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When it's time to kick the AI conversation up a notch
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Yes, but to be clear: the ideology of capitalism (along with the specific ideologies of the tech barons) is baked into the AI.
Tools, by their very nature, orient their users toward a particular way of seeing the world that they would not otherwise adopt.
That’s simply what happens when suddenly some outcomes are easier to achieve than others, and some methods of achieving those outcomes become easier than others too.
To be clear, the ideology of capitalism is absolutely not baked into AI, because development of this technology is not exclusive to capitalist states. China is a socialist state, and technology developed there is very much rooted in the material conditions of China. Similarly, there are open source projects working on AI tech which are not commercially driven. Your argument holds for AI tech built by corporations in the US.
China is not so different from the US, and even open source projects are using the same methods as the commercial projects.
But I’m not too interested in evaluating individual projects here, since the original question was to what extent are the harms of AI driven by capitalism, and my answer is: deeply.
I just wanted to remind people that artifacts have politics, so when we’re considering how an given kind of artifact would be different under a different political regime, we need to take seriously the fact that tools are not “just tools” and that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.
China is fundamentally different from the US in every respect imaginable, and you should spend a bit of time actually educating yourself on the subject instead of just stating your uninformed opinions. Here are a couple of books you can get started with to actually understand China:
You could make the same argument for a hammer.
But you'd still be wrong
I could, but it’s already been made.