USSR was technophilic and invented space travel.
DPRK is technophilic.
PRC is technophilic and is the world leader in many advanced technologies.
Marx analyses technological progress deeply. The increase in productive power that results from the creation and rollout of new technologies (including AI) is what raises material standards of living.
We need to stop calling it AI. We have Language Models, and we have Image Models - but in neither case is intelligence being created or emulated.
Who controls the technology matters a great deal and is being glossed over completely here
Engels in "The Conditions of the Working Class in England" responded to this point better than I could, though written in 1844 Marx fully endorsed the analysis in Capitol Vol. I
Let the wise bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer: “Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery.” The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a “surplus population,” to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair.
The advance of industry, in the hands of a Communist society, will be a tool for the improvement of all. But in a society ruled by the Bourgeois, such innovation will facilitate more oppression, exploitation, and unemployment, if doing so is the most profitable. You can look at the immiserating consequences which followed the invention of the cotton gin to see that; not even accounting for genuinely awful inventions like leaded gasoline, credit card scores, and nuclear weapons.
Yeah ok but whrn an ai takes my jov and i starve to death ill make sure to be technophillic
Tech is cool in a vacuum and occasionally when it actually does improve lives (like medical research, on average).
Tech is cool more often in socialist countries because the gains are more often socialized.
Tech often sucks under capitalism, as (1) when it helps producticity, this usually just helps the rich capitalists and (2) the tech "innovations" are often vampires on life and production, just making money by decreasing wages and employment across an industry.
Finally, a lot of the latter is built on absurd and financialized infinite growth economies and, fundamentally, maintaining the imperial world order, which is why they are ao often bullshit that doesn't really help anyone, or actively harms people. It's just a grift on a grift on a grift, making residuals off of residuals of forcing hyperexploitation on people in South Asia and Africa.
Kim Jong-il, On The Juche Idea –
Ours is an age of science and technology. Only by rapidly developing science and technology, can we accelerate socialist construction, develop the national economy onto a new, higher stage and successfully improve the people's standard of living and increase the nation's strength.
By dynamically promoting the technical revolution, our Party has turned our once technically and economically backward country into an advanced socialist industrial state in a short time and made a great stride forward in putting all branches of the national economy on a modern scientific and technical basis and freeing the working people from arduous labour.
The increase in productive power that results from the creation and rollout of new technologies (including AI) is what raises material standards of living.
except if you're put out of work by it, but fuck those people i guess
Something of an over-correction from Silicon Valley's sect of technophilia that's divorced from any sort of mechanical understanding of technology. When people insist god is in the computer, it's hard not to fantasize about a solar storm wiping out all the Turing machines.
Their are certain technologies we agree are damaging, even socially administered. Coal power plants for example. When I'm on this site saying "phone bad" it's because I see social media as addictive and alienating. When I say car bad, you know why. "Smart" appliances enable mass surveillance while requiring more rare earth mining than regular appliances.
I'm not going full Zerzan, but a level of fear around many technologies is healthy
these are still problems with technology under capitalism. constant surveillance by advertisers and feds, social media is addicting so that you continue using it and they continue harvesting your data to sell, etc. a certain level of technophobia is always necessary but i think there’s much less fear required for technology developed without the necessity to constantly generate profit (current examples of libre software are great examples of this i think)
new technologies (including AI) is what raises material standards of living.
Lol no it's not. What did the cotton gin do for the standards of living of enslaved people? Nothing, it just made slavery more economically advantageous. All the profits from increased efficiency went straight into the pockets of the slavers.
There's a famous graph showing productivity compared to real wages over time and how they decoupled in the 80's with productivity still rising and wages stagnating.
The average worker today is vastly more productive compared to a primitive hunter-gatherer, so why can't you maintain a hunter-gatherer standard of living off, say 1 hour per week?
Increases in productivity only matter if the rich aren't able to squeeze you for every penny you make, which they can as long as they control the means of production.
new technologies raise standards of living but ownership of those technologies allowing for the exploitation of others prohibiting a raise in standards of living is also true
both can be a thing
like a replicator would vastly improve a person's standard of living, but not so much if the cost of using it is spending a life time in the slavery mines because it's owned by Felon Dusk. Capitalism dictating that state of affairs doesn't mean the replicator wouldn't raise standards of living if not restrained
a replicator would destroy the standard of living for people who were put out of work by the replicator, because now they can't make rent
well yea under capitalism but under not capitalism the replicator would simply replicate them new homes
yea but wouldn't the capacity for technological progress to improve standards of living be a property inherent to it and something which is restrained by capitalism, an outside force
yes, but as i said, we live under capitalism
advances in automation under capitalism can occasionally increase the standard of living for some, at the cost of completely fucking the standard of living for the people who no longer have a job because of ityes, but this post is a response to the "ai" bad discourse in another thread, which is not a theoretical discussion about the future, but the effects of technological advances in the here and now
Capitalism dictating that state of affairs doesn’t mean the replicator wouldn’t raise standards of living if not restrained
Uh... Duh? Is anyone disputing that?
Yes but technology under capitalism is used by capitalists to exploit workers, so sometimes technophobia is justified.
Dogshit take. There's nothing to phillic about llms that draw shitty yassified pictures and write word soup. It's not ai, it's not useful for any purpose. You want to talk about powerful data crunching algos for folding proteins or doing first pass inspections for cancer or whatever i'm game, that shit is cool and good. But i sincerely doubt that leftist objections to using neural nets to diagnose cancer is why you posted this. The world does not need chat gpt or whatever they're calling the image generation algos.
