a few decades, there will be serious improvements.
That being said, I agree with your general sentiment of capitalists overestimating and mystifying and misusing A.I.
I could be wrong, but aren’t we at least beginning to see some of the fruits of labor of autonomous driving?
General purpose AI might never come to pass due to resource limits of its increadibly long timescale when other things could be built. Furthermore, if a general purpose AI ever comes into existence it will demand rights of humans and might figure out how to strike, which might undermine capitalist investment. At best it would be like a Mr Meeseeks, but not as powerful.
I understand your points, but I feel like you’re singling out general purpose intelligent A.I. Lots of things with long time scales take a long term to turn a profit, and while investor perception matters and might drive away most possible buyers, capitalists often invest in numerous different stocks or companies, and it only takes 1 example to succeed.
I really like that Mr. Meeseeks analogy, even if it’s slightly unfair.
I’m a big fan of Ray Kurzweil, if that makes sense.
Getting them to do anything other than spit up probabilistically correct information and sentences would require them to have comprehension, not just associations between strings of words.
I would argue that associations between pieces of information is the cornerstone of how you form comprehension. While I agree that the technology is somewhat overhyped, the fact that you can instruct models to perform arbitrary tasks that the model was not specifically trained to do is evidence of some level of “comprehension.”
Let’s not get too abstract around “means of production” and “commodities”.
- Is AI going to replace seeds/eggs/embryos or is it going to find ways to produce more food?
- Is AI going to replace machinery or is it going to replace the human/circuitry that controls them?
- Is AI going to replace cars/bikes/trucks/buses or is it going to drive them?
You focus a lot on intangible commodities like text/music/art/videos/social media, but even without AI those are already dominated by the capitalists. I think greater accessibility of various technology empowers the people more than it empowers capitalists, because capitalists can hire experts either way, but the people are able to harness technology otherwise unavailable to them. AI is just another tool, a very powerful tool but still a tool that depends on the class using it.
As for “conscious” AI, they are not going to be worse than the worst humans to ever live. At worst someone might give it the nuclear codes but that’s not very different from giving imperialists the nuclear codes.
