I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI is far more beneficial than capitalism.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
AI is a blank optimization process
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.