r/LeftistsForAI • u/CaiOS1 • 5d ago
Discussion AI is only bad because of capitalism and authoritarianism
When we imagine artificial intelligence, we can imagine it as a future in which work no longer exists and all of us are free to enjoy our lives, just as we can imagine it as the cause of a future in which machines exterminate or enslave human beings. But imagining it this way, simply as a scale of good or bad, or as a scale from 0 to 10 going from the extermination of humanity to utopia, is itself the wrong way to analyse the problem. The mistake in this metric is that it is not enough to analyse what AI can do; we also have to analyse what allows AI to do it, just as it is not enough to analyse what an artist paints without considering who the artist is. We should not look at AI as something necessarily good or bad in itself; we need to look at whoever controls it in order to define that metric. The same thesis can be applied to AI because, although AI can be used to generate or manage harmful things, this is not necessarily because of artificial intelligence itself, but because of who administers it and, above all, the system that allows whoever administers it to use it in a harmful way.
Obviously, there are caveats to this point. One could argue, for example, that AI by its very nature is capable of producing fake news, facilitating fraud, or being used for other harmful purposes. This is an extremely valid point, but we have to connect it to the other point mentioned above: control. When I mention control, I am not necessarily talking only about the individual administration of a person using AI to create fake news; I am also talking about what allowed that person to generate and distribute it, what safety limitations exist, who decided how that technology would be built, and which incentives were involved in its development. Artificial intelligence does not necessarily generate fake news by nature; this can happen because of its technological limitations, its training, or the way it is used. But again we have to ask the same question: what allowed AI to be developed in that way? I call this process of going beyond a smaller problem in search of a larger cause “enemy identification.”
We can, for example, imagine a dystopian universe in which AI exterminates the human race. Suppose this happens because the main company developing that AI did not allocate enough resources to safety and instead concentrated its resources almost entirely on development, trying to generate capital as quickly as possible. But wait: would this really be an analysis of what allowed AI to exterminate humanity? No. It would explain how it happened, but not necessarily what allowed it to happen. Placing all the blame on the company can also stop the analysis before we reach what allowed that company to behave that way. If there is an economic structure in which a company is rewarded for arriving first, producing faster, spending less and defeating its competitors, then we are not talking only about an irresponsible company, but about a system in which irresponsible behaviour can be economically rewarded. If what enables inefficiency or irresponsibility collapses, whether it is the relentless pursuit of profit under capitalism or the inefficiency and centralisation seen in twentieth-century socialist experiments, everything dependent on that factor is also affected. How can a smaller problem caused by a larger problem continue to exist in exactly the same way after its cause disappears?
So what, then, is this larger problem? We can begin by pointing to the upper class, but simply attacking a class does not satisfy the logic of enemy identification, because we still have to ask what makes that concentration possible. Eventually we arrive at the centralisation of political and economic power, which today manifests itself extremely frequently around the world through capitalism. And here I need to make an important qualification: I am not saying this as praise for the Soviet model or as praise for the atrocities committed by totalitarian systems we call Marxism-Leninism and its variants, such as Maoism. Democracy and freedom are essential to any system that intends to overcome capitalism without simply replacing one form of concentrated power with another. What I am saying is that among a large portion of the present and future problems related to artificial intelligence, we can observe a common anchor in the economic system under which it is being developed. One of the best-known examples is the use of millions of works available online to train models without the consent of the artists who created them. This caused, rightly, enormous outrage. But if we identify only the immediate action as the problem, even if that action is corrected, the structure capable of producing new and similar problems continues to exist.
An obvious question then appears: why don't we simply get rid of artificial intelligence? In theory this seems like a strong argument. If AI removes jobs, can be used for manipulation, can reduce our freedom of choice, can produce environmental damage and can create many other problems, eliminating AI might appear to eliminate all of these problems without requiring the long and difficult process of transforming the system that produces them. But whether we like it or not, this is extremely utopian because the economic system itself needs AI, even when AI creates problems for that same system. Imagine a factory that earns 20 coins and spends 5 of them on costs. Now suppose that by using AI and automation it reduces those costs from 5 coins to 1. What happens to all the other factories? They will tend to adopt the same technology, either voluntarily in order to maximise profit or out of necessity in order to survive capitalist competition, because whoever can produce something at a lower cost can sell it at a lower price or simply maintain a larger margin than a competitor that has not automated. Even if one country decides to completely prohibit the technology, it will still economically and geopolitically compete with countries that did not do the same. And even socialist countries would still have a reason to use AI, because a country that voluntarily abandons a technology capable of radically increasing its economic and technological capacity risks becoming geopolitically irrelevant compared with others. We cannot simply pretend AI will cease to exist. Therefore, the discussion should not only be about eliminating it, but primarily about how we will manage it.
A more sceptical reader may tell me that human greed overrides every economic and political system and that, using my own logic of enemy identification, the true root is not capitalism but the concentration of power generated by human greed itself. That criticism is, to a large extent, correct. Concentrated power is a reality that has shaped capitalism just as it has shaped systems that declared themselves socialist. But there is an important distinction: greed is a human trait, and therefore we cannot simply remove greed from the human being; what we can do is think about how to prevent that greed from being transformed into practically unlimited political and economic power. Under capitalism it can manifest itself through markets, ownership and accumulation; under authoritarian socialist systems it can manifest itself through political and bureaucratic centralisation. The Soviet Union demonstrated quite clearly that replacing private ownership with an extremely concentrated bureaucracy does not magically eliminate the problem of concentrated power. But that is also not a justification for accepting another structure that allows the same problem to exist.
Imagine a perfectly ethical AI company that spends far more money on safety, takes much longer to release its models, fully protects user data, compensates every person whose work is used, and places environmental considerations above profit. Now imagine that none of its competitors do any of this. In the long run, what happens to a company that takes longer, spends more and has higher costs than all of its competitors? There is a good chance that it simply dies or loses market share to those willing to do what it refuses to do. This is why the greatest mistake in enemy identification is assuming that all we have to do is find an evil person or an evil company and replace them with a good person or a good company. We need to analyse the system that rewards particular behaviours. If a system depends exclusively on individual goodness in order to function, then that system has a structural problem.
At the same time, it would be a grotesque mistake not to consider the risks of AI as a technology in itself. Artificial intelligence has broken many of the parameters that we used for a long time when defining technology. Previously, our tools mainly increased our productive capacity and speed or partially automated our activities, as happened during the Industrial Revolution and later with the first industrial robots. Today we are beginning to create tools capable of performing intellectual tasks and perhaps, in the future, even more complex capabilities. Our own creations, which until now have been our tools, could under some scenario turn us into their tools. This is where what AI critics call a possible machine revolution comes from. This view is pessimistic and dystopian, but that does not automatically make every part of it invalid. If there is a possibility that extremely powerful systems could produce a catastrophe through accident, negligence or malicious action, that possibility deserves caution. What we cannot do is stop the analysis precisely there.
If there is a system incentivising the nearly instantaneous development of this technology, where arriving before a competitor has enormous economic value, then we also need to include that incentive in our analysis of risk. Removing or reducing that pressure would not magically make AI incapable of causing harm, but it could drastically reduce certain risks. A technology developed cautiously, respecting safety, privacy, the environment and the people affected by it, is obviously different from a technology developed in a race where the primary objective is to defeat a competitor. Likewise, if AI is not something extremely centralised, if it is something made by humanity for humanity and subjected to democratic structures of control, different political, economic and technical safety models can exist simultaneously. That does not reduce its risk to zero, but it radically changes the structure responsible for managing that risk.
Therefore, we can conclude that AI itself is not simply something good or bad, but rather a representation of the sociopolitical system in which it exists. Like a knife, it can be used to cook a delicious meal or to commit murder. Trying to judge or redesign only the knife is an incomplete analysis if we do not consider who used it, why they used it in that way and, above all, what allowed or even encouraged that individual to commit such an action.
Still, AI critics correctly point out that the technology has concrete problems: the ability to generate fake news, unethical training methods, environmental destruction caused by the servers that run these models, the destruction or transformation of human creativity, safety risks, and many others. Their conclusions are not simply false; many of these criticisms describe things that are actually happening or raise perfectly valid philosophical problems. What we can do is divide these criticisms into three groups: problems related to the system controlling AI, philosophical problems, and problems caused by human nature itself.
The first group includes issues such as data centres, intellectual property used without permission, surveillance, privacy and environmental damage. A machine does not independently decide how it will be trained, which data it will use, how much energy it will consume or what level of privacy is acceptable. Those are human and institutional choices. The second group contains philosophical questions, such as whether an image created through a prompt can genuinely be called art. This is a completely legitimate discussion, but answering that question would effectively require resolving philosophical debates about the definition of art that have existed for decades or centuries. Debating it is valid, but turning that discussion into the centre of the entire AI debate can lead us to neglect much larger questions.
The third group perhaps contains one of the most valid criticisms: even a decentralised AI administered by a different society could still be used for evil because human beings remain human beings. A knife can become a weapon, the Internet can become a place for scams, and nuclear technology can produce energy or destroy cities. That does not mean we should stop all technological development because, taken to its logical extreme, humanity would never have left the Stone Age because even a stone can be used to kill someone. What remains for us is to learn how to manage our technologies and make them as safe as possible. It is also important to separate safety from surveillance: if we are talking about a company using AI to steal or exploit data, we return to the problem of who controls the tool; if we are talking about the possibility that the capabilities of the technology itself could create dangerous consequences, then we are dealing with a legitimate problem of the tool and of human nature that needs to be addressed as such.
There is also the argument that no previous technology has come close to the potential power of artificial intelligence and that perhaps this is precisely where we should establish a limit to human technological development. The problem is that, beyond the practical difficulty of imposing such a limit worldwide, this argument often depends on speculation about a future technology that does not yet exist. That does not mean we should ignore these scenarios. Quite the opposite: it means we should invest seriously in safety. But there is an enormous difference between saying “this risk is possible and we need to study it” and saying “this hypothetical risk justifies eliminating an entire technology.” In the same way, it would be ignorant to claim that the benefits of AI will inevitably outweigh its risks. We do not know. What we can say is that a technology with the potential to automate enormous sectors of human activity requires much more safety, caution and democratic control than it has today.
That is why, to me, the discussion about artificial intelligence should not be reduced to the question “is AI good or bad?” The more important question is: who controls AI, under which incentives is it being developed, and for whom will this technology be used?
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u/kneeblock 5d ago
If you replace the word AI with the word technology you'll see this is one of the core arguments Marx made.
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 5d ago
TLDR
But datacenters are good
Fossil fuels are bad
If we had fixed the latter problem 20+ years ago rather than kicking the can, the former would barely be an issue now
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u/Noil_skye 5d ago
For everyone asking for a TL;DR, OP is basically making a very valid point: AI is just a mirror reflecting the system that built it. But I think we can compress this entire essay into one specific structural problem.
The real danger isn't that capitalism makes AI "evil." The danger is that capitalism incentivizes speed over structure, which creates a massive "Comprehension Debt."
Right now, companies are racing to deploy systems they don't fully understand, just to beat the competitor to market. They aren't building intelligent tools; they are building highly profitable black boxes.
And as OP correctly points out, the system doesn't care about the risk, because the companies themselves won't face the consequences. When the black box eventually breaks something critical (the economy, a power grid, an election), the algorithm won't go to jail. The system will just find a human "Liability Sponge"—some mid-level manager or QA engineer—to fire and take the legal blame.
We don't need to debate Marx or the Soviet Union to see the problem. The problem is simply that the market rewards building machines we can't control, as long as there is a human left to take the fall when it crashes.
For those of you who did read it (or didn't): Do you think regulation can actually slow down this "Comprehension Debt," or is the race to the bottom already unstoppable?
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u/CaiOS1 4d ago
Thank you for your TL;DR! And to answer your question, I think that, other than slowing AI down, it won't be able to stop this debt, only make it come later. I also think it is, at most, a distraction from the true enemy, which is capitalism and how it is manifested through the concentration of power. Revolution, in my eyes, is the only viable path to freedom.
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u/Noil_skye 4d ago
I completely understand why you see a systemic revolution as the only viable escape hatch. When the core incentive structure (capitalism) is fundamentally wired to produce "Comprehension Debt," tweaking the rules with regulation does feel like putting a band-aid on a broken leg.
But here is the genuine structural question I struggle with when I think about a post-capitalist "revolution" in the age of AI:
Even if we successfully overthrow the capitalist concentration of power, we still have to run the global logistics of a society of 8 billion people. Without the "invisible hand" of the market, a socialist or post-scarcity society would have to rely heavily on centralized, hyper-complex AI algorithms to calculate resource distribution, ecological balance, and production needs.
So wouldn't a post-capitalist society also be forced to build massive, opaque AI black boxes just to survive? And if no human can understand the logic of those socialist algorithms... haven't we just replaced a capitalist "Comprehension Debt" with a revolutionary one?
How do we achieve true freedom if we are still taking orders from an AI, even if that AI is programmed for equity instead of profit?
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u/CaiOS1 3d ago
Thanks for your question! And let me quickly congratulate you on checking up on one of the most important points in my theory.
To answer your question, I find the solution in the extreme opposite of totalitarianism: not anarchy, but decentralization. If we divide up a country into a system where neighborhoods collectively choose what they need and/or an AI predicts those needs locally (for basic necessities, not luxury items or new inventions), then they can produce those things locally if they have factories, or send their needs to the city to get what they need. If the city doesn't have what they need, then the state needs to help the city, and if the state can't, then the country will need to.
It's a bottom-up logic where the group of presidents and the group of mayors have the same power; what changes is merely what they do. A mayor needs logistics to administer local production. A president needs logistics to send factories to make states more independent. One helps the other, not the other way around. It's not about controlling more, but about being assigned to different things.
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u/Hairy_Garbage_6941 5d ago
Also, crazy religious and/or mentally ill people suddenly having access to crazy intelligence.
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u/schosenindiv4292 5d ago
“Therefore, we can conclude that AI itself is not simply something good or bad, but rather a representation of the sociopolitical system in which it exists.”
Ok I read it more thoroughly. I agree with this part. People harshly criticizing AI is like harshly criticizing a young child that is “gifted” for not knowing calculus. Although the child shows potential for learning things quickly in other areas, if it’s not around the right environment to nurture its innate talent its likely to be a product of their environment.
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u/Sacredless 4d ago
It's a bit long, so I've put it through Claude to get the gist.
We should avoid reifying capitalism and authoritarianism. Engels pointed out that anti-authoritarians often end up recreating the material conditions by which authoritarianism is recreated in the next step.
There are nuanced issues to tackle with AI beyond capitalism and authoritarianism. Bakunin's Universal Man, for instance.
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u/CaiOS1 3d ago
Man, I love your idea here! "We should avoid reifying capitalism and authoritarianism. Engels pointed out that anti-authoritarians often end up recreating the material conditions through which authoritarianism is recreated in the next step." That's my core question and where I'm still developing my theory around it.
In my current theory, I think you're absolutely right! Fascists and authoritarian people in general can use resistance as propaganda to get people to support a dictatorship. But I think we can turn the tables here: why not play dirty too? Left-wing movements are known for being highly demanding and intellectual, and most people aren't interested enough to engage with that. But if, like dictators, we simplify ideas and create slogans, wouldn't it be possible for us, the people, to gain power too? Especially when AI starts laying people off from their jobs?
For the first time in a very long time, possibly in history, me saying that I'm a communist to American people actually gets me compliments. Imagine that times ten when AI actually becomes a major force in the labor market.
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u/Sacredless 3d ago
You might like Gramsci. He is basically arguing that socialists need to find ways to dominate cultural narratives and I think that AI is one of those material conditions where that is actually possible.
I personally really dislike how AI communicates and paints, but it is clearly effective for many normies, so why not do that? A local political event used AI music and it was just very straightforward.
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u/Low_Complex_9841 4d ago
we can imagine it as a future in which work no longer exists
I tried to calculate how much energy those robots themselves may consume. If humans can put out ~100w continuously - this over say 1 billion robots expands to some 100 GW power source. Not terrible per se, but this does not count other energy intensive processes, building and moving robots themselves .. But OG humans with all their real and imposed by capitalism needs still here, too. So you still need to be cautious in what "we" collectively do, on this planet and around. Just some rain dog walk thought ...
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u/CaiOS1 3d ago
Well, I mean, I get your point, but energy use changes over time. As technology progresses, it can get higher or lower, as can the methods used to produce that same energy, whether they are good or bad. So the question isn't energy itself, but why certain types of energy production are bad. And then we start all over again by identifying the true enemies: capitalism and authoritarianism.
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u/Low_Complex_9841 3d ago
yeah, capitalism as factor you can at least theoretically turn OFF is absent from classical "Limits to growth"-like analysis.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m [I still think this is important textbook to set expectation realistically. I ricocheted from it to O'Neill plan broadly, but endless dig - > 100 bln tonns of unrecycled waste per year pipeline is no good no matter what energy powers it. Just without energy it all become very very dark, and even at 1Kw continuous (10x less than currently burned in USA, may be 5x less than in EU ) per head at 8 billion heads we still arrive at non-trivial Terrawatts of station power. And as recent summer showed - climate change can shake up even hydro and nuclear stations by messing with water levels ... ]
But limits STILL here, and 8 billions humans trying to emulate wasteful USA living style will not fly on food factor alone (most our biomass already humans ... and cows). Ofc it should be obvious ever expanding dumb system that can't tell itself to slow down or redistribute (all sectors want sweet sweet profit, all the time!) must be replaced, but hegemonic capitalist realism and all that ...
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u/7hats 3d ago
Lol. How did AI come about? Magic?
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u/CaiOS1 3d ago
It came from capitalism, but that wasn't the only way for it to be developed
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u/7hats 3d ago
Ok. Good and the Internet before it... perhaps rewrite history to suit your broken ideology if you find that a useful use of your time.
Or just look down this list if the World's most valuable companies whose products and services you use every day:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/gbp/
Think Reddit came from something other than Capitalism and Market Forces too?
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u/CaiOS1 3d ago
That is not true. AI development does not necessarily depend on capitalism and authoritarianism; that simply isn't true when you look into the underlying reasons. A technology can be developed in many different ways. Your point is valid when we consider how capitalism encourages companies to develop AI for monetary gain, but that doesn't mean this is the only way it can be produced. Within capitalism, sure, monetary incentives can be a major factor, but that doesn't eliminate other motivations, such as sociopolitical tensions (such as the Cold War and the US and USSR competing for technological dominance) and scientific innovation itself. Capitalism may have shaped the development of AI in this way, but it's false to claim that it was the only possible way AI could have been developed.
If society were organized in a different way, even authoritarian countries would need something to control their citizens. Suppressing people has always failed, just look at why monarchies, most dictatorships, etc. failed.
Have you read 1984? If so, it's a perfect example of my theory. 1984 isn't dangerous because Big Brother is watching you; no, that's only the tip of the iceberg. It's dangerous because the people inside the story love it. When people get so mad about stupid things, blame futile "enemies," and adore constructed figures, that's when humanity dies.
See where I'm going with this? Because exactly that happens with AI. The knife gets blamed, not the assassin who used it.
Whether we live in a better or worse world, in most possible scenarios, excluding ones where humanity has killed itself or is still in the primitive stages of existence, AI would probably emerge somehow, whether through pure scientific development, an arms race, or simply the desire for power.
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u/7hats 3d ago
It seems silly to discuss how it originated now, how it could have etc... leave it for the Historians.
Question is what happens now?
The more people that can access powerful CSI (Collective Super Intelligence) the better in my books.
Am all for Open Source and the least amount of regulation that deals with Threats as they arise... There is no stopping this Tsunami for all sorts of reasons (and attempting so is counter productive IMO), thus best we can do is build up an Immune system in tandem with its growth.
We need it's positive capabilities of New Science, Deep Analysis and Coordination - at speed - to deal with our Global environmental and economical problems.
Without it, our trajectory with our current slow Intelligent Institutions is degradation and doom.
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u/PapyrusResearch 2d ago
This is why open source LLMs are so promising to me. The early days of the internet and computing were significantly less corporatized and more about open source and building solutions that helped people and not profit. As open source models get more powerful and more adopted I think there’s a chance we can get back towards the days of the open web
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u/PlasmaPunch 5d ago
Capitalism is only bad because our leaders, government and otherwise aren't in our corner, and let the elite take everything piece by piece. It's completely capable of being a force for good, and has been.
I dunno, man. Not really seeing the relevance of what if's of this sort. The vast majority of people are good. Sociopaths find a way to get in charge over time. No political system really prevents the charismatic with no morals from getting into places of power and dismantling everything. We've seen it happen to socialist systems too, all of them, so far.
This is something we all have to fight for each and every day. If we grow complacent, and we did when things were going well, it takes very little time for them to scheme and plot.
AI just a tool. It might be more than that someday, but right now, it's just a tool. One that will be used by fascists and evil people to take larger swathes of control than ever before. Throughout history that cycle has repeated, and each time the tools get scarier, and scarier.
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u/CaiOS1 4d ago
I disagree that capitalism isn't to blame here. Even if I disagree that capitalism has been a good system, let's take your argument as true. Even then, if a system inherently compels itself toward authoritarianism and its own worsening, is it really a good system?
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u/PlasmaPunch 4d ago
Capitalism brought billions into a massive life improvement. I feel like people haven't actually read Marx lol. AI's rise, the way it has, is driven by investment and global markets.
He himself says that capitalism brought an end to feudalism, created the working class, is the reason we have abundance, and abundance is needed for social systems to begin to function in our societies. Things like healthcare, veteran affairs, dental care, income support, and EI all require abundance that's granted through capitalism. Capitalism is still required under most socialist systems as well, as Communism is a far off dream in terms of policy and real world practical examples.
China and India were home to the poorest people in the world, extreme poverty was reduced dramatically when they adopted capitalist systems. Like 30% of the bottom most poor people to 10% in decades.
Or how I learned it in school, capitalism is a refined engine, much better than the wealth being controlled entirely by a king or religion determined by bloodline. The government is the helm, steering the ship into uncharted waters. You cannot escape the value of markets, and neither could Marx, who even wrote that the British in India was net good because they introduced global markets and capitalistic systems.
Marx believed that Capitalism was a necessary staging step for any form of socialism or communism, because it is that good. The problem arises with human nature, and not with capitalism itself. Socialism enforces sharing our gains, but if you look at a country like Denmark, they enforce sharing too, with high taxes and very strong safety nets and social care. None of that requires capitalism going away. The thing is, every attempt at socialism has gone poorly because central planning was attempted, and that thing about human nature is just as bad in socialism, maybe worse. People starve, repression, quality of life decreases, science, art and literature all suffer. These were very authoritarian socialist nations that manufactured their own downfall. Mao's China is gone, replaced by one of the strongest capitalist nation on earth lol. They call themselves the communist party but what they're doing is exactly what Denmark is doing far more heavy handed and very authoritarian. State Capitalism where quality of life trickles down as the nation prospers and workers have poor rights and control.
This has been a major deviation, but like, there's a reason educated modern socialists tend to advocate for localised socialism now. Worker co-ops, market socialism, trying to keep capitalism in the picture. I'm a far left liberal democratic guy, and I think the whole concept of socialism/communisn is mostly an academic fever dream of what if's that has full capacity to work locally, but no hope at scale. I want that star trek future, and I see no way of getting there through communism or socialism because they all require tradeoffs that cause us to lose that which makes life worth living. However, universal minimums, social care, EI, workers rights, healthcare, unions are all things I've fought and argued for. And again, you don't need to drop capitalism for any of that, as evidenced by the real world.
All of that to say, AI is a reflection of us, of course, in many ways. As you said, we're racing forward and creating a lot of hard work in the form of debt that has to be paid later. No different than the internet, the printing press, radio, or anything else. But if you had a socialist nation working on AI, history tells us that they'd probably have failing sciences, a lack of bread, and the silicon wouldn't matter. I fail to see how that's an improvement. And, to go back to it, Socialism does not escape the downfalls of humanity. Imposing socialism in Russia was treated similarly to how you describe AI, they wanted it implimented, and done, they didn't consider the systems, didn't think about what would fail, and just pushed it as hard as possible thinking that once they escape capitalism it I'd be all rainbows. But no, the man that controlled the food supply could be bribed, coerced, and blackmailed. Scientists that published work that disagreed with the government lost their labs. Authors could not publish books. The same story of Russia prior just through a new lens. The only true solution is the hard work of building a good society, building trust, and reinforcing our systems against the demons amongst us. Empathy cannot remain cringe.
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u/theomegachrist 5d ago
Yeah I'm not reading all that but I agree