It should be a good thing but it won't be under capitalism.
Best case scenario we either revolution everything before then or the singularity turns out to be communist.
the singularity is a myth made up by weird nerds. AI isn't sentient is a masterfully marketed way of getting computers to do statistics
nerds really just make their whole philosophy and political ideology from their parasocial relationship with R2D2
thats how I view it too.. but its also inevitable so it seems like instead of throwing a fit about AI automating our jobs we should be really throwing a fit about not having enough safety nets for that to be a good thing.
I do wonder what capitalists plan on doing when most everything is automated though. Its only a matter of time and that gives people A LOT of time to sharpen their guillotines.
i worry they can't wait until full automation so they can brutally exterminate us. some of these people think they are a different species.
it's literally the Luddite situation and nothing has changed about it
it is Good but because it makes large swathes of the population economically obsolete it's Not Good
It's good and communism requires it, only capitalism manages to take "less labor produces more goods" and twist it into a bad thing.
But if I'm entitled to the surplus value of my labor how do I get any when the AI take my job and I don't do any labor
Because the necessary labor and the wealth are considered communally. The first half of the deal, "from each according to his ability," means doing your part of the socially necessary labor. As automation decreases the amount of human labor required to sustain the whole of society, there's less work required of each person while everyone still gets the other half of the deal, "to each according to his need."
You'd still be entitled to the surplus value of whatever other labor you do. Through central planning a socialist state can move all the people who were displaced by automation into other fields, and with the amount of hands that are freed up by automation you'd probably work very little. On top of that the commodities that are produced through automation would be owned in common and would be put towards meeting everyone's needs, so no one will be homeless or will starve because they no longer have a job. If all labor is automated (which can't really happen IMO) we'd still have all the commodities, yet held in common and given to each according to their need.
Is tool, is okay if used by a friendly hand, not so okay if used by an unfriendly one.
Sophisticated statistical learning techniques, which is %95 of what is really discussed under the 'AI' banner, can be incredibly valuable when utilized for ethical scientific analysis. The problem is that those techniques are incredibly efficient at identifying our almost Pavlovian responses, and social media provides the idea rapid feedback loop to fine tune methods to exploit them en masse.
:this: is why Meta is so hellbent on VR. The immersiveness of VR combined with biometrics will level up their current manipulation methodologies to a crazy level. Dynamic skinner boxes.
it's a technology for laundering the violence of industrial society through pseudomathematical calculation. if you meet a computer on the road, strike it dead.
I don't think this is the right question to ask. AI/Automation is progress, plain and simple, and you can't fight progress.
But, if you insist on saying good/bad then I agree with everyone else in the comments about capitalism/communism.
right now, bad. Capitalism will heavily abuse it. Socialism would be better for it
I think it helps to distinguish automation into two categories. The first, we can call "Specific Automation". This is when tasks that were once carried out by a person are now carried out by a machine. It's output is much greater than that of a person, but it does so 'unthinkingly'. If it can correct errors, it is only in ways that its creator has anticipated. If something goes wrong, it will spit out junk with the same speed and quantity that it would a quality product. If something goes catastrophically wrong, it will destroy itself and, depending on the machine, could pose a danger to any people near by. So you need someone to 'mind' it, to be the conscious actor in the system. This is how automation has always been and how it still is today. There's a lot of money to be saved if you can cut out the conscious actor, if you can make the machine mind itself. Let's call this "General Automation".
I'm not gonna beat around the bush, "General Automation" is a pipe-dream. A computer is no different from any other machine; it can carry out specific tasks, reading and writing, with wondrous speeds. And it will crash the instant it's in a situation it has no instructions for. Sure, you can make the computer write a bunch of instructions for itself, but you still have to predefine a metric by which it prunes those instructions - otherwise you've just got a hot mess of code that does nothing. After the pruning, you still have a hot mess of code -- but! It yields results! Specific results, only within the parameters it's been given. And you don't know how it's reached those results. And it's not transferable. You have to go through the process all over again for any task you wish to point it at. Somehow, they say, this process will eventually lead to sentience -- a machine that is truly aware of itself. Absurd! Why does anyone believe this? Because
A) It Would Really Save Us Quite a Lot of Money if You Could Deliver, Upfront Costs be Damned
and
B) Computers are Magic Books That Read and Write Themselves and Practically Nobody Knows How They Work, Even Programmers, Sometimes Especially Programmers
It is creating an edge for the surveillance state that makes our own organization more difficuly and will be used to disrupt us later. AI is a capital-intensive project and one where it is difficult for workers to shut it down or appropriate it or withhold their labor to prevent its function. We cannot achieve anything remotely approaching parity through taking over "the AI factory" not bend its use to our own gain in any significant way.
Until revolution, it's a weapon of the enemy.
Capitalism will use all available tools to maximize exploitation and oppression regardless of the nature of those tools.
If you're talking about AI as it actually exists and not AI as imagined by Kurzweil nerds then AI and machine learning and algorithms are just tools. They can cause problems, but so can a hammer. If they're used responsibly they have the potential to improve society.
