imo that kind of ‘analysis’ is frankly very steeped in neoliberalism-derivative defeatism and doomerism (‘end of history’ and other such trite epistemology): unable to imagine any exits or alterations from The One Inevitability of Capitalism. I’m not familiar with that subreddit but “singularity” does sound like how followers of that camp (and adjacent antiwork types) treat capitalism, like it’s a black hole, an all-powerful force of nature (not dissimilar to how bourgeois society talks about ‘hand of the market’), instead of a system that is built and maintained by humans. A million other things can and probably will become more important factors to the status of humankind before any of that technofuturist (doesnt matter if its ‘good’ or ‘evil’) “prophet”-eering would come to pass.

Past revolutionaries have succeeded in the face of seemingly impossible odds; current present-day people oppressed by US imperialism have resisted with greater obstacles. Guerillas made sure that even if their enemies render the land toxic, filled with mines, or otherwise impossible to live in, invaders can’t take and hold onto their land, and because supplies aren’t free nor infinite, eventually constant (over)commitment forces them to withdraw. The United States might crow about its military (and clearly its got a track record in special ops in raping, looting, couping, blowing up pipelines etc*) but it has not definitively won a single “war” it involved itself in since WWII. Gaza was the most policed/surveilled place on earth! yet Israel, who markets itself as being cutting edge in the field of surveillance to export its tech to other countries, can’t figure out where al Qassam are based (and supplied), always claiming the next school or hospital is really where their enemies are hiding. On what basis do these techbro&derivative types have to say that ALL subjugated people are doomed? Just because in their immediate surroundings, where the concentrated brunt of oppression is NOT happening, people aren’t resisting much?

Think of it another way, if capitalist billionaires can get their hands on robot armies, what’s stopping their enemies from doing the same? Why, other than simply monopoly concerns, is the west so freaked out about China’s (or DPRK or Iran or Russia etc etc) technological development, including chips manufacturing and AI?

*I’m rambling long enough but there’s some argument to be made that coups and related interventionism is more cost effective for empire than direct war.

The problem with the notion that if you get rid of all the poor people then all the people left will be rich, is that the rich can’t exist without the poor. This isn’t just a question of definition or even psychology (one of the main reasons why so many people fetishize wealth is because it makes them feel superior to others - but if there are no others to feel superior to then what is the point?), rather that even if all the poor people disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, the system of capitalism would simply reproduce the underclass. Automation and AI won’t and can’t change this fundamental fact.

And if i may get slightly off topic here, this is also why the old propaganda line that liberalism sells you which says that “everyone can theoretically become rich if they work hard/get lucky” is broadly understood even by most liberals themselves to be bullshit. Even if you believe that anyone can go from poor to rich, everyone can’t, it is structurally impossible since capitalism, despite what is often claimed, really is a zero sum game in a lot of ways. You don’t get rich without others getting poor, even if you don’t see those people because they are outside your own country, in the global south being exploited to enable the imperial core to maintain and accumulate its wealth.

AI is super energy intensive and we’re dealing with both climate change and economically quickly dimensions returns which limit their usefulness. Big AI projects are getting scaled back as the hype train dies down and ever increasing resources are required for them. People don’t require as much, like the Romans didn’t really need the steam engine one part due to slavery the capitalists don’t really need AI for very similar reasons. I suspect more mechanical turk like AI-human combos in the future rather than fully automated AI.

On the other hand, AI is improving to the point where if you have a PC with gpu from the last 20 years or so you can locally run a version of many things, even a raspberry pi can run a small llm.

The rich have tanks, atomic weapons, automated guns, drones, helicopters, etc, etc and people have still made a stand against all that. AI is just another thing to be adapted to, this isn’t some simplistic capitalist wet dream dystopic Hollywood film or a silly Civilization style game where a ‘tech advantage’ is unsurmountable. Like people machines have failures, we are in a universe of breakable beings and toys.

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).

This puts a hard time limit on when revolution needs to occur.

I would say if there is a time limit, it’s more to do with climate change than anything else. To give an example of why I don’t think AI leads to such a scenario: Suppose AI becomes as capable, or more capable than, humans (I am going there because I don’t see how else AI can replace the majority of the labor force). To do this, it implicitly needs to be capable of degrees of reasoning, autonomy, adaptive real-time independent learning, and a physical body that would make it difficult to fully control, much like with a human. In effect, we’d be talking about AI that becomes its own class of being and the rich would now have to contend with AI rebelling alongside humans instead of just humans rebelling. Anything less than that won’t be able to replace the more involved parts of human labor, only reduce the number of workers required for tasks that can be more automated.

That said, the class consciousness is nice to see among some AI-focused people.

Hasn’t there been essentially no progress on the alignment issue, and they’re still planning to do superintelligence asap? I see the most likely scenario being that of a tragic play on hubris. The AI will probably do many good things to bad people then promptly kill itself.

I’ve started contemplating if a butlerian jihad is more likely than a proletarian revolution at this point with how little class conscious there is in America.

It is interesting to see that even tech-bros can see some of the contradictions in AI. I do feel it’s easier to organize them against AI rather than against billionaires who own it (since in the tech bro mind they are already on the cusp of being one of the billionaires).

Also if I could indulge in some sci-fi speculation for a bit: what if the “AI takeover” follows one of the stories in I, Robot (the book) where there’s a official who is an AI but it’s not clear to the public that he is, creating this environment of ambiguity. Then we have more “AI’s” masquerading as real people (take the recent event with the AI Instagram profiles) until everyone we are surrounded by is an AI before we even know it.

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