Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination

tirumaraiselvan

Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.

contubernio

AI would have gotten to the point more quickly.

blfr

Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit. Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line. Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill. So far, capitalism just can't stop winning.

markus_zhang

This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there. I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.

k__

We could have so much free time if the gains from all the automation were evenly distributed.

elendilm

The author is obviously non-technical and hence gullible as she doesn't understand the nuances of the underlying technology. Sadly, she fell victim to modern-day tech paranoia and bought into the apocalyptic fear mongering sold by those trying to stay afloat in the face of upward cost spirals unlike any we have ever seen. The author's fear of being labeled as AI merely for using em-dashes is irrational. Popular or not, good content will always be appreciated by those with honest integrity.

andai

How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]: >One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1] I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un... [2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

ai-x

Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy. And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.

chilmers

This article is proof you don't need to use or like AI to be a victim of deep AI psychosis.

baranul

> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race. > No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free. > needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved. > humanity may have to die Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.

seydor

chatgpt, summarize this drivel

barrenko

I love that theory or a post somewhere to the tune that capitalism is the way AI is assembling itself from the future.

spwa4

I thought the earth becoming unlivable due to climate change was capitalism's final destination? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitali... Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people , which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS! (is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?) But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!

cbeach

I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI. Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology. Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI? At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.

hotelsacher

> the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us. At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right. After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.

siavosh

“Cyclopes branches at the neck into several squabbling bodies that give the impression they don’t get along, but … they clearly do” Such a great visual metaphor.

pigpop

It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's

gyanchawdhary

Im Indian and the author is a well known Indian communist, mostly known for winning the Booker prize and forever trying to export the Berkeley style socialism in India (and failed miserably) Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …

SubiculumCode

Well, it's not about capitalism anymore because the West will be damned if they'd let a Chinese AI destroy the world first, and so too would the Chinese be damned if they'd let the West's AI have that sole honor. ...and so everyone must stay in the race. Solving that geopolitical conundrum is not optional.

bitwize

There's just one problem: the point of capitalism is to make a profit. AI is being built by an SV cult (or a confluence of several such cults) who want to build the fucking Omnissiah, with little regard for profitability. When the investors start demanding a return, they reason, they'll just ask the Omnissiah how to make money.