Robotics/AI in Communism

[VCrakeV]

How could the advancement of robotics and AI affect a communist society? Would the elimination (or near-elimination) of work be good or bad in such a society? What work, if any could never be automated?

Do you think AI can help transition into communism? An AI-controlled store could help in transitional stages. What else do you think AI could do that is an obstacle to us? Will progress in robotics help us, or harm us?

[Aslan]

There was a novel where civilization had achieved communism in a galactic scale with an AI as the overlord/overseer.

however back to the point. Now for work I'd say that technology is good as it creates an easier way for raw goods to be made into useful items in communism. What we need to look out for in capitalism is capitalists replacing manual labor for machine labor. I'm no Luddite but capitalists create manual labor as a way to expunge workers and in turn profit. This is when technology is bad. As it creates more of the ''precariat'' and in turn leaves potential revolutionaries in the dust.

[Rafiq]

Perhaps you might be interested in the Cosmism that flourished in the Soviet Union before collectivization. I might add that it must be understood very critically, however.

One of the interesting ideas was the imagined eventual "automation" of the human body - the idea was that pain, feeling would be replaced by a kind of message system, i.e. as though one is playing a video game, you would never actually feel pain, but receive messages or some indication (via some automated sensory system, I suppose) that you were in danger. These are very likely consequences of Communism, but rather than get entangled in the future, we should understand the implications of this "dream", let's say, for the present. The total conquest of not only one's expression of labor, but the total conquest of one's life itself, which is why immortality was a popular fantasy of the time.

Other ideas, yes sometimes ridiculous but more importantly authentically spontaneous, was the notion that one day, the resurrection of all the world's dead, even the most vile scoundrels to be rehabilitated, to atone for all the unaccounted injustices, the unheard and forgotten screams and cries, the wrongly butchered, starved, driven to their own suicide, and those villains who had missed the opportunity to repent for their sins. It was not the logic of putting scoundrels who got away with injustices on trial, for the Bolsheviks this was bourgeois civic morality - instead, rehabilitation and redemption was the new moral approach. The Bolsheviks did not recognize individuals to be sufficient-unto themselves, all of the crimes throughout history were crimes of a system, of history even - individuals were understood as innocently entangled in this. This is why Stalinism must be understood in retrospect to the Communism of the previous decade, because it was a reaction to it on bourgeois terms - no matter that it was more "brutal", Stalinism reintroduced bourgeois civic morality in treating individuals as free and rational subjects responsible for their actions. No matter how far off or ridiculous this is - this is a rather beautiful notion, and in a way it encapsulated the early naivity of the Bolsheviks - at first, they wanted to completely abolish the death penalty and allow all the people to experience the new order of life.

These ideas are at the core of Communism, thoroughly universalist and anti-essentialist. Of course we know that some will have to perish, many will have to be, and will be butchered, and what the Bolsheviks failed to acknowledge was how thoroughly social relations and ideology shape the very being of individuals in their entirety - no matter that they were identical to us insofar as their ESSENTIAL potential to be received by the ideas of Communism, they were situated in such a circumstance wherein they would rather die before accepting the new order of life.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

How could the advancement of robotics and AI affect a communist society? Would the elimination (or near-elimination) of work be good or bad in such a society? What work, if any could never be automated?

Do you think AI can help transition into communism? An AI-controlled store could help in transitional stages. What else do you think AI could do that is an obstacle to us? Will progress in robotics help us, or harm us?

Socialists often talk about the abolition of work. But in that case, by "work" we mean labour that is imposed on the individual from the outside, that is not a free expression of human personality. Labour as such, i.e. humans expending their labour-power to change the material world, will not be abolished in the foreseeable future. Industrial robotics is nice, of course, as is the use of robotics for household applications. I doubt automobile workers want to go back to the days of the first assembly lines. But it still requires humans to do things - which is good in its way, I mean we have to do something between being born and dying.

Personally, I am enthusiastic about robotics and AI, as I am about any technology that isn't just used to give yuppies another thing to glue to their face. But I think people often use these technologies - and rapid prototyping a.k.a. "3D printing" and so on - as crutches in an argument. The point of communism is not that we will invent super-robots that will do all the work, but that the social relations involved in production will change. And abundance is not a matter of inventing something new - socialism was already possible in the 19th century - but of changing the way in which goods are produced and distributed.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point about an AI-controlled store. What would the AI be controlling, exactly? I don't see how using an AI instead of a human manager would help society move beyond commodity production, but I don't understand what you're getting at at all, to be honest.

[ckaihatsu]

How could the advancement of robotics and AI affect a communist society? Would the elimination (or near-elimination) of work be good or bad in such a society? What work, if any could never be automated?

Do you think AI can help transition into communism? An AI-controlled store could help in transitional stages. What else do you think AI could do that is an obstacle to us? Will progress in robotics help us, or harm us?


This topic relates to three objective components that tend to get blurred, and even conflated, in discussions about society and political economy -- [1] politics, [2] logistics, and [3] lifestyle.

*Any* kind of technology, at *any* level of development, really speaks to the *second* component, that of 'logistics' -- how does the 'political norm' of society 'make things happen', to effect certains kinds of [3] 'consumption', or 'lifestyle' -- ?

You're implicitly suggesting that [2] logistics / technology could somehow be *deterministic*, which is known as 'technological determinism'.

This, for materialists / revolutionaries, is a *fallacy*, since 'work' -- in the sense of applied intentions and applied mass-intentions -- will *never* be rendered obsolete because people will always have the will to effect something-or-other, and the rest is either social -- [1] politics -- or mechanistic, [2] logistics, for [3] lifestyle.

[VCrakeV]

This topic relates to three objective components that tend to get blurred, and even conflated, in discussions about society and political economy -- [1] politics, [2] logistics, and [3] lifestyle.

*Any* kind of technology, at *any* level of development, really speaks to the *second* component, that of 'logistics' -- how does the 'political norm' of society 'make things happen', to effect certains kinds of [3] 'consumption', or 'lifestyle' -- ?

You're implicitly suggesting that [2] logistics / technology could somehow be *deterministic*, which is known as 'technological determinism'.

This, for materialists / revolutionaries, is a *fallacy*, since 'work' -- in the sense of applied intentions and applied mass-intentions -- will *never* be rendered obsolete because people will always have the will to effect something-or-other, and the rest is either social -- [1] politics -- or mechanistic, [2] logistics, for [3] lifestyle.

I'm confused... I'm having trouble following.

@Xhar Xhar: I was talking strictly about a transitional state of society. Would you trust the average person to be in charge of a bunch of goods? Not until we've completely evolved our way of thinking. Too many people are too selfish.

[ckaihatsu]

I'm confused... I'm having trouble following.


Which part or parts are you having trouble with?

[tuwix]

How could the advancement of robotics and AI affect a communist society? Would the elimination (or near-elimination) of work be good or bad in such a society? What work, if any could never be automated?

Do you think AI can help transition into communism? An AI-controlled store could help in transitional stages. What else do you think AI could do that is an obstacle to us? Will progress in robotics help us, or harm us?

Automation is indispensable to achieve a higher phase of communism. Only when at least 95% of work will be done by machines, then money will cease to be incentive to work because the rest can be done by volunteers. Otherwise always there will be needed people to do unpleasant jobs where mere incentive to do them is money.

[ckaihatsu]

Automation is indispensable to achieve a higher phase of communism. Only when at least 95% of work will be done by machines, then money will cease to be incentive to work because the rest can be done by volunteers. Otherwise always there will be needed people to do unpleasant jobs where mere incentive to do them is money.


I'll note that there are *two* definitions of 'unpleasant' around this topic -- the first has to do with what we as people in society allow / leave-to *others* in the way of unpleasant labor roles:





[I] cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.




https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/


But the *second* meaning of 'unpleasant' or 'distasteful' has to do with the 'ins and outs' of social reality -- maybe, either now or in the future, people will find themselves doing work that's not necessarily *hazardous* or *imposing*, but that would still be generally considered as 'lower level', or lesser in social status due to its relative function in the overall supply chain.

Maybe, in a futuristic future virtually all 'work' will consist of inputting certain routines through computer interfaces (like via moving symbols around on a tablet), for robotic automation to follow and fulfill -- but there might *still* be certain sub-optimal work roles in effect, like that of the prep work in a kitchen.

Sure, no one would be oppressed or *exploited*, but certain people might still be left to doing 'distasteful' kinds of labor, relatively speaking, if the society didn't proactively *address* this aspect of how collective work is done.

[VCrakeV]

Which part or parts are you having trouble with?

Everything after the second paragraph

[ckaihatsu]

Everything after the second paragraph


Okay....





This topic relates to three objective components that tend to get blurred, and even conflated, in discussions about society and political economy -- [1] politics, [2] logistics, and [3] lifestyle.

*Any* kind of technology, at *any* level of development, really speaks to the *second* component, that of 'logistics' -- how does the 'political norm' of society 'make things happen', to effect certains kinds of [3] 'consumption', or 'lifestyle' -- ?




You're implicitly suggesting that [2] logistics / technology could somehow be *deterministic*, which is known as 'technological determinism'.

This, for materialists / revolutionaries, is a *fallacy*, since 'work' -- in the sense of applied intentions and applied mass-intentions -- will *never* be rendered obsolete because people will always have the will to effect something-or-other, and the rest is either social -- [1] politics -- or mechanistic, [2] logistics, for [3] lifestyle.


I may have overstated -- you may *not necessarily* have been implying technological determinism, but I dealt with that issue nonetheless.

If you (or anyone) acknowledges the premise that human-social 'politics' (as for private property and profit-making, or for collectivism and production for need) is distinct / separate-from the *logistics* of implementing whatever social paradigm, then that means we can treat all technological means separately from willful social activity.

No one would confuse a plow with a lord's estate, since the historical social forces that brought 'estates' into being have a trajectory of their own, which could exist with or without the technology of wooden plows.

Likewise -- our *current* society happens to be one of capitalism, so whether we have remote controls for our televisions at our disposal, or not, or whether production is automated, or not, capitalism will exist by default all the same.

The fallacy of technological determinism is plainly seen in all treatments of 'artificial intelligence' whenever anxiety is expressed about the scenario of machines taking on equal or superior roles in relation to human society. ('Artificial intelligence' may also mean just more sophisticated tasks performed by regular, conventional linear computation, as for speech recognition, etc.)

The reason the 'Hollywood' version of artificial intelligence is necessarily technological determinism is because it's 'putting the cart before the horse' -- people would have to socially *accept* any conceivably self-sentient mechanical entity in a *social* way, and we know that people have a history of not always doing that even for *each other* -- (!)

Here's my entire position on it:





I'm saying that *no* algorithm / machine would be able to hold up to a line of questioning regarding its own purported 'personal social history', so *any* use of the Turing test to supposedly demonstrate 'artificial intelligence' is just a social exercise in triviality and self-deception, or 'pretending'.




I guess my *own* standard would be what I stated previously, that the algorithm would have to be able to successfully bullshit someone about its own purported history, but then there'd be the ethical issue of if that should be a goal of science to begin with.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

@Xhar Xhar: I was talking strictly about a transitional state of society. Would you trust the average person to be in charge of a bunch of goods? Not until we've completely evolved our way of thinking. Too many people are too selfish.

I think too many people are not selfish at all, they work long hours so the owners of "their" business can get wealthy and they don't even want to cut their throats (the capitalists', not their own). But yes, I would trust the average person to be in charge of "a bunch of goods". There is no alternative, unless you imagine everything in socialism will be done by extraordinary people. Even having an AI doesn't mean you're not relying on people - the AI was programmed by somebody after all.

[ckaihatsu]

I think too many people are not selfish at all, they work long hours so the owners of "their" business can get wealthy and they don't even want to cut their throats (the capitalists', not their own). But yes, I would trust the average person to be in charge of "a bunch of goods".




There is no alternative, unless you imagine everything in socialism will be done by extraordinary people.


This is the very definition of elitism, btw.





Even having an AI doesn't mean you're not relying on people - the AI was programmed by somebody after all.


To be precise, the regular usage of 'AI' would mean that the artificial entity *transcended* its programming, and would be self-aware with its own self-created goals and plans, like *any* individual.

That's why all this hype about AIs just winds up playing into the implicit political argument for *elitism* -- as though a world of leveled social relations *wouldn't* be sufficient for the production and handling of all goods. (So then a layer of *privilege* would be "required", as from clergy, nobility, royalty, ownership / management, the state, or 'artificial intelligence' -- most likely with someone actually pulling the strings in the background).

[ckaihatsu]

Just thought of something for the reader to consider -- nowadays the technology exists for a monkey to use nothing but its own willpower to control a prosthetic arm, to bring food to its mouth.


Monkey uses brain to control prothetic arm

sm2d0w87wQE


What if some segment of humanity brought a *wealth* of prosthetics to some animals -- how would the larger humanity respond to this, and to what extents of individual autonomy would 'we' allow these animals, and potentially *all* animals -- ?

This may be a good stand-in for considerations of a postulated *artificial* intelligence, in terms of social acceptance.

[ckaihatsu]

This is also the future of humanity under socialism, according to our opponents.... (grin)


http://s9.postimg.org/xsjtefvy7/vlcsnap_2015_10_30_04h33m45s113.png

[Comrade #138672]

AI is advanced technology. It will be part of a communist society, and yes, it will help us. Think of AI as a tool.

And no, robots will not rise up against humanity. The only dangerous thing about AI is that the bourgeoisie is able to use it against the proletariat, e.g., drones, NSA technology.

[olahsenor]

AI and robotics under socialism would truly lessen the burden of the workers and the peasants. Since nobody gets fired under socialism, all that the workers and the peasants would have to do would be to discuss Marxism in workplaces lounges and the houses of the kolhoz managers, attend to their children's personal longings, entertainment and leisure.

[Comrade Jacob]

This is also the future of humanity under socialism, according to our opponents.... (grin)


http://s9.postimg.org/xsjtefvy7/vlcsnap_2015_10_30_04h33m45s113.png

Still far better than what we have now.

[ckaihatsu]

Still far better than what we have now.


Uh, yeah, sure, and I, uh, got this setup already, anyway -- it's real sweet with little marshmallows right to my face, and all I gotta do is get into the plexiglass box and *want* marshmallows.... (grin) Bought it a year ago and it might be even cheaper now....


= D





AI and robotics under socialism would truly lessen the burden of the workers and the peasants. Since nobody gets fired under socialism, all that the workers and the peasants would have to do would be to discuss Marxism in workplaces lounges and the houses of the kolhoz managers, attend to their children's personal longings, entertainment and leisure.


Well, this is the 'static technology' vision of socialism, which comes with its own baggage, incidentally -- I raised the question recently at another thread:




The typical counter-argument here (not mine) is to say that, post-revolution, everyone will immediately become enlightened and will thus only want to pursue concerns in the field of *humanities* (as opposed to 'science' and 'engineering'), arguing that all of it would be valid as 'work', for the good of society and its people.

All matters of *technical* inquiry and development would be roundly derided as 'socially unnecessary' and would automatically be disdained, the inevitable material result of global human liberation.

Would a post-capitalist society really be an idyllic naturalistic pastoral scene, like that of the Smurfs, or would it actually include technology of some kinds (as from the era of capitalism) -- ?




If it *does* include technology, would it be at a *minimum level* and *static*, with only as much necessary to automate all 'gruntwork', so that everyone can live their preferred socially *humanistic* kinds of lives -- ?



Or would people continue to take active interests in *non*-humanistic, more *technical*-minded avenues, so as to keep a certain pace of uncoerced technological *development* going -- ?

So here it is, for the politically intrepid:




- How would a technologically 'static' post-capitalist society determine who *maintains* the socially necessary machinery that benefits everyone in society -- ?



And/or:

- How would a technologically 'developmental' post-capitalist society determine the social value of the work that anyone does for 'pure science', or for 'applied science' -- ? (How would any scientific endeavors be judged relative to the results of immediate material productivity, as for crops, for example -- ?)


In A Nut Shell

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nut-shell-t194231/index.html

[ckaihatsu]

[1] politics, [2] logistics, and [3] lifestyle


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

http://s6.postimg.org/44rloql0x/160309_History_Macro_Micro_politics_logistic.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/r686uhkod/full/)