I feel similarly disillusioned about Westerners’ revolutionary potential and this AI “debate” is not helping. It feels like such a basic aspect of marxism.
Everytime one wants to clarify it is capitalism and not the technology people do mental gymnastics which ends up being usually some combination of defense of proprietorship and mysticising creatvitity (including the quality of AI output; if the output was high enough quality would that they mean they would then support AI?)
There’s zero self awareness of how Nietschean they sound and how effectively they are saying the automation of other people’s jobs is fine but not theirs because of some inherent superiority that they bring to the table of humanity (usually artisanship). There is no examination of their own fear of proletarianization.
It really feels their marxism, at least in this field, is vibes based.
There could be lots of interesting discussions, for example how we could seize the means of production of AI, or how it could be used to organise or create agitprop, or help progress towards DOTP but all of that is lost because people refuse to leave their liberal myopic bubble.
(The downvotes I’m not bothered about. Lemmygrad is a place for learning and pushing my understanding of theory. I want someone to show me the error of ways so I can learn but this one is such an easy “dunk” against reactionary takes. My own field (I don’t want to say what to keep anonimity) is under threat so I am less sympathetic when other so-called marxists refuse to expand their horizon.)
There’s zero self awareness of how Nietschean they sound and how effectively they are saying the automation of other people’s jobs is fine but not theirs because of some inherent superiority that they bring to the table of humanity (usually artisanship). There is no examination of their own fear of proletarianization.
You know, when you put it this way, it makes me wonder how much of it is fueled by a quiet elitism that people are not even being conscious of. The OP pic I think touches on this, albeit unintentionally; the implication is that the annoying parts of existence are fine to automate, but the cool parts shouldn’t be, and that the annoying parts are icky manual labor and that the cool parts are expressing yourself. This I don’t think is inherently elitist on the face of it, but it does imply a very particular view about the world, which isn’t necessarily shared by everyone and one that arguably derives, at least in part, from certain elitist societal structures. It’s wealthy people who, automation or no, can have other people do the icky parts and then they do the fun parts. And the idea of others being able to do this too because of AI leaves out the ugly and inconvenient reality that if you automate the “icky” jobs, but you don’t address class/caste issues along with it, what you get is a bunch of people who were already on the lower rungs of class and caste, who are now out of work and have no replacement job.
Nowhere in the online creeds about AI do I recall seeing mention of this problem, but plenty is said about “art.” The unspoken implication seems to be that it’s fine to leave the factory worker types high and dry, but don’t you dare come for the “creatives.” It is at times talked about almost like the history of automation started with the AI transformer model proof of concept paper Attention Is All You Need and suddenly “creatives” rose to the occasion, all of a sudden realizing what is wrong with automation.
It would be more understandable, I think, if people who suddenly feel so strongly about “AI” were consistently speaking up about automation of “icky” jobs in the class strata as well. This does not appear to occur though and it doesn’t come across to me like an intentional, selective blindness. It comes across, such as in the concept of OP pic, like it simply doesn’t occur to people because they are so used to viewing “icky” jobs as this inherently unwanted thing that of course it’s fine to want to automate them because “no one really wants to be doing it anyway.” Which would be fine if there was an actual answer for what those people are supposed to do with their lives, that allows them to have food and shelter in a capitalist world. I mean, there was a period when the big thing was “learn to code”, now the coding field is saturated to hell with code bootcamps and other such stuff. It is more competitive than ever, which is probably better for the employer and not so much for the employee. Now automation is coming for coding too.
The lesson should not be that “X is the one untouchable field and others are okay to automate.” The lesson should be that there is no “safe” job to hide out from a system like capitalism and exist outside of its problems. That we need to organize with each other about it and stop pretending we can be one of the “elites” on the edges, as a spectator.
The OP pic I think touches on this, albeit unintentionally; the implication is that the annoying parts of existence are fine to automate, but the cool parts shouldn’t be, and that the annoying parts are icky manual labor and that the cool parts are expressing yourself.
There is a certainly an undercurrent of this; labour aristocratic mores.
I feel similarly disillusioned about Westerners’ revolutionary potential and this AI “debate” is not helping. It feels like such a basic aspect of marxism.
Everytime one wants to clarify it is capitalism and not the technology people do mental gymnastics which ends up being usually some combination of defense of proprietorship and mysticising creatvitity (including the quality of AI output; if the output was high enough quality would that they mean they would then support AI?)
There’s zero self awareness of how Nietschean they sound and how effectively they are saying the automation of other people’s jobs is fine but not theirs because of some inherent superiority that they bring to the table of humanity (usually artisanship). There is no examination of their own fear of proletarianization.
It really feels their marxism, at least in this field, is vibes based.
There could be lots of interesting discussions, for example how we could seize the means of production of AI, or how it could be used to organise or create agitprop, or help progress towards DOTP but all of that is lost because people refuse to leave their liberal myopic bubble.
(The downvotes I’m not bothered about. Lemmygrad is a place for learning and pushing my understanding of theory. I want someone to show me the error of ways so I can learn but this one is such an easy “dunk” against reactionary takes. My own field (I don’t want to say what to keep anonimity) is under threat so I am less sympathetic when other so-called marxists refuse to expand their horizon.)
You know, when you put it this way, it makes me wonder how much of it is fueled by a quiet elitism that people are not even being conscious of. The OP pic I think touches on this, albeit unintentionally; the implication is that the annoying parts of existence are fine to automate, but the cool parts shouldn’t be, and that the annoying parts are icky manual labor and that the cool parts are expressing yourself. This I don’t think is inherently elitist on the face of it, but it does imply a very particular view about the world, which isn’t necessarily shared by everyone and one that arguably derives, at least in part, from certain elitist societal structures. It’s wealthy people who, automation or no, can have other people do the icky parts and then they do the fun parts. And the idea of others being able to do this too because of AI leaves out the ugly and inconvenient reality that if you automate the “icky” jobs, but you don’t address class/caste issues along with it, what you get is a bunch of people who were already on the lower rungs of class and caste, who are now out of work and have no replacement job.
Nowhere in the online creeds about AI do I recall seeing mention of this problem, but plenty is said about “art.” The unspoken implication seems to be that it’s fine to leave the factory worker types high and dry, but don’t you dare come for the “creatives.” It is at times talked about almost like the history of automation started with the AI transformer model proof of concept paper Attention Is All You Need and suddenly “creatives” rose to the occasion, all of a sudden realizing what is wrong with automation.
It would be more understandable, I think, if people who suddenly feel so strongly about “AI” were consistently speaking up about automation of “icky” jobs in the class strata as well. This does not appear to occur though and it doesn’t come across to me like an intentional, selective blindness. It comes across, such as in the concept of OP pic, like it simply doesn’t occur to people because they are so used to viewing “icky” jobs as this inherently unwanted thing that of course it’s fine to want to automate them because “no one really wants to be doing it anyway.” Which would be fine if there was an actual answer for what those people are supposed to do with their lives, that allows them to have food and shelter in a capitalist world. I mean, there was a period when the big thing was “learn to code”, now the coding field is saturated to hell with code bootcamps and other such stuff. It is more competitive than ever, which is probably better for the employer and not so much for the employee. Now automation is coming for coding too.
The lesson should not be that “X is the one untouchable field and others are okay to automate.” The lesson should be that there is no “safe” job to hide out from a system like capitalism and exist outside of its problems. That we need to organize with each other about it and stop pretending we can be one of the “elites” on the edges, as a spectator.
There is a certainly an undercurrent of this; labour aristocratic mores.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7917393/6397188