This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda.
-
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
Highly-trained LLMs are a form of capital. They are produced by extracting knowledge from text which workers have made, and they cannot be made practically useful without vast compute expenditures. The companies which make them seek to recoup their costs by renting them out, primarily to corporations which want to use them to reduce the number of workers which they employ. The facts are straightforward, and the net effect is a wealth transfer from workers to owners.
Current attempts at producing large-scale social or economic transformations via generative AI are an unavoidably right-wing political project.
-
Highly-trained LLMs are a form of capital. They are produced by extracting knowledge from text which workers have made, and they cannot be made practically useful without vast compute expenditures. The companies which make them seek to recoup their costs by renting them out, primarily to corporations which want to use them to reduce the number of workers which they employ. The facts are straightforward, and the net effect is a wealth transfer from workers to owners.
Current attempts at producing large-scale social or economic transformations via generative AI are an unavoidably right-wing political project.
Unlike cryptocurrency-based smart contracts, I don’t think that machine learning and generative AI are inherently right-wing technologies. It’s totally possible to encode your own little crappy neural net and have it spit out weird pixels for an art project, and that’s okay. I honestly don’t think that LLMs are a terrible tool for search and data extraction, and I’ve seen reasonable claims for their usefulness in other circumstances as well. The key point is that a small list of targeted use-cases is not going to upend society.
Generative AI is being marketed as a revolutionary force which is going to somehow destabilize and remake our whole economic system. This is because the most capable and expensive generative AI systems are produced and controlled by capitalists who have destabilization and wealth capture as their goal. Any AI tools which are capable of causing significant economic impacts have been produced to further this objective.
-
Unlike cryptocurrency-based smart contracts, I don’t think that machine learning and generative AI are inherently right-wing technologies. It’s totally possible to encode your own little crappy neural net and have it spit out weird pixels for an art project, and that’s okay. I honestly don’t think that LLMs are a terrible tool for search and data extraction, and I’ve seen reasonable claims for their usefulness in other circumstances as well. The key point is that a small list of targeted use-cases is not going to upend society.
Generative AI is being marketed as a revolutionary force which is going to somehow destabilize and remake our whole economic system. This is because the most capable and expensive generative AI systems are produced and controlled by capitalists who have destabilization and wealth capture as their goal. Any AI tools which are capable of causing significant economic impacts have been produced to further this objective.
@jnkrtech I somewhat agree, tho I think that things can actually destabilize/remake societies without it always being very on purpose. I think that even small AI models may have this effect, tho not in the way that the AGI-pursuers might envision. Making more of the world "machine readable" changes our capacity for sensing/measuring and decisionmaking in ways that I think could be pretty profound. Even with pre-transformer architectures.
-
@jnkrtech I somewhat agree, tho I think that things can actually destabilize/remake societies without it always being very on purpose. I think that even small AI models may have this effect, tho not in the way that the AGI-pursuers might envision. Making more of the world "machine readable" changes our capacity for sensing/measuring and decisionmaking in ways that I think could be pretty profound. Even with pre-transformer architectures.
@jnkrtech
I do agree that today's AI is mostly being built with disruption of labor markets as the explicit goal ("all economically valuable work" and such). And that does seem pretty yikes!
But I think even if that wasn't the case, there'd be reason to be concerned about biggo shifts as a result of people's use of these technologies. -
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
@jnkrtech we should do the opposite of fight. Unite, even.
-
Unlike cryptocurrency-based smart contracts, I don’t think that machine learning and generative AI are inherently right-wing technologies. It’s totally possible to encode your own little crappy neural net and have it spit out weird pixels for an art project, and that’s okay. I honestly don’t think that LLMs are a terrible tool for search and data extraction, and I’ve seen reasonable claims for their usefulness in other circumstances as well. The key point is that a small list of targeted use-cases is not going to upend society.
Generative AI is being marketed as a revolutionary force which is going to somehow destabilize and remake our whole economic system. This is because the most capable and expensive generative AI systems are produced and controlled by capitalists who have destabilization and wealth capture as their goal. Any AI tools which are capable of causing significant economic impacts have been produced to further this objective.
@jnkrtech best analysis of AI I've seen - also they don't actually have to do anything besides make a hype bubble that pumps and dumps the whole stock market a la 2008
-
Highly-trained LLMs are a form of capital. They are produced by extracting knowledge from text which workers have made, and they cannot be made practically useful without vast compute expenditures. The companies which make them seek to recoup their costs by renting them out, primarily to corporations which want to use them to reduce the number of workers which they employ. The facts are straightforward, and the net effect is a wealth transfer from workers to owners.
Current attempts at producing large-scale social or economic transformations via generative AI are an unavoidably right-wing political project.
@jnkrtech i have a shitload of research im doing on this topic you may appreciate. theres a bunch od math involved and a bunch of live fire tests i need to do
-
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
"Workers who don't adopt mechanical looms and spinning machines will be left behind'.
No workers said "Cool, I want to work in a dark, satanic mill, where I'll go deaf and die early of lung disease".
Ned Ludd was right.
-
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
@jnkrtech I wish more people understood this.
-
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
-
Highly-trained LLMs are a form of capital. They are produced by extracting knowledge from text which workers have made, and they cannot be made practically useful without vast compute expenditures. The companies which make them seek to recoup their costs by renting them out, primarily to corporations which want to use them to reduce the number of workers which they employ. The facts are straightforward, and the net effect is a wealth transfer from workers to owners.
Current attempts at producing large-scale social or economic transformations via generative AI are an unavoidably right-wing political project.
@jnkrtech
The LLM is a statistical analysis of a corpus of language. In a sense, it is language in, language out, with math in the middle. The math is done on the corpus. The "front end" is parsing user intent against the business logic that built the machine, and inducing output from the LLM. For those who are interested in language itself, and how language has been used, it is a tool of considerable impact, I think. -
This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.
@jnkrtech it's worse than that. They want everyone using AI because LLM-mediated genre capture makes people easy to control. When we all start speaking the machine's language of legible coherence, and flatten all edges and inconsistencies into nothing by recognizing them as errors... no one will need to be dominated or controlled. They'll control themselves.
-
R Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) shared this topic on
