I’m all for robots doing all the dangerous, dirty, boring and otherwise undesirable work that humans do. I think the big problem here is that in a neoliberal society this just means that the people who would be doing shit work for shit wages are now welcome to curl up and die while the owners of the robotic laborers reap all the benefits. Capitalism simply isn’t equipped to deal with the consequences of full automation in a way that’s even remotely beneficial to the working class.
Despite AI being recent, this problem is very well documented in Marxist literature for over a century. Based on the organic composition of capital, the two forms of capital is constant (nature, machines, etc.) and variable capital (workers). When you automate work, that means more variable capital becomes constant capital. But that also means that you can’t exploit it like you exploit humans through surplus value. So while it makes sense in the short term for capitalists, this is also a factor that leads to an economic crisis and everything that follows it.
So, slight nitpick: the thing youre calling AI was invented in pretty much its current form by Turing and Minsky in like 1951. This shit is damn near 75 years old, closer to the first use of a nuclear weapon in war than we are to Hilary Clinton getting her ass beat by trump. The first LLM ran on vacuum tubes. These things predate the integrated circuits we use today by several years. As does their abandonment by actual smart people. I think the first ones literally ran on vacuum tubes (yes MOSFETs existed, but I think tubes were still in use?)
Also, it’s not AI, it will never be AI, it will never lead to AI, and it is possibly the largest extant obstacle to the development of AI.
Agreed though. Capitalists love them some slaves. it’s not even just functional; the power, the exploitation, it gets them off, validates their existence. It really is pederasty and cocaine all the way down.
Eternal reminder that ELIZA, the first chatbot, ran on an array of potatoes and people still believed it was sentient.
And it was all a joke because some guy was annoyed with Freudian psychotherapy grifters and, correctly, thought that a simple machine could do their job.
They did the math determining that it was a dead end. They were right. Yes it requires a certain bigness of data set to function, but after that the returns diminish logarithmically. It basically peaks at the software I’m using to type this on my phone. These massive data centers may as well be using that energy and water to breed monkeys and make typewriters.
There are other niche uses, but this is mostly it.
I should clarify; the utility of large language models isn’t in the utility of the technology, but the utility of the propaganda. It’s selling a dream, so we stay asleep, it’s selling the liberal holy Grail of the endless perfect excuse and abdication, and the fascist one of a perfect inhuman system, simultaneously an impossible future and a bullshit homogenized soup of half remembered past and a composite of us all in which we are a consciousness wothout a body (but without all thar pesky interiority)that will grind us all into the mud
Its not about being good at stuff. If you see an “AI” engineer, offer them a cocktail made with your favorite whiskey and drain cleaner.
Tractors have been “self driving” for over a decade, they just need constant monitoring because things frequently break or get jammed. And last I worked in ag the driver still had to perform turns at the end of rows, idk if that’s been improved since.
Which is to say that we’ve been (or had the resources to be) relatively post-scarcity for a long time, but to actually implement it would undermine the economic, racial, and patriarchal hierarchies that so many are addicted to.
Yeah. The neo-liberal goal for automation is the Terminator dark future where robots can produce wealth for a tiny ruling class while the now surplus working class is exterminated.
It will most likely never be full automation, but if it for some reason happened, then that wouldn’t be capitalism anymore, by definition since there wouldn’t be any unpaid labour to steal. Funnily enough Marx noted this as the possible moment when capitalism logically come to an end, abolishing itself.
And yeah, in capitalism any moment before full automation will be exploited to make the most profits and most misery possible.
It doesn’t have to come to the point of full automation. Just hollowing out enough labor that there isn’t enough surplus value to overcome the rents that finance capital created over the last half century of large scale rentseeking a.k.a. neoliberalism.
Yeah, i guess Marx went to the furthest possible conclusion because he usually avoided making prophecies without knowing conditions, but it’s pretty obvious that even if we ignore everything else, capitalist system will collapse way before reaching that point.
Being someone who actually works in manufacturing automation, I completely disagree that it doesn’t increase efficiency or quantity of production. It absolutely does both of those things. It has to be part of a larger ergonomic line process improvements though, automation on it’s own is just a tool on the line. In many cases where management wants to use automation, more efficiency can be found in things like better, more obvious tool layouts, or better peripheral order scheduling.
As for quality? Kinda, process understanding and replication is by far the largest determinate of quality, which automation can improve, but only with regular maintenance which most companies are loathe to do properly.
What automation mostly does is ‘reduce’ the level of skill required by floor operators to create a product) even though operators generally have to learn to work with and around the ghosts in the machine), allowing for management to justify not giving out pay raises to them. Same as it ever was for any Tayloristic endeavor.
No no no! Youre doing it wrong! It should only be used to discipline labor, you delusional fucking commie! Youre abusing the sacred legacy of henry ford! Anything else is heresy!
I’m all for robots doing all the dangerous, dirty, boring and otherwise undesirable work that humans do. I think the big problem here is that in a neoliberal society this just means that the people who would be doing shit work for shit wages are now welcome to curl up and die while the owners of the robotic laborers reap all the benefits. Capitalism simply isn’t equipped to deal with the consequences of full automation in a way that’s even remotely beneficial to the working class.
FALGSC now!
Despite AI being recent, this problem is very well documented in Marxist literature for over a century. Based on the organic composition of capital, the two forms of capital is constant (nature, machines, etc.) and variable capital (workers). When you automate work, that means more variable capital becomes constant capital. But that also means that you can’t exploit it like you exploit humans through surplus value. So while it makes sense in the short term for capitalists, this is also a factor that leads to an economic crisis and everything that follows it.
So, slight nitpick: the thing youre calling AI was invented in pretty much its current form by Turing and Minsky in like 1951. This shit is damn near 75 years old, closer to the first use of a nuclear weapon in war than we are to Hilary Clinton getting her ass beat by trump. The first LLM ran on vacuum tubes. These things predate the integrated circuits we use today by several years. As does their abandonment by actual smart people. I think the first ones literally ran on vacuum tubes (yes MOSFETs existed, but I think tubes were still in use?)
Also, it’s not AI, it will never be AI, it will never lead to AI, and it is possibly the largest extant obstacle to the development of AI.
Agreed though. Capitalists love them some slaves. it’s not even just functional; the power, the exploitation, it gets them off, validates their existence. It really is pederasty and cocaine all the way down.
Eternal reminder that ELIZA, the first chatbot, ran on an array of potatoes and people still believed it was sentient.
And it was all a joke because some guy was annoyed with Freudian psychotherapy grifters and, correctly, thought that a simple machine could do their job.
Mathematically yes, but the ability to store and transmit such a large amount of information for learning models to work practically is fairly recent.
AI in the deterministic algorithm sense is truly very old though.
They did the math determining that it was a dead end. They were right. Yes it requires a certain bigness of data set to function, but after that the returns diminish logarithmically. It basically peaks at the software I’m using to type this on my phone. These massive data centers may as well be using that energy and water to breed monkeys and make typewriters.
There are other niche uses, but this is mostly it.
I should clarify; the utility of large language models isn’t in the utility of the technology, but the utility of the propaganda. It’s selling a dream, so we stay asleep, it’s selling the liberal holy Grail of the endless perfect excuse and abdication, and the fascist one of a perfect inhuman system, simultaneously an impossible future and a bullshit homogenized soup of half remembered past and a composite of us all in which we are a consciousness wothout a body (but without all thar pesky interiority)that will grind us all into the mud
Its not about being good at stuff. If you see an “AI” engineer, offer them a cocktail made with your favorite whiskey and drain cleaner.
What if we breed monkeys to be our telepathic typewriters
Tractors have been “self driving” for over a decade, they just need constant monitoring because things frequently break or get jammed. And last I worked in ag the driver still had to perform turns at the end of rows, idk if that’s been improved since.
Which is to say that we’ve been (or had the resources to be) relatively post-scarcity for a long time, but to actually implement it would undermine the economic, racial, and patriarchal hierarchies that so many are addicted to.
Yeah. The neo-liberal goal for automation is the Terminator dark future where robots can produce wealth for a tiny ruling class while the now surplus working class is exterminated.
It will most likely never be full automation, but if it for some reason happened, then that wouldn’t be capitalism anymore, by definition since there wouldn’t be any unpaid labour to steal. Funnily enough Marx noted this as the possible moment when capitalism logically come to an end, abolishing itself.
And yeah, in capitalism any moment before full automation will be exploited to make the most profits and most misery possible.
It doesn’t have to come to the point of full automation. Just hollowing out enough labor that there isn’t enough surplus value to overcome the rents that finance capital created over the last half century of large scale rentseeking a.k.a. neoliberalism.
Yeah, i guess Marx went to the furthest possible conclusion because he usually avoided making prophecies without knowing conditions, but it’s pretty obvious that even if we ignore everything else, capitalist system will collapse way before reaching that point.
‘Abolishing itself’ into a ‘cloud of sexless hydrogen’ tho.
Or cruelty squad.
Automation is for disciplining labor and reducing the size of the classes that threaten capital.
Not for increasing efficiency quality or quantity of production! What even is this commie bullshit?
Being someone who actually works in manufacturing automation, I completely disagree that it doesn’t increase efficiency or quantity of production. It absolutely does both of those things. It has to be part of a larger ergonomic line process improvements though, automation on it’s own is just a tool on the line. In many cases where management wants to use automation, more efficiency can be found in things like better, more obvious tool layouts, or better peripheral order scheduling.
As for quality? Kinda, process understanding and replication is by far the largest determinate of quality, which automation can improve, but only with regular maintenance which most companies are loathe to do properly.
What automation mostly does is ‘reduce’ the level of skill required by floor operators to create a product) even though operators generally have to learn to work with and around the ghosts in the machine), allowing for management to justify not giving out pay raises to them. Same as it ever was for any Tayloristic endeavor.
No no no! Youre doing it wrong! It should only be used to discipline labor, you delusional fucking commie! Youre abusing the sacred legacy of henry ford! Anything else is heresy!
Oh of course! I forgot the pact we all sign in engineering school.