While looking at more gear-based leftist takes on AI, I found this piece by Daniel Morley, published in the magazine of the Trotskyist “Revolutionary Communist International”. While it contains some fundamental misunderstandings (I personally cringed at conflation of consciousness and intelligence), it shows the writer has done a surprising amount of technical due diligence (it briefly touches on overfitting and adversarial robustness). While it’s thesis boils down to “AI will be bad under capitalism (because technological unemployment and monopolies) but amazing under communism (because AI can help us automate the economy), so let us overthrow capitalism faster”, it at least has a thesis derived from coherent principles and a degree of technical understanding. Also it cited references and made a quite tasteful use of Stable Diffusion for illustrations, so that was nice.
Anyways I guess my somewhat actionable point here is that the non-postmodernist Marxists seem to be at least somewhat thinking (as opposed to angry-vibing) about AI.
From today’s perspective, Marx is just another old white cishet tech bro. (something something swims left)
I never expected that one day I would miss the old-style Marxists, but God forgive me, I do. We disagreed on many things, but at least we were able to have an intelligent debate.
Political positions are inherently high-dimensional, and “leftward” is constantly being rotated around according to where the set of people and institutions considered to be “the left” seem to be moving to.
While looking at more gear-based leftist takes on AI, I found this piece by Daniel Morley, published in the magazine of the Trotskyist “Revolutionary Communist International”. While it contains some fundamental misunderstandings (I personally cringed at conflation of consciousness and intelligence), it shows the writer has done a surprising amount of technical due diligence (it briefly touches on overfitting and adversarial robustness). While it’s thesis boils down to “AI will be bad under capitalism (because technological unemployment and monopolies) but amazing under communism (because AI can help us automate the economy), so let us overthrow capitalism faster”, it at least has a thesis derived from coherent principles and a degree of technical understanding. Also it cited references and made a quite tasteful use of Stable Diffusion for illustrations, so that was nice.
Anyways I guess my somewhat actionable point here is that the non-postmodernist Marxists seem to be at least somewhat thinking (as opposed to angry-vibing) about AI.
From today’s perspective, Marx is just another old white cishet tech bro. (something something swims left)
I never expected that one day I would miss the old-style Marxists, but God forgive me, I do. We disagreed on many things, but at least we were able to have an intelligent debate.
Political positions are inherently high-dimensional, and “leftward” is constantly being rotated around according to where the set of people and institutions considered to be “the left” seem to be moving to.