Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:
Except Marx’s proposed solutions were to use the trends and directions of capitalist society against it, to allow its own contradictions to defeat itself. Not to criticize and whine and try to freeze things in place somehow, those who try to regulate and freeze capitalism in place are reformists and are doomed to failure.
Artificial Luddite reaction against AI automation can only slow it temporarily, not stop it globally. It’s inevitable and the end point of capitalism. There’s nothing you or I can do to stop it, and in fact it’s necessary for socialism for these productive forces to advance to the point of post-scarcity. We simply need to seize them.
So it’s not useful to scaremonger about the technology itself, it’s only useful to promote the seizure of the technology for our own ends.
If you understood Marx and Historical Materialism, this would be more clear. Capitalism is not ontologically evil, capitalism has no moral character it is merely a necessary stage before socialism. This is where a lot of left moralists diverge or misunderstand Marx, and why many also are too harsh on the PRC.
seizure of the technology for our own ends.
What ends could their possibly be to siezing Chat GPT? That we can generate meaningless blocks of text more quickly?
The capitalists will use this and other generation tech to eliminate jobs, naturally - socialists, whose society should not be enslaved to market dynamics, should be able to recognize that this tech is destructive and eliminate or severely restrict it accordingly.
So it’s a technology that can eliminate jobs, but it’s also entirely useless in the hands of a worker-controlled economy? Only one of these two things can be true.
You misunderstand. AI generation doesn’t meaningfully replace art, but it can substitute for art in contexts where volume trumps content, and if it is embraced on an industrial scale it has the potential to permanently damage art as an institution. Under capitalism, where raw output is a consideration of every artist who needs to be able to make a living, the faux art generated by algorithms will inevitably be mass adopted regardless of the damage it does to society.
The way to square that circle is to say that the jobs it’s eliminating are useless lol
