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Thom: I watched this long video on Generative AI from Forbes. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY518YRfs5M) It discusses the implications of AI being used to generate texts, images, voices and coding. What I am hoping to begin seeing is nowhere in sight there. All they are interested in is how to use AI. It is clear that AI is going to do some mental gymnastics that either were impossible before or could not be done as well. As a result, it is equally clear that many people will be made redundant - put out of work. They ask about impacts. What is this impact (which they studiously ignore)? I start with the principle that if a machine can do a task, it is not proper for a human being to do it instead. As machines improve, human beings are not needed. That means that as machines improve, humans should be asked to do less and less, asymptotically zero. This should usher in the golden age of human exploration, free from imposed and demeaning work. But that is a socialist viewpoint. Reduce the average length of a workweek as far as logic demands (even ultimately to zero), while keeping, or increasing fabulously, the wages, or pay of everyone. The capitalist viewpoint is that bosses should become fabulously wealthy and powerful and workers should become progressively irrelevant and discarded and impoverished. I think that AI is introducing a conundrum that cannot be solved within the context of capitalistic business but that must lead to a break in the super enclosing dome covering all of capitalist business theory today. In this sense, AI is leading the way to the introduction of universal socialism. We have a task to make sure it goes there, rather than to the empowering of a new class of parasites with censorial power.
I find no discussion along these lines in the Pollyannish bleatings about the potential of AI. I haven't searched socialist literature for its take on AI.
All relevant and excellently wrote articles as usual.