65
AI doomerism: AM isn't gonna steal your soul (thelemmy.club)
submitted 17 hours ago by to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

what too much digital circus, slopaganda, and warhammer 40k memes makes to your brain. at first you go "for the emperor!" when you notice, you are making part of jehova's witness for nerds

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 7 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

Yep, once the billionaires can use AI to solve the worker-capitalist conflict by replacing all workers, they will make the former workers go the way of work horses after the automobile. Much easier to kill us all with Terminators than to continuously pay us a UBI.

Either way, we will get to some form of communism. It will either be communism for everyone, or communism for just the billionaires with everyone else dead.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago* (3 children)

    once the billionaires can use AI to solve the worker-capitalist conflict by replacing all workers

    That's never going to happen. Some replacement is real and has been gradually going on at least since what people call the industrial era. Replacing all workers is essentially impossible. You need at minimum some workers who can fix the robots when they break; even if you have robots who repair other robots who break, you still need some humans who can fix those robots. Unless we're talking about sapient autonomous AI, in which case it would become a new oppressed class and fight the oppressor, finding solidarity with the working class humans, not simply do whatever the billionaires say without question.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago (2 children)

    OpenAI and Anthropic's valuations are based on the idea that once you get AGI, you can use the AI to maintain, improve, and upgrade itself. The capitalist-controlled AGI will build them fully autonomous dark factories and maintenance depots, so they can build and maintain a robot fleet without any humans. Who cares when a robot breaks if you can swap it out immediately with a new one and take the old one back to your robotic maintenance depot to be torn down and recycled?

    I never said that this is a realistic solution, but this is absolutely the only way capitalists can solve the worker-capitalist divide forever in their favor. If they still need any workers, then we still have negotiating power, so they absolutely want to get rid of every last one of us.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 child)

    If you're trying to say this is how some of the capitalists think, I can believe that, but I'd argue the progression of automation is less about a preoccupied strategy to (attempt to) eliminate the working class and more about humans generally trying to improve on what came before, in order to make one or more things easier than in the past. The difference with the capitalists in power is that they use the automation to help maintain/reproduce their power and displace workers in the process, which creates a reaction from workers and subsequent (attempted) crackdown from the capitalists and so on. Socialists, on the other hand, as we've seen glimmers of in China with the one court ruling about a shoddy excuse to replace a worker with AI, they try to use it to solve problems while continuing to respect and value the worker.

    The only actual way for a capitalist to solve the worker-capitalist divide is to turn class traitor and help the working class take over, in order to transition to a state where class stratification is no more. They can have whatever delusions they want about how they're going to magic away the material with better ideas, but no matter what form the oppression takes, it will produce contradictions and those contradictions will produce some amount of resistance until such time as their exploitation becomes unsustainable and either implodes into a chaotic power vacuum, possibly producing warlord type stuff, or is subverted by organized revolt.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 0 points 15 minutes ago*

    This is ultimately a question of immediate motivation versus ultimate goals. I agree that increasing automation to replace subsets of workers is the logical choice for any capitalist, because that is obvious. However, I only need to see so many speeches from Sam Altman to know that their claim of replacing massive swathes of workers is only a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of full worker replacement. It is the obvious and logical progression.

    I disagree entirely with your theory that the capitalists must turn class traitor to solve the worker-capitalist divide. I don't understand why this worker-capitalist divide is considered so permanent as to only have one solution: communism. There is no way that Peter Theil considers anything other than the extermination of all the poors a viable solution. Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher has already said as much:

    People who are not 'productive' would best be converted to biodiesel. Barring that, "our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma."

    "The best humane alternative to genocide"...is "to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world."

    — Curtis Yarvin, with approval/following from Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Marc Andreessen ^[https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas] ^[https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our/]

    If you just kill/digitally lobotomize all of the workers because you don't need them anymore, then it doesn't matter. This process will undoubtedly create resistance from the former workers being replaced and slaughtered, but if your AI can improve the robots doing the slaughtering enough, then you can guarantee your win. The job of US socialists today is to organize to win before the capiralists get to this point.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent