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i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

gonna just fully lean into being a stereotypical leftist here: yinz claim to have read marx yet clearly haven't read marx or internalized the ideas within bsky.app/profile/segy...

I think the difference is despite the flaws it is easy to see how factories produce things that benefit people. A textile factory is going to make a blanket that keeps you warm, meat processing will keep you fed. Modern tech's benefits are niche

modern tech is way too big a set to make such a blanket statement about

You sound like you're fun at parties

I understand where you're coming from, but I also think it's worth thinking about the fact that the split in tone here is along the lines of people who are currently financially stable and the people whose livelihoods are *presently* being eroded by these technologies with no upside in sight.

If you think there's an upside to building this technology so it can be captured by labour, I think there needs to be an actual story being told about how that can actually be accomplished. Because otherwise, people whose careers are being destroyed today are just being told to stop resenting it!

Again, I don't think your intentions are bad here - but I think to change minds here, people would need to hear something practical about how things could actually change *in this instance* instead of the same cycle continuing where capital captures all value while eroding labour's share.

Then let’s go nationalize all the best LLM models. Please lead that campaign as one of the spokespeople making these tools

and i'm not the first to say this, but it is a grave mistake that folks want to cede an important technology to the right we fight for technology so that we can direct it towards good ends. we don't just let the other side take good tools because we don't like how they use those tools

I find this especially weird when applied to existing open freely downloadable models that can run on your own hardware. You can hate how they were made, but not using them is like saying "I won't use this entire class of algorithms because bad people invented them".

I've seen more embrace on the anarcho-left side I think the general rejection of copyright/IP in that space means they don't have to worry about one of the major hurdles for folks closer to the center-left

I'll admit that some of my unease comes from my own growing suspicion of anything that leads to "scale" because so much of it gets coopted into tech that's anti-humanity ("big data" tools powering oppressive systems, etc) Dunno what the right answer is here

yep, one thing this whole thing has really cast into light for me is how old i am. the kids don't know about "information wants to be free"

is anyone fighting for AI to really and truly benefit humanity right now? everything I see just furthers the value capture by capital. apologies if this comes off as a troll, I'm genuinely curious what this actually looks like in practice

no i think this is the right question! i think that if you're talking about the big companies, they mostly say it's about humanity but it's actually about capital what i'm talking about is the *usage* directly. like, for example, using llms to enhance our ability to write software that helps people

something related i typed last night on this topic.

('life' here is my brother's handle in this space, just realized that first sentence may be a bit hard to understand without that context haha)

i think part of this is the (intentional, capitalists write the history books) characterization of luddites and related movements as being anti-technology rather than pro-labor. i think a lot of people agree with the luddites' aims and methods and confuse the symptom for the cause