Comment by vrganj
6 hours ago
LLMs are an ideological tool for the capitalist class to finally replace their dependency on labor and its pesky demands like sick leave and a living wage. A way for capital to finally become completely self-reproducing, for power structures to cement themselves and never be challenged again.
That's why the VC and CEO crowd are so excited about it, while the average population is hesitant at best.
There is no addressing this issue without developing class consciousness.
The only two ways out of this are 1) communal ownership of the means of production, e.g. of compute or 2) technofeudalism with cleansing of the now unneeded, unproductive new underclass that only takes up resources our overlords want for themselves.
Which version do you want to see realized? It's time to make your choice.
Here is another scenario. You mobilize your local community or even country to choose option 1, communal ownership. Then another country or region follows path 2. If option 2 is more productive (maybe because you redirected productivity gains towards wellbeing instead of more compute) you are toast, you now have a sort of Cold War scenario where eventually the technofeudalists will have the upper hand and could outcompete or destroy the technocommunalists or whatever you want to call them.
Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.
These thought scenarios are bunk. There is no isolated silo in the real world. See foreign interference between Capitalist and Communist countries. Cuba isn’t even allowed to be a sovereign, Communist country in the Carribean (see attempted invasions, embargoes, now the crippling oil embargoes).
> Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.
That’s why socialists argue for international revolution.
The AI boosters imagine they'll be annointed and rewarded by their new overlords.
That's why they're obsessed (to the point of psychosis) with "mastering" the new technique.
That's why they're all building a "harness".
What they don't realize is that the ironworker still ends up in chains.
IMHO that is the most likely of the many dystopian robots-replace-humans scenario:
The AI-enhanced become more and more AI-integrated and internally AI-fused and they don't even realize they eventually are not humans at all.
The non-AI underclass just hasn't got enough access to resources to survive long term and dies out with a whimper.
I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out:
- the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns.
- democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers.
- AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class
- Any combination of the above.
> 1) communal ownership of the means of production, e.g. of compute
As every communist, you forget about economics of such a system. How would you prevent concentration of capital in this system? Planned economy? Planned by whom?
> It's time to make your choice
Clearly you feel you've made yours, so what are you doing differently now to what you did before?
You should read Nick Land, you've only went half-way with the argument.
The capitalist class doesn't control Capital, Capital controls the capitalist class.