Aja on 5/2/2024 at 01:25
Communism but where you can miraculously prevent the takeover by egotistical, power-hungry individuals: there's the rub.
SD on 5/2/2024 at 03:34
AI can have my job, I'll go and do something worthwhile instead.
mxleader on 5/2/2024 at 04:04
To be fair AI did not take my last job that I didn't want, but someone younger did. But then he didn't want it either. I doubt AI wants it either.
Nicker on 5/2/2024 at 05:10
Quote:
In theory, any idealised hypothetical system can work better than capitalism, but the real pudding is getting it to work with humans with all their flaws and ambitions.
Capitalism can't work unless it is overlaid with effective regulation or some other moderating force. Capitalism has never existed in it's purist, meritocratic form either. The real pudding is always blood-and-shit pudding, concocted by crooks, regardless of the ...ism or ...ocracy. They do it everything nice humans invent; that's why this sub-thread is still peripherally relevant to the topic. "Robots can rescue humans from drudgery." And the crooks say, "Robots can automate criminal oppression".
Nicker on 5/2/2024 at 05:11
Quote Posted by mxleader
To be fair AI did not take my last job that I didn't want, but someone younger did. But then he didn't want it either. I doubt AI wants it either.
Are you sure it was a younger human, though?
mxleader on 5/2/2024 at 05:13
Quote Posted by Nicker
Are you sure it was a younger human, though?
Yeah, they hired my replacement before laying me off. He may have been a robot though...
Azaran on 5/2/2024 at 05:20
Communism was rotten from the get go, contrary to what WAY too many people think (including myself when I was 17-21). All those 20th century dictatorships weren't 'not real communism'; they were faithful to Marx's principles: Dictatorship of the proletariat, destroying society and culture to supposedly improve it, viewing art and culture as bourgeois decadence (unless it serves the Party), repressing dissent to 'save' the revolution, etc. These were all part of Marx's theories.
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
"Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that."
Any reductionist system is bound to fail. Boiling down all human history as simply the interaction between oppressors and oppressed is.. well...dumb.
Destroying society to rebuild it 'better' is like demolishing a city because a few buildings are in disrepair. Yet that's what communism preached: trying to fix society is 'reactionary' (or whatever other buzzword), and the only way is to raze it.
Marx is a good example of a broken clock being right twice a day.
And even if there were good aspects to communism, the last thing I want is to have my material goods expropriated, and be forced to live in a commune or communal apartment, with a bunch of other people, with 0 privacy, no hobbies, and doing forced labour "for the glorious Communist fatherland", then being told I should be happy and grateful to have food rations and a squalid shelter over my head.
In communism, you and I are mere cogs in its machine, nothing more.
Sulphur on 5/2/2024 at 05:28
Your first quote is very out of context. It's Marx's illustration of what the bourgeoisie would accuse communism of doing, while addressing it in the rest of the manifesto. But yeah, communism in and of itself has flaws that have already been expounded on.
demagogue on 5/2/2024 at 06:14
I'm as anti-communist as the next guy, but I don't like how people use anti-communism to close their eyes to real exploitation, corporate capture of regulation, economic and social rights -- housing, land, food/water, health care, social security, sustainable & decent work, education, etc -- and the role of class, race, and social position in all of that. That's getting into another topic though.
But on the topic just a little, though, it is interesting to go back and read some of the old school Marxist-adjacent types like Kropotkin in light of the AI revolution. He's the one that was really hyper optimistic about state-controlled technology taking care of human needs.
I think after the experience of the 20th Century, not many are that optimistic about tech anymore. There's no doubt that AI could do a lot for human good. It's just really hard to trust either state, any corporation, or even a non-profit to be the one in control of it.
I tend to think there are a few human features that are persistently throwing a monkey wrench into social good, like the way narcissism and ego work, limits in people's understanding & the attraction of simple but false narratives & group think, a certain known percent of humans that will have some destructive mental illness you can't just hand wave away as economic exploitation...
You can try to put in rules that protect AI from the most likely risks of bad actors using it to bad ends, but that has its limits, and I think at some point, like with climate change, there will come a time when we're thinking more about mitigating and adapting to the harm than preventing it. We can only hope the right people can come up with the right rules in time.
Nicker on 5/2/2024 at 14:01
Unforeseen consequences, accelerated. Our earliest new technologies had effects which rolled out over centuries, slowly infusing through the world. Starting with the industrial revolution, the changes became generational. The WW2 generation were born into the electrical age and by the time they began passing, going to the moon was old hat. Literally from horse drawn carts to self driving cars.
The effects of ChatGtp were nearly instantaneous, one of the first being academic cheating with a fresh kind of plagiarism, stealing work that hasn't even been penned yet. Toxic fireworks displays are fast being replaced by drone art but imagine swarm attacks in place of infantry or as instruments of terror. Remember the chill of hearing the buzz of those flying Manhacks in Half Life?
Quote:
I tend to think there are a few human features that are persistently throwing a monkey wrench into social good,...
I have chewed on this a few times in other threads. We have a perverse fascination/weakness for sociopaths, historical and living. Pretty much any historical leader who took or was given the honorific "Great", was a narcissistic sociopath. Whatever good they did was an accidental consequence of humanity healing from their predation. We recognize them too late and forget our lessons about them with each new generation.
It's the same with toxic financial schemes. People think they have cracked the code to easy street with some perpetual-motion inspired money magic and every time the bubble bursts (tulips, the south seas, sub-prime loans), we go, "that was dumb - won't do that again" and sure as shit we will, without fail.
One predictable thing about new tech, the first three target applications will be war, the easy life, and sex.
Yeah, there is something in our genes. Our wisdom is always ten steps behind our cleverness.
