I think replacing coders with AI is still ways away. But if your boss is saying thats what he wants to do, then you should consider your days numbered. I think one of the aims of AI is that you can have less skilled workers be productive with them and thus don’t require experienced engineers which are rarer and have higher wages. I see it kind of like how the automotive industry’s technological advancements “de-skilled” workers and thus you not only didnt need highly skilled workers, but you could also get away with hiring less workers. AI is not one-to-one with the assembly line though so this isnt a predetermined outcome.

Now I don’t think less-skilled worker = low performer. Low performers at these companies are just people that can’t politically defend their jobs. I really hate the term because it always comes up as a point of contention when talking about unionizing (in any industry) and it just serves to divide workers. It’s so obvious to me because “low performer” is only used for describing workers at the bottom of the company hierarchy and never at the leadership level.

I do like though that Zuckerberg is just saying the quiet part out loud for why capitalists are investing so much money into AI. If anything it just makes the contradictions of capitalism easier to point out.

I feel this as well. Being a principled communist is the most isolating thing in capitalist society. The only thing I’ve learned is the same thing I’ve learned when I was pursuing different hobbies – the only way to not isolate yourself is find friends within the hobby you have a interest in rather than try to convert friends into your hobby as it is almost impossible to get them interested if they aren’t already. The advantage of communism though is it is much more than a hobby and can relate to everyone, so there is some hope that others will come around if the movement becomes larger.

He mentions that if your manager refuses to acknowledge your union you can go to the NLRB. How would that change under Trump?

I hope it doesnt take until 2050 to see some kind of international socialist movement. I think we need to prepare for revolutionary action within our own countries and the best we can hope from China is they would support it if we were to succeed. And as other people said getting organized is key to that – there are many spontaneous events that help radicalize people but its about seizing those opportunities to create a lasting movement.

China’s non-interventionism is both a blessing and a curse.

Luddism part 2.

I think the question is if AI, as a tool, can make such a quantitative change in productivity that there is a qualitative change in the relations of production. Otherwise it’s just going to be the same as all other increases in productivity this century which sharpen the contradictions of capitalism.

I mean from my experience with chatgpt, it has def been trained on Marxist theory texts. And it gets some of it right and some of it wrong in the same way it gets anything right or wrong.

LLM’s are black boxes. You can’t modify their algorithm and influence them at the layer of abstraction to be pro or anti anything (at least from my understanding). The only way you could do that is by cherry picking its training data, and even then it’s still a black box so it could potentially have a bias towards the opposite of what you intend.

I’ve started contemplating if a butlerian jihad is more likely than a proletarian revolution at this point with how little class conscious there is in America.

It is interesting to see that even tech-bros can see some of the contradictions in AI. I do feel it’s easier to organize them against AI rather than against billionaires who own it (since in the tech bro mind they are already on the cusp of being one of the billionaires).

Also if I could indulge in some sci-fi speculation for a bit: what if the “AI takeover” follows one of the stories in I, Robot (the book) where there’s a official who is an AI but it’s not clear to the public that he is, creating this environment of ambiguity. Then we have more “AI’s” masquerading as real people (take the recent event with the AI Instagram profiles) until everyone we are surrounded by is an AI before we even know it.

It would be cool to see more tech worker solidarity, but I feel tech workers in particular have the most animosity towards each other, at least in big tech. Of course this is the result of how these companies are structured, but it’s hard to get that across to them.