ChatGPT cannot imagine freedom or alternatives; it can only present you with plagiarized mash-ups of the data it’s been trained on. So, if generative AI tools begin to form the foundation of creative works and even more of the other writing and visualizing we do, it will further narrow the possibilities on offer to us. Just as previous waves of digital tech were used to deskill workers and defang smaller competitors, the adoption of even more AI tools has the side effect of further disempowering workers and giving management even further control over our cultural stories.
As Le Guin continued her speech, she touched on this very point. “The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art,” she explained. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” That’s exactly why billionaires in the tech industry and beyond are so interested in further curtailing how our words can be used to help fuel that resistance, which would inevitably place them in the line of fire.
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The stories and artworks that resonate with us are inspired by the life experiences of artists who made them. A computer can never capture a similar essence. Le Guin asserted that to face the challenging times ahead, we’ll need “writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.” Generative AI seems part of a wider plan by the most powerful people in the world to head that off, and to trap us in a world hurtling toward oblivion as long as they can hold onto their influence for a little longer.
As Le Guin said, creating art and producing commodities are two distinct acts. For companies, generative AI is a great way to produce even more cheap commodities to keep the cycle of capitalism going. It’s great for them, but horrible for us. It’s our responsibility to challenge the technology and the business model behind it, and to ensure we can still imagine a better tomorrow.
Simple: we need to move towards a post-labor society and have some form of universal basic income.
I think that big studios are on a timer. Generative AI for videos is getting better and better and manages to follow a script now. In 5 years, you won’t shoot movies anymore, you will generate them and it will stop being a business, it will get back to being an art form and a culture unhindered with the copyright silliness that wasted the cultural output of the last century.
Yes, the very people immediately replaced by AIs are going to suffer. Note however an interesting fact: this was an unintentional side effect of the tech. AI was not developed by big studios with the aim of displacing writers (such a proposal would have been laughable 2 years ago). Just like 2D artists and soon 3D artists and an increasing number of webdevs, this is just a set of skills that suddenly became available in improving models.
I understand their anger, but their strike is a losing proposition and people who promoting it are selling them false hope. More jobs will be replaced that way (we all thought truck drivers would go away before artists though), we need to prepare for this transition.
What we need to defend is our income, not our job. Society will need less and less jobs. We can let capitalism reorganize it blindly through the genocidal hand of market or we can understand the causes of the change and shape it into the type of society we want.
Lol, how do we do that? Since we’re clearly not anywhere close to that, how does this theoretical help us? Are we going to stop capitalist from utilizing AI to replace workers until we’re a post scarcity society?
I think that’s a tremendously naive sentiment… First of all, I don’t think there’s anyone in AI that believes it will replace multimillion dollar film industries in 5 years. Secondly, I think it’s silly to believe people won’t find a way to capitalize automated labour to the detriment of the working class.
Lol, you really think that AI is creating art that is sellable? It can barely put together a comprehensible short article. Even in theory, it’s not creating anything new, it’s just IP theft.
I think you are misunderstanding that we don’t really have a say in any of that unless we have a say over the means of production. Capitalist don’t care about what’s good for the people, they care about their portfolios. The only progress we make we create by strangling the means of production from them. If you don’t have leverage over the controlling class, they don’t care about you.
Your ideological statements lead me to believe that you are conflating leftism with effective altruism. Which is basically what all tech bros have adopted as a means to justify their self proclaims egalitarianism while also making billions. You can’t use technology to circumvent supporting labour movements.
Ah yes, proletariat revolution first, then every problem will be solved by the wisdom of the working class. I know this meme.
Assuming you live in the US good luck in a country where the biggest mob waves the confederacy flag and where actual left-wing parties are almost inexistant.
There will be a majority in favor of basic income before there is enough support for the proletariat revolution. And I make the same statement in France where riots are frequent, antifa groups actually exist, and there are openly revolutionary organizations.
I have now known 3 generations that wait for the Grand Soir. In the meantime, pragmatic people who contribute to the cooperative economy create post-capitalist pockets right now and open source movements are the biggest post-scarcity experiment out there. But yeah, just dismiss that as siliconvalley tech-broism. We had campaigns called “degooglising the net” but surely it must mean we are in bed with the GAFAM.
What does this even mean? Arguing that workers should receive income even where their job is automated is not support? What do you want exactly? That we pretend that automatable jobs are not? That we force ourselves to carve bullshit jobs to justify our rights to exist?
Lol, do you think the people in power will just decide to give up power and allow us to enter post scarcity without a fight?
And what makes you assume that these are the conditions to automatically transition to a post scarcity society?
Do you honestly think capitalist governments care what a majority of people want?
My dude, how are you claiming that it’s a post-capitalist pocket? Unless these open source companies are being run by a single guy, or have organized their businesses as a workers collective… you’re still participating in capitalism. The only difference is the way you license your service.
Ahh so competiting with Google is now leftism…
No… emphatically no. You are arguing that workers should receive a universal income, not that workers will receive a universal income. What you are arguing will happen is that they will loose their jobs. You get to do what you want, and then people loose their jobs, then you get to claim, “we’ll, I said they should get a universal income”.
You can’t just automate a small aspect of the economy and expect economic and governmental hierarchical structures that are a hundred years old to change over night. Just because we have the ability to enter post scarcity, doesn’t mean that we will. We produce more than enough food to feed the world, we still choose to allow people to starve.
Your definition of post capitalism, is just capitalism with less IP control. It’s not changing what class controls the means of production, which means it’s still capitalism.
Ah yes, how could I forget the trench warfare of the great linux-IBM war that brought post-scarcity to the OS world. How could I dismiss the terrible bombing campaign Microsoft led against Mozilla in the Internet Browsers Wars. Even now, LAION barely holds because of its in-depth network of anti-tank ditches.
I am actually talking about workers-owned collectives, which exist without receiving violent opposition. They do receive some opposition, in tribunals, in lobbying, but the corporate world, yes, will relinquish control and fade into irrelevance without more violence than that. It has in several fields as well. Peaceful change happens all the time.
Most open source development is not made by workers collective though. A lot is make non-profit, some are organized as foundations (Mozilla for instance) and some is made by regular for-profit capitalist companies that make their money out of service around the post-scarce open source they depend on, so they help maintain it. This is a transitional model where non-capitalist entities collaborate with capitalist ones into expanding the areas of post-scarcity.
As for automation: most works will be automatable in the next 20 years. This is not a leftist or a rightist position, this is a fact. The position is how we propose to react to it. My proposal is that we stop correlating work with the right to live a decent life. It can be done through basic income though there are many other ways to achieve similar result: expand greatly the “insertion income” (we have something like a very symbolic basic income in France but it is small and time limited), expand unemployement benefits, students pension and lower progressively retirement age as society gets more and more automated. These all are things that happened in the past with left wing government. Expanding the social net is a politically acceptable, realistic and moderate proposal.
What is your proposal to compensate the automation of work? Violent uprising is not a proposal, it is a mean to implement a proposal.
What do you, Ô guardian of leftism, consider to be the acceptable proposal to workers whose jobs can be made 20x faster at a tenth of the cost by a machine?
I don’t think you understand what post scarcity is … it’s not something that you can accomplish with efficiency in one arena of commerce. The whole point of post scarcity is to eliminate the competition that drives historic materialism.
Again, you cannot create post scarcity by cooperating with capitalism. Capitalism is based on profiting off of scarcity or artificial scarcity.
Lol, they’ve been saying that for the last 20 years… I think you are reading too much news from silicon valley (marketing).
Tbh I think we’re probably running out of time to do anything meaningful. Climate change is going to put pressure on governments to secure borders and capture resources. My guess is that most democratic governments are going to slide into militaristic fascism, fueled by increased competition between monopolistic corporations. To think technology like AI won’t be used to lubricate this transition, and will instead be used to create “electronic post scarcity” is baffling toe.
I think that’s a bit pedantic… I could say that thinking up a policy for UBI is not a proposal, but a means to implement a proposal.
If you don’t change the hierarchy of production and distribution, who exactly is this automation helping? You are being more efficient, but where is the benefit of that efficiency going to? Ah yes the owners…
So to you leftism is about creating more wealth for the owning class and creating less ways to distribute that profit to the worker class. Efficiency that does not benefit the worker, doesn’t not count as leftism. It’s pretty simple…
UBI is just a neoliberal ploy to pacify the population, you will get the bare minimum of social care while the wealthy seize the vast majority of the capital. It’s just like social security in the US or the retirement age in France. As soon as the capitalist thinks it’s in the way of growth, they will defund or minimize its effectiveness instead of increasing taxation to accommodate it.
So… many things to answer and correct there. Let me focus on two here (and please refrain to assume things about me that are hilariously incorrect. Calling everyone with a tech education a silicon valley chill is not giving you any favor)
First post-scaricity. You are denying that post-scarcity is happening right now in some fields because it is contrary to your model of the world. That’s not better than these conservatives who deny renewable energies can be profitable where they actually are measurably so.
Post-scarcity has been achieved in the domain of software, most of the internet runs on a free software stack, this is a situation that has been opposed by de-facto monopolies that existed there before. We have won. There was no physical violence. There were lawsuits, there was lobbying, there were shady actions, but nothing that required storming Microsoft Redmond’s HQ to free our comrades.
Please tell me how open source software is not a post-scarce field. Yes, regular companies use or even develop open source software because they found a business model that does not rely on scracity of the software (usually based around service, or hosting). Like it or not (and you are right to hate the exploitive part of it) but this is capitalist and non-capitalist entities COLLABORATING.
Then, revolution. You find “pedantic” to ask what is the purpose of revolution? The power structures you want to put into place afterwards? Isn’t that the only question that matters? I am asking, because workers-owned collective exist, some of them are big and they are already well integrated in the current economic system. Without having to storm anything or overthrow structures.
So my question is how the structures you want to implement would be different from what we have right now in workers-owned collectives and what prevents them today from existing?
I’ll let all the other big disagreements I have in your message out for now, for the sake of brievity.
I’m saying that your interpretation of post-scarcity is either flawed, or an interpretation so far from the original meaning that it is no longer useful for discord.
Post scarcity in it’s most basic definition is a theoretical economic scenario where most goods can be produced in an abundance with little to no human input. This does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services
Your interpretation doesn’t meet the basic definition of post scarcity. Simply because “most of the internet runs on a free software stack” doesn’t mean anything you are doing is helping people get the goods they require to survive.
Now we can get the leftist interpretation of post-scarcity. Simply because an open source software completes with a monopoly, doesn’t mean you’ve created post-scarcity. Microsoft still exist, it’s still undeniably a monopoly, it’s still profiting off of aspects of the open source software that replaced its licensing monopoly. You haven’t changed the hierarchy of of power, nor do you have any more control over the distribution of capital.
No, I said the way you predicated a retort was pedantic. This whole line of questioning is an attempt to substantiate a fallacy of false dichotomy. I don’t have to have a better plan of action to criticize a false claim.
Again, I think you keep trying to hyperfocus on a few worker collectives in a service industry that has nothing to do with fulfilling peoples material needs. We were discussing AI that was according to you going to replace artist… I don’t see how a couple unnamed software workers collectives are really going to help artist meet their material needs in the foreseeable future, nor do I really see how it pertains to the original argument.
Ahh yes, I’ll allow us to stop talking about the argument in hand. Look at this non sequitar instead…
I give up. I can’t believe this is an argument made in good faith. If it is, I think I will need to provide you with definitions of too many notions for it to ever be a worthwhile effort and literally none of my retorts and questions get addressed. The confidence with which you push misconceptions makes me really sad that you promote my political side.
Please inform yourself better on the various subjects touched. About free software, about workers-own cooperatives today (e.g. Mondragon), about communes existing within the capitalist system today (e.g. Longo Maï), read a bit more on post-scarcity and really, really, please stop telling people that the progress they promote is useless unless we abolish capitalism first. That meme is tiring and hurting. With that mindset we would never have had women’s right or the civil rights movement.