"Someone once said it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism" - Frederic Jameson

The sooner the mainstream left and center-left abandons insitutional conservativism the better off we'll be in my opinion. 

This isn't to say we shouldn't conserve some things, but the left and center-left need to regain an imagination. 

So far it only seems like the far-left can imagine a new world, and most of that is just regurgitating 19th century Marxism at this point, which Marx wouldn't have wanted or Leninism in the case of the ML's, which also was largely insitutuonally conservative.

How exactly do I sound like I'm trolling?

I don't really lean left but it is wild to me that technology that has massive potential to shift the world away from capitalism and towards something better thanks to post-scarcity being reached is being developed right now and the typical response from the left is to downplay it which is getting more and more ridiculous every week at this point and/or outright oppose it and want it banned/destroyed instead of trying to steer the technology in a direction they'd prefer. That could go down as one of the biggest political blunders of all time if it keeps up.

There are some positive developments that might be considered a win-win situation between those wanting data centers and those who are opposed. Remember when Microsoft experimented with situating a data center in the ocean? That would eliminate any need for electricity and burning fossil fuels. Google has built a data center in Nevada that uses geothermal energy.

Here is a video on that:
https://youtube.com/shorts/9ltVH8RQYFk?is=NWwyBQWrQloraUi1

Things are definitely going to suck big time if this "A.I." garbage isn't reigned in and soon, but I doubt it will result in any kind of Terminator-esque scenario where the machines become sentient and try to wipe us out. The idea of sentient A.I. gone rogue is great fodder for dystopian sci-fi, but I really doubt it's even remotely plausible. The real harm is far more banal yet no less terrifying. The already-emerging impacts on culture, the economy, and the environment are horrible enough to justify banning the stuff. Humanity is absolutely not prepared for a post-labor society that starts to emerge while capitalism is still the dominant economic system globally (even in nominally "communist" countries these days, since except maybe North Korea they've effectively adopted market systems).

It's like how the real eco-villains aren't the Saturday morning caricatures seen in shows like Captain Planet. They're just guys in suits looking over quarterly earnings and deciding the best way to make the line go up. They aren't destroying the environment for shits & giggles. They're doing it because that's just the cost of doing business. Their entire business model is predicated on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, just like how the entire business model of the tobacco industry is predicated on getting as many people smoking as many cigarettes as possible.

Real evil is far more boring yet far more insidious than your typical comic book villain. Gordon Gekko was probably one of the more realistic villains in a film. He just wanted to make a lot of money. The incentives of the economic system in which he operated made it to where he acted in not just unethical but flat-out illegal means, and to where he just didn't give a shit that he did so, and he dragged others down with him, all because, in his own words, "Greed is good." And so it goes in real-life with the motley assortment of billionaires in the Fortune 500 list. They're not out to hurt us. They just when their actions do cause harm they do not and cannot care because of the incentives of capitalism.

And even when someone is initially well-meaning, the pursuit of wealth can still harm people, and leads people to continue doing that harmful thing. John Hammond from Jurassic Park comes to mind as a notable fictional example. He and his scientists discovered they could clone dinosaurs, and the first thing Hammond sought to do with it was create a zoo. He didn't see anything profound. He saw a business opportunity and could not wait to profit off of this new technology instead of using it to make the world a better place. Because of his hubris, he got several people killed. InGen kept pursuing his work and that line of business anyway for over 20 years, predictably resulting in even more deaths. In real life, some things were invented in good faith to solve an actual problem, but when that solution was discovered to have its own problems, harming or killing thousands, they preferred inaction because to change course would harm the bottom line. Tetraethyllead and chlorofluorocarbons come to mind. The manufacturers made those things to solve real issues (engine knocking for TEL, replacing toxic gases used as early refrigerants for CFCs), it was found out that their solutions had their own problems (lead poisoning; ozone depletion), and instead of immediately finding something to replace those things fought tooth and nail to avoid any further changes to their business model. They basically had to be forced to phase those things out by governments. Those phase-outs are among the biggest public health and environmental protection success stories in my lifetime, and show that government can work for the people. The only thing needed is public pressure and political will by elected officials.

If you think humanity is thinking about post-labor without also thinking about a post-capitalism world, well, that's like saying you can get a good-quality brand-new 4-bedroom house in Boca Raton for only $50,000. It just ain't happening. The businesses pushing for "A.I." and other novel forms of automation (like fully-automated restaurants and retail stores) aren't concerned about the long-term consequences of a society where increasingly large portions of the population are permanently unemployable. What's going to happen when unemployment permanently stays over 10%? 20%? 50%? Who's going to take care of those people? "Oh, we'll just have a UBI!" Well, who's going to pay for it? The tax burden needed to finance a system where large swathes of the population are totally dependent on government money will have to fall increasingly on the wealthy people who enabled permanent mass unemployment in the first place. You really think they're going to agree to such a thing after spending decades successfully convincing governments around the world (esp. the U.S., where most of these countries are headquartered) to continually slash their taxes? This is to say nothing of the environmental impact of data centers, and the inflationary pressures they have on certain consumer goods.

The capitalist class, the people who own the means of production, are not going to do anything to abolish the very system that made them wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. In the process of accumulating their wealth, they often times took a lot of shortcuts and did a lot of exploitation, making bank on the suffering of others. They frequently got a big leg up from the state in the form of bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation, and the occasional CIA-backed coup of a non-compliant foreign government ("socialism for me, but not for thee" might as well be the motto of Corporate America). In the 19th & early 20th centuries it was the banana republics, abusive company towns that paid their employees in scrip ("St. Peter, don't you call me because I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."), horrifically unsafe working conditions, and literal murder of employees for daring to go on strike. Today it's fossil fuel companies ignoring the negative externalities of their products or tech giants unleashing and forcing upon everyone possibly one of the most existentially dangerous technologies since the invention of the atom bomb.

The amount of misery inflicted by the insatiable greed of wealthy business owners is incalculable. There just seems to be something about becoming ultra-wealthy that turns people into sociopaths. They seem to view the rest of humanity as disposable, expendable cogs in a big money-printing machine, and now they're trying to find ways of making those cogs unnecessary in the first place by automating as much as possible. They've always viewed every employee as a drain on the bottom line, and if they could find a way to not have any employees, they'd do it, damn the consequences to society and its future, because there's profit to be made this fiscal year. They aren't in the business of being "job creators." They're in the business of making the line go up. They've always looked for way to cut overhead. Layoffs. Slashing wages & benefits. Offshoring. The aforementioned company towns where workers weren't even paid actual money. Use of literal slave labor. And now various forms of automation that threaten to make most of humanity obsolete. Big Tech is constantly trying to find ways of inventing something to allow corporations around the world to at least implicitly say "We never wanted you in the first place. We hired you because we needed you, but now we don't need you or anyone else at all."

Before "A.I." hit, people were hopefully that automation might finally free us of the drudgery of most everyday grunt work, giving us more free time to do the jobs we actually want to do rather than the ones we need to do just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. But one of the first things Silicon Valley did was create this "A.I." garbage, showing that even the jobs that people actually wanted to do aren't safe. Because the arts & entertainment have been fully commodified by the capitalist mode of production, there's probably plenty of execs in the film, TV, music, video game, and literature industries looking for ways to make "actor," "artist," "costume designer," "prop maker," "writer," "programmer," and all the various titles you see in the credits of every creative work to no longer be actual jobs people are paid money for. And Big Tech is coming for a bunch of other jobs, too, and lots of businesses will be glad to avail themselves of the latest job-destroying tech. They'll pat themselves on the back for being geniuses for cutting nearly all of their overhead, all while society collapses around them because we haven't moved past the capitalist mode of productions. Meanwhile, politicians and frauds will continue to produce fake bullshit with this "A.I." slop, because it vastly streamlines the process of creating propaganda and altering historical records (Stalin would cream his pants if he could see what authoritarian politicians are doing with "A.I."), and that's to say nothing of the other harms this technology can wreak upon us.

Humans are notoriously poor long-term planners, and nowhere is that more obvious than in corporate capitalism, where the only thing that matters is that this fiscal quarter is bigger than the last, and that everything gives as much ROI as quickly as possible. All other considerations are secondary. The rest of us are expendable in the face of the capitalists' overriding need to see the line go up. It's like they have this attitude of "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, and if there's no bridge to cross because we burned it down, oh well. Tough shit. I'll either be dead of old age or can weather the collapse in my fully-automated billionaire bunker. But right now there's money to be made and the line will go up come hell or high water."

But you can only keep kicking people to the curb and treating the rest of society like shit under the attitude of "not my problem" for so long before it does in fact become your problem. That's the problem with any sort of unsustainable system. You can only kick the can down the road so far before you run into a dead end, and then everybody's wondering "Well, now what?" even though they were warned years if not decades earlier of the consequences, just like with climate change.

If we keep going down this path with this new technological terror Silicon Valley unleashed on us and is trying to force down our throats, this ain't going to end up like the "fully-automated space communism" of Star Trek. As long as capitalists and authoritarian governments have this tech at their disposal, the only outcome is dystopia, not utopia. Capitalism, at least in the form it exists in presently, must die for humanity to live. Small mom & pop businesses are fine, and what Smith had in mind when he wrote Wealth of Nations 250 years ago. They typically lack the same "growth at any cost" mindset of a publicly-traded corporation. Think of a local eatery or hair salon or hardware store that's been continually running the same singular location for decades, making good money with reliable clientele because the incentives are a bit different when your main source of accountability is the community, i.e., the owner and his customers having to look each other in the eye when doing business. It's a lot different than the owner being sequestered away in an executive suite and feeling his only accountability is towards the shareholders.

TL;DR: Fuck "A.I." It should be banned by law, the data centers torn down, and something useful like affordable housing or public parks put in their place, or just let nature reclaim the lot. I don't trust the people hawking this tech any further than I can throw them.

You sound like you're trolling by regurgitating what basically says "Automation is the future but that's ok, so just accept that you'll be unemployed, homeless and useless while robots take all the jobs.", while downplaying the very serious environmental and economic consequences of AI, just to smugly tout your misplaced optimism as the truth.

Mankind can never exist with robots leaving them nothing to do. You sound like you actually want us to end up immobile and helpless like the humans in WALL-E, and that's disturbing.

Now as advised to me, I'm no longer going to speak with someone who's fine being unemployed and homeless in the coming age of robots.

Plutocracy is basically Feudalism on a much bigger scale, we haven't moved on from Ceasar's divide and rule either. We only keep getting more efficient at it and AI will be the ultimate tool to envision Orwell's 1984. It's laughable to think mega AI corporations would be interested in providing for the plebs.

I consider myself to be on the far-left, and I'm simultaneously baffled like you on this, but also not very surprised that the modern so-called left can't imagine a post-capitalist world. Something broke when the social-liberal (keynesian) and democratic socialist coalition didn't bring about socialism in the post-war era. Mainstream leftists stopped imagining a better world, and basically regressed into a conservative movement trying to preserve the gains won during that era and attempting to use the same socio-political technologies developed during that era. That is why the right has been winning pretty much everywhere on political-economy (not culture) since the 1970's - 1980's (depending on the country.) 

You see it in this thread. People imagine somehow the capitalist-controlled state will ban a wide-set of technologies (something that has never really been done in history) called "AI" but can't imagine the working class displacing said capitalist state. You see it in the workerist mindset of the posters, where a post-wage labor political-economy can't be imagined or is considered a bad thing because "people need routines." 

There is a reason why r/anti-work started as a post-leftist space and not a leftist one (although it has been captured by self-identified "leftists", and isn't about anti-work anymore.) 

Like, you have people unironically defending intellectual property "rights" and calling themselves leftists in the last half-decade. 

Capitalism isn't just the multi-national corporations. It is also the state which creates the legal and ethical frameworks which perpetuate their existence and dominance. It is intellectual property, and exclusionary real property laws. It is naval forces that keep global markets open, and secret police that depose divergent polities. It's the centrally controlled monetary and fiscal systems. It's not just authoritarian states that do this either. Almost every European state, as an example, has legal frameworks that perpetuate and depend upon the capitalist system. It's a fundamental characteristic of the state, and you can't disentangle the two. That's why your second paragraph is even less likely to happen than capitalism being displaced (an already nearly unexpected event.) States have as much invested in AI and data-centers as the large multi-nationals in the same way 19th century states had as much invested in railroads and factories as the robber barons. The idea that the proletariat could capture the state through their enfranchisement and bring about socialism/post-capitalism failed its test in the 20th century, when almost all of the gains of the early half of that century were reversed in the second half in most countries. 

I'll send a message responding to this in a bit.

You realize that local AI models exist right? The technology is a much broader subject than just what big AI companies are doing. Also it's a silly statement since technological advancement improved living standards drastically the previous century so AI and robotics doing the same in this one is expected. For example robots helping care for the elderly and disabled is a huge positive development that's gonna happen in the coming decades.

The bold part is one of the more absurd aspects of this luddite hysteria. I have a fairly strong libertarian leaning so am staunchly opposed to stuff like copyright and the left generally being against it is something I agreed with them on but AI has polarized a lot of them into acting like Disney lawyers which is a real shame.  Pro technological development and anti-copyright is a combination that should be a lot more popular than it is but is politically homeless right now.

Heck, even without talking about company-trained local models, many relatively small institutions can train or fine-tune large-ish video-language-reasoning models. The IT department for the city of Rio De Janeiro distilled their own LLM recently, for example. That's an entity with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, not billions. 

Video-Language Models are famously hard to build a moat around. That's one of the risks to the profitability of the SOTA AI model-development companies, and why they have pivoted toward selling the services around the models as their competitive edge rather than the models themselves. 

If I were to guess, AI model providers are going to be at-cost/near-cost utility companies in the next decade, akin to public ISPs, and similar to the original vision of Open AI of a "capped profit" model. They'll sustain their revenue from larger companies that depend on their existence as complements, with maybe some advertisements as a revenue diversifier, and of course use-fees. The hardware-side of things will become more efficient with ASICs, photonics, etc. More public institutions, like the Rio De Janeiro example, but also public labs and universities, will also expand. 

Like with most new technologies, costs remain high with the initial discovery, and then come down rapidly. I think many people are suspicious because social media organizations and search engines concentrated because the network effects incentivized that, but DL models don't have that same dynamic. They don't become more valuable as their user-base expands.