The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you’re tacitly saying “no you guys are right but your fucked anyway”.
There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.
These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.
But you’re ultimately right. The luddites lost, we’ll lose, and we’re fucked.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. The Luddites were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. So, they set to work to burn the factories down thinking that if they could destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by mere vandalism. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that should be condemned here, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This is precisely what Marx articulated showing that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well.
The rational strategy for those who have come to the conclusion that corporate AI cannot be trusted, which is itself very much a correct one, should be to focus their energy on ways to develop this technology outside the stranglehold of corporations. We already have a powerful example in the form of open source software. And with the release of Chinese model weights, there is a solid foundation to build upon.
The more open models are used, the less demand there will be for the proprietary ones. These models are the tools that people can run on their own machines, and under their own control. Developing and using open alternatives to paid APIs cuts directly into the profits of the corporations renting out LLMs. A mere boycott will not alter the balance of economic forces or change the status quo. If you want to resist, do it constructively by encouraging the use and development of this technology in the open.
While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I’m advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don’t have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they’re just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.
Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it’s obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.
Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don’t care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.
The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you’re tacitly saying “no you guys are right but your fucked anyway”.
There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.
These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.
But you’re ultimately right. The luddites lost, we’ll lose, and we’re fucked.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. The Luddites were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. So, they set to work to burn the factories down thinking that if they could destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by mere vandalism. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that should be condemned here, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This is precisely what Marx articulated showing that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well.
The rational strategy for those who have come to the conclusion that corporate AI cannot be trusted, which is itself very much a correct one, should be to focus their energy on ways to develop this technology outside the stranglehold of corporations. We already have a powerful example in the form of open source software. And with the release of Chinese model weights, there is a solid foundation to build upon.
The more open models are used, the less demand there will be for the proprietary ones. These models are the tools that people can run on their own machines, and under their own control. Developing and using open alternatives to paid APIs cuts directly into the profits of the corporations renting out LLMs. A mere boycott will not alter the balance of economic forces or change the status quo. If you want to resist, do it constructively by encouraging the use and development of this technology in the open.
While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is fun :)
But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I’m advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don’t have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they’re just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.
Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it’s obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.
Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don’t care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.
But do we even want to be workers? I don’t. I have to be worker.
We shouldn’t be fighting parts of a broken or rather unfair system, but the system. I don’t want to fight for my place at the bottom of a pit.