this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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So, my argument was “capitalism makes this tech dangerous” and your reasoning for disagreeing is basically, “but what if we don’t win capitalism because we try to protect people and the environment?”
I think it's important to consider these elements and try to mitigate them as we move forward. But they'll never be completely fixed.
If anything has the power to collapse capitalism, it's AI automation. Capitalism is all about keeping people working for the benefit of those above with the threat of not getting what you need to survive. That threat is predicated by there not being enough to go around.
Once we're able to make an enormous surplus without the labor of the common man; the basis of capitalism begins to crumble. I fear that if we give corporations time, they'll try and make the world run on AI WITHOUT anyone losing jobs. That terrifies me more, because people will accept the status quo but lose the only power they ever had in capitalism: The combined value of their labor. A strike doesn't work so well if your whole job is pushing a button to make AI do it.
I think the beginning of AI will be painful for the reasons we both have outlined. But I believe that's growing pains towards a better future. Giving corps time to boil the frog won't be good. Keeping the corps fighting each other to be the first by pushing this tech forward is the quickest way for them to create their own obsolescence.
I just don’t see any scenario in which companies eliminate the need for employees, but keep paying them. And I don’t see any scenario in which these capitalist enterprises, clearly that give zero fucks about the impact of the tech as long as they hold the keys, don’t take that money and power to fight tax increases to fund UBI.
I see exactly what is happening now, and that has happened with all technological advances: careers getting eliminated for the bottom line, only for more meaningless jobs to be necessitated in their absence—jobs that offer less buying power for the paycheck they’re signing.
I obviously don’t know what will happen in the future. But trends don’t lie. Richer, more powerful companies, using that power and money to get richer and amass more power. Our government is already broken at current levels of corporate capitalism. More powerful corporations will not make things better for us. They will undoubtedly make the worse. Because the worse things are for us, the better they are for the ownership class.
We are all working class. And the class war is raging. We have just been losing.
And this is all before we even discuss the environmental impact of this stupid ass tech. Which is devastating. When we don’t have time for more environmental devastation.
Totally get where you're coming from. Corporate greed seems like the boogie man behind capitalism. It's easy to understand: make line go up. But I'm afraid the dark parts of capitalism are spookier than that. They don't just want money. If that were the case they'd sell all those expensive corporate offices and let people be more productive at home.
They want people to lord over, they want the power to surveil them. To make them do team building exercises. They call themselves a family. They take team pictures with the CEO smiling in front. People think of them as heartless machines. But machines would try and make people happy, that's when they work the best. No, they're happy to have offices full of people twiddling their thumbs, they're narcissists. Their whole incentive to climb the ladder is to be standing on someone else's head.
Who are you king of, if there's only robots around you?