Robots and the Precariat

[Antiochus]

Within 15 years it is estimated that AI will reach human levels of intelligence and computing power. The robots with this AI will be able to complete human tasks and jobs as complex as scientific research, legal work, sewage treatment and so on. This is, I think, the largest single event transforming human labor in the past 200+ years.

If true it could potentially mean that they could cheaply and effectively replace hundreds of millions of individuals , and not simply manual labor, enlarging the 'precariat' rapidly. What does this mean for the prospect of a militant working class? Given that it will happen within most of our lifetimes, it is something deeply important to think about. Already many people are worried, for all the wrong reasons. If we lived in a Communist society, it would be a great and joyful event, wiping out, for the first time in history, the need for labor. But it could enact a living hell in the present situation.

[Rafiq]

We should see it in the context of an emerging neo-feudalism. It is pure speculation whether this would or even could happen - but if all labor is replaced by artificial intelligence, then this would take the same character as - say - the ownership of a successful app, like Uber. It would be a fundamentally rent-based relationship.

It would mean that industrial production would be a part of Silicon Valley just as much as the 'intangible' digital world. What we could expect would indeed be hell on Earth, a new aristocracy (if there is not one already) and so on. I believe that these developments can be confronted through political struggle, that is, through a reinvigorated democratic political struggle (i.e. for more powerful democratic reforms).

[oneday]

Do realize that this has been said since at least the 1960's- "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do." - Herbert A. Simon (certainly well respected), 1965.

Something Noam Chomsky is right on:

0kICLG4Zg8s

[ckaihatsu]

Do realize that this has been said since at least the 1960's- "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do." - Herbert A. Simon (certainly well respected), 1965.

Something Noam Chomsky is right on:

[YOUTUBE]0kICLG4Zg8s[YOUTUBE]


If we simply apply the axiom that the bourgeois ownership has no objective interest in automating all tasks, when the here-and-now human labor for such is immediately available and cheap, then we can finally see that there's no inherent dynamic speeding us on an inevitable trajectory to technological hell or utopia.

Another way of putting this is that the bourgeoisie just needs a new *fetish*, one that's *nominally* useful to consumers, like Facebook or whatever -- nothing *fiercely* groundbreaking, innovative, or disruptive.

A few sidenotes:

- The urban revolution of the ancient world may have necessitated a mass-culture *fetish*, one of single-god-worship, or monotheism:





Axial age[edit]

See also: Axial Age

The period from 900 to 200 BCE has been described by historians as the axial age, a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. According to Jaspers, this is the era of history when "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today". Intellectual historian Peter Watson has summarized this period as the foundation of many of humanity's most influential philosophical traditions, including monotheism in Persia and Canaan, Platonism in Greece, Buddhism, Jainism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China. These ideas would become institutionalized in time, for example Ashoka's role in the spread of Buddhism, or the role of platonic philosophy in Christianity at its foundation.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religions#Axial_age


- The suggestion of a supra-humanity 'AI' could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy, along the lines of belief in any monotheistic deity, if the prevailing bourgeois culture *fetishizes* such a potential creation, as by incessantly referring to its possibility as an *inevitability*. This would be equivalent to a mass-psychological *projection*, where hard-coded digital and mechanical tools become widely imbued with *anthropomorphic* characteristics, even though they do not actually exist / are not actually sentient.

- From the 'viewpoint' of the proletariat, it is continuously *outsourcing* the social functions of management, administration, security, social services, welfare, education, health care, housing, and so on, *as long* as it's not struggling on a class basis to incorporate and control these social functions for itself, autonomously from capital.