TLDR: if the rich succeed in building AI systems that cater fully to their needs through the whole supply chain (i.e. AI can mine and process resources into what they want with no humans needed), then the rich will have no reason to keep anyone else around and can just massacre all the poors.
Recently, the r/singularity subreddit has had several posts which show some class-consciousness, despite they mostly-techbro atmosphere.
The post I’ve linked and reproduced below states a concern I also have with AI:
If we assume that we reach AGI, maybe even super intelligence, then we can expect a lot of human jobs will suddenly become obsolete.
First it could be white collar and tech jobs. Then when robotics catches up, manual labor will soon follow. Pretty soon every conceivable position a human once had can now be taken over by a machine.
Humans are officially obsolete.
What’s really chilling is that, while humans in general will no longer be a necessity to run a government or society, the very few billionaires at the top that helped bring this AI to existence will be the ones who control it - and no longer need anyone else. No military personnel, teachers, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, engineers, no one.
Why should countries exist filled with people when people are no longer needed to farm crops, serve in the military, build infrastructure, or anything else?
I would like to believe that if all of humanities needs can now always be fulfilled (but controlled by a very, very few), those few would see the benefit in making sure everyone lives a happy and fulfilling life.
The truth is though, the few at the top will likely leave everyone else to fend for themselves the second their walled garden is in place.
As the years pass, eventually AI becomes fully self-sustaining - from sourcing its own raw materials, to maintaining and improving its own systems - even the AI does not need a single human anymore (not that many are left at that point).
Granted, it could take a long while for this scenario to occur (if ever), but the way things are shaking out, it’s looking more and more unlikely that we’ll never get to a utopia where no one works unless they want to and everyone’s needs are met. It’s just not possible if the people in charge are greedy, backstabbing, corporate sociopaths that only play nice because they have to at the moment.
I find their argument quite valid, only lacking in the explicit mention of ‘capitalism’.
Once the rich have full-supply-chain-AI, we wouldn’t be able to revolt even if we wanted to. The robotic police force controlled by the rich can just massacre all the poors.
This puts a hard time limit on when revolution needs to occur. After that I guess we need China’s J-36s to save the American proletariat.
Society will be radically changed long before AI radically changes society.
Given the mostly white, bourgeois preoccupation with “x-AI risk” (existential/extinction) I think the real “risk” is that the self-legitimating myths of capitalism will fall on muted microphones. Even 10 years ago when AI was still called machine learning and it was much less impressive (its outputs were exclusively categorization of inputs) and it required decades of breakthroughs and to be hooked up to every input in society and multiplexed with every output to do anything “harmful” the x-AI risk people were running around crying (this holds true today of LLMs and other statistically likely to exist content emitters).
The pitch is always that the AI will decide the needs of the many outweigh the needs (private property rights) of the few. This is only scary if you are among that few. Even property rights obsessed liberals don’t think themselves among the few who will be exproprAIted but are outraged by the expropriation itself. It’s a boogyman spewed by the people who are the problem and we’re asked to share their fear. Ridiculous.
Unlike other private property and artifacts of capital accumulation which are inert (the workers may organize against you but the steel mill itself won’t), the AI their capital gives birth to might in several decades time maybe organize against you (but not really).