The pandemic really shifted the balance between capital and knowledge workers like engineers, consultants, marketers, and academics who don’t own capital but wield a lot of influence - the so called PMC.
During COVID, the PMC suddenly got way more autonomy. Remote work gave them freedom to work from anywhere, set their own hours, and basically ignore old-school workplace control. Plus, they used their cultural clout to push for """woke""" causes. On top of that, the great resignation gave them serious leverage to demand raises and better conditions.
From the capitalist perspective, this looked like the PMC getting a bit too big for their britches, acting like stakeholders instead of wage workers.
Now enter generative AI. This isn’t just some productivity tool, it's capital’s answer to reclaiming control. By automating complex knowledge work like writing, coding, and design, AI threatens to replace or deskill the very roles the PMC has dominated. It lets capital reassert power by commoditizing intellectual labor and cutting out the "middleman."
In short: generative AI is a disciplinary tool, a trump card capital is playing to discipline an uppity PMC and take back the reins.
It's Capital's final anti PMC NUKE (if it works, which isn't guaranteed)
55 posts and 4 image replies omitted.>>2405054From what I've read at this point AI has no value system. By which I mean it has no sense of right or wrong, not in the ethical sense but in a true or false sense. It has no way of determining what is factual or not, and no way of remembering what "facts" it does incorporate.
So right now the term "AI" is really a misnomer because there isn't any intelligence driving it. In fact it's probably more accurate to liken them to incredibly sophisticated versions of your phone's predictive typing.
When you put an question to one of these LLM prompts, it's not really considering the content of your question or evaluating sources in order to provide you with an answer. Instead it generates a response based off whatever internal processes have been erected to cobble together something that resembles a good answer from the scraps of whatever inputs it was trained on. Sometimes it's true enough if the information its drawing from is good, but it's just as likely to be a bunch of bullshit.
And you can see this play out with shit like grok. By turns it either gives out faulty information, or embarrassing responses, or for one reason or another has to be "fixed" for ideological reasons, which is another major factor in LLMs being fundamentally broken.
At least that's my layman's interpretation of things. Ed Zitron's blog has much more in depth deconstructions and explanations for how defective AI is in general.
>>2378662>If nobody has a job because its all automated you need a way to get money into peoples hands to pay for all the shit they automated. The only solution ive heard presented to solve this is a Tech Lord appropriating an individuals data they produce on the internet and selling it on the data market and then giving this individual back a portion of it for living essentials just like a medieval serf working in the fields. Any other possibilities?I think what we're seeing is these tech companies especially more or less merging with the government. From an economic perspective "getting money into people's hands" is much less efficient than the government just depositing it straight into your bank account.
From what I've read the haute bourgeoisie are ideologically committed to a number of things. One is the idea that climate change is an inevitable catastrophe. Another is that they alone are the worthy and as such only they really deserve to rule and survive. Everyone else is just so much grist for the mill.
Right now they seem to be fixated on the idea of building massive company towns that they rule over with a silicon fist. There's some trying to build one now out in California, thankfully being held up by local government, but who knows how long that will last.
But yeah, you're seeing moves from the big silicon valley companies and billionaires like Musk, Gates, Thiel, Bezos and the rest to take over functions formerly relegated to the government or traditional mic contractors, because only the government can provide the guaranteed, titanic profits American monopolies require to exist any more. The "middle class" that originally allowed consumer economies to function doesn't exist any more, and with the progressing inability of the American military to ensure cheap as free resources and the advent of competition from China, the era of unlimited expansion and guaranteed increases in profits is rapidly coming to an end.
Gaza is just the prelude. We're going to witness nightmares without precedent in scale or scope.
>>23766861. Yes.
2. I think the bigger reason for the LLM marketing push that we're seeing is that it's the only release valve that currently exists for overaccumulated capital in a world where the rate of profit is in a secular decline. It's the same reason rents are rising, that gambling is legal, that soon all drugs and prostitution will be. This ends with people having the right to bill their kids for the diapers and breast milk that they "sold" to their infant children.
When it comes up against the limits of a finite ecology, capital's relentless appetite for surplus value becomes a species-wide death drive.
>>2405202I mean yeah but it's all done in a way where the state remains in control. all the tech Thiel is providing is making the state more efficient
>>2405195every scientists prediction about climate change didn't factor in China's sudden mass production of solar panels. That's not to say there won't be a lot of consequences for letting it get this bad but it's not the world ending catastrophe people assume it is
>>2405248>every scientists prediction about climate change didn't factor and a lot of those same scientists didnt predict how bad it would be. Theres a reason why theres been a trend of faster than expected.
Now if i was being fully unironic, climate change wont be a complete catastrophe. But it will fuck over a lot of places to the point I can easily see the usa bourg going full dystopian to maintain control.
>>2405248>I mean yeah but it's all done in a way where the state remains in control. all the tech Thiel is providing is making the state more efficientI don't think it's accurate at all to say the state is in the least bit in control. It's regulatory bodies have been captured for decades now, and with the bureaucratic purges and judicial rulings gutting what's left of its regulatory power there's virtually no oversight.
But beyond that, even in 2008 there were corporations that were "too big to fail" and since then that category has only proliferated and those within it expanded. We've seen what happens when these companies do fail: the government steps in to bail them out and ensure their continuity, because if they go down then they take the entire rest of the economy with them.
And further, we saw exactly just how in charge the government was during covid when during the greatest single health crisis in US history, all it took to basically end quarantines was a conversation with one ceo. Not to mention the activities surrounding Boeing, which are so flagrantly illegal and detrimental that it beggars belief, and the government’s response was basically to extract a promise from them to do better.
The government is absolutely not the one in control.
Information technology has been a giant casino, a scam, a ponzi scheme for the longest time. With the rise of the internet, more specificly the world wide web, dublication of information became basically cost-free for anyone, aside from the energy to run the computers. As such, the first melt down was the dotcom bubble in late 90s/early 2000s, because digital information has basically no value in itself.
The first big push to enforce adherence to rent extraction schemes was when all the IP holding entertainment conglomerates went storm against Napster. One of their shills was Lars Ulrich of Metallica, who even testified, as multi millionaire, in front of the Congress (correct me if i'm wrong and it was the Senate, i'm not a burger) how le smol artists would be ruined by it.
Since then, with emergence of whatever new implementation of software to easily dublicate and share information, there always was then the reaction by porkies to shut this down. With the end of the 2000s and in the early 2010s came the consolidation of the world wide web. 'Social Media' was pushed upon us to lock in users into golden cages, aka 'platforms', to extract rent.
Consolidation is now pretty much finalized, with this place for example being a remnant of a once 'wild west' and 'free' world wide web. By now, the 'internet' is pretty much a handful of platforms, all counting billions of users.
Since none of these platforms generate value in themselves, all they have is extracting rent. As people are used to get stuff free in 'the internet', the user became the commodity, sold to the highest bidder, most often the advertising industry.
'AI', more specifically machine learning as a concept, is something about 80 years old. The concept since went through mutltiple 'AI winters' because no one was able to find actual use cases. The last boom, in a big part, is the result of two things: way too much 'computing capital' lying around idle because of former fads like 'Big Data', 'The Cloud', 'Bitcoin' and way too much 'capital' in form of idle money because porkers couldn't find worthwile options to invest their money in as they dismantled actually productive industries with their push for neo-liberal reform.
'AI' as we now see it is thus the result of ever more undproductive imeperial core economies, mostly consisting of 'service economies'. It is the final grift before the house of cards comes crashing down. There is, compared to the surreal amounts of capital 'invested' into Generative AI, zero investment into actually worthwile research.
Remember 'Industry 4.0'? When is the last time you heard of it? Actually interesting shit like predictive maintenance based on pattern recognition was for the shortest time the hot shit, then came OpenAI along.
Porky has no masterful plan. Porky has a profitability crisis and the only thing porky came up with is throwing away money in a last ditch effort to fleece the rubes. Of course, there are hoardes of delusional porkers and managers who all to happy believe that 'AI' will replace the workers. Because these clowns forgot what it is that makes them rich: exploiting human labor.
>>2406165>I just want to know the force stopping Shell or Exxonmobile from setting up capital and profiting off the oil rich regions of the world. Subjugating those oil rich regions allows for greater profits particularly as subject governments lack the ability to resist themselves or help others resist. You can see an example of this with the Chavez government giving the Cuban government oil, and the Cuban government supplying Ven with medical supplies.
You're acting like operating at a loss in order to get higher profits later is something the bourgeoisie would never do willingly when we see them do it all the time. And right now we're seeing Chevron return to Venezuela after a 6 month absence and Maduro making concessions to Trump. Chevron's activities accounted for a quarter of Venezuela's oil production, so who do you think was hurt more by the license revocation, Chevron or the already embattled Maduro government?
>>2406175not really an argument but alright
>>2406179>And right now we're seeing Chevron return to Venezuela after a 6 month absence and Maduro making concessions to TrumpThey flip flop on this all the time, it would be like the 8th time across 2 administrations. You're kinda agreeing with my point here too, that the bourgeoise doesn't actually have the strength to pressure Venezuela alone, it needs State power as a conduit, such as sanctions or using licenses as leverage in negotiations. In the case of Iran, did you know post revolution it was mostly American companies bidding on Iranian oil contracts? It was until the Clinton Administration blocked a deal Conoco had with Iran to pour a billion into oil infrastructure, and a souring of relations between Israel and Iran, that American oil companies got the message and pulled out of Iran totally by 2003. Without the State power putting the needs of the state first and foremost, the oil barons would've enjoyed fat profits for 30 years. The oil companies were allowed to operate in neutral countries not dominated by the US like Brazil, or even the kurds in north syria, there's nothing that makes Iran or Venezuela special in the eyes of the bourgeoise
>>2405863That's not how monopoly capital and crises of overproduction work. It's not a vibes based measure of "productivity." Productivity in this case is literally just profit on enterprise. And rent is just capital. A landlord is just a kind of small business.
Regarding, I agree, it's high time we nationalise the big tech monopolies.
>>2406307Nice words you use. Sad you do neither care to elaborate to make them make sense, nor attack any of my points in particular but throw around blanket statements.
>A landlord is just a kind of small business.Lol. No, a landlord is not a small business you idiot.
>>2409656Capitalists do not do productive labor. All capitalists are parasites.
Rent-seeking is a Proudhonist line.
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