A Response to Technological Futures

The open letter to which this post is a reply

I found myself agreeing with much of the PERMACOMPUTER letter, though I can't sign it because I do not agree with the first sentence of the first of the conclusions at the end of the letter. I think this may point to a slight ideological difference between myself and the letter's authors, which has prompted me to outline my own views here in response.

In my opinion, what this letter points to and describes is the dysfunction of capitalism. The technique of generative modeling is largely a threat because it imperils the livelihoods of millions of people, who still need to work in order to live decent lives.¹ These millions still need to work in order to live decent lives because capitalism requires the imposition of artificial scarcity, to the benefit of the rentier class. There can be no capitalism, no rentiers, without the enclosure of the commons, after all.²

In a properly socialist world, the benefits of automation would accrue to all toward the goal of universal emancipation from labor. This is the fundamental difference, in my opinion, between a world of technological post-scarcity and technological neo-feudalism. The project here, in my opinion, should not be to avoid the use of particular technologies because they promise to wreak havoc in exploitative capitalist contexts, but to emancipate those technologies from those exploitative capitalist contexts. So while I sympathize with much of the letter, I think it's foolish to swear off a technique, especially one which could so greatly reduce the need for labor in so many contexts.

The genie will not go back into the bottle, so to speak, and swearing off a force amplifier will not benefit those of us who wish to build a better future. Rather than swearing off this technology wholesale, I propose it would be better to create a cooperatively managed, collectively owned alternative, shared with the like-minded and closed-off from the enclosers. This would at least allow those of us with reservations about further empowering the neo-feudal capital class to remain reasonably competitive with those who do not have such reservations. Ideally it would go further than that and serve as another point of support in the creation of an anti-capitalist or socialist economy.

Toward such a project I would be willing to offer some technological assistance. Machine learning is not my area of expertise, and I'm a fairly average programmer, but I have some time to volunteer and a few terabytes of free hard drive space to give toward the cause.

(To be clear, I do think that individually-oriented, human-scale technology will be a good and necessary piece of the future I'd like to help build, but, at the risk of belaboring my point, I think we will also need larger-scale, collectively-managed pieces if we are to have an effective anti-capitalist movement.)

Footnotes

¹ There is an argument that technology creates as many jobs as it destroys. This is not quite right, in my opinion. When a technology is adopted by industry, it is generally because it allows for greater profitability. A technology that decreases profitability will not be adopted unless political means are pursued to make not adopting the technology less profitable. Increased profit margins, aside from those obtained through political means, come from a higher ratio of output to input. This can be the result of more efficient use of material inputs, in which case labor is largely unaffected, or more efficient use of labor inputs. In the case of more efficient use of labor inputs, the amount of capital being spent on labor must necessarily be reduced. I.e., there must be either fewer jobs as a result, or the jobs must be lower paid. Demand may increase alongside this, compensating for the efficiency gains and potentially driving overall job growth, but if demand does not increase (as it must eventually do, if we are to make do on our solitary, finite planet), then job loss is the result. This is always the case. The only solution to the problem implied by this dynamic, the only way to avoid the creation of a neo-feudalist society, is to provide for the basic needs of all without reservation so that the gradual extinction of labor demand does not produce inequity, and the attendant atrocities, of a kind we can hardly now imagine.

The current crop of generative AI cannot do whole jobs on its own, but it certainly does improve labor efficiency. In a capitalism-dominant context, this is to labor's detriment.

² This enclosure is what ultimately drives the e-waste the authors rightly bemoan. It is why we find ourselves needing to buy new hardware in order to run software over which we have no ownership or control in order to flip bits in a computer somewhere. Open software and open protocols would make it easier to write alternative, low-glamour clients for the purpose of extending the lives of our devices. Open hardware would mean being able to more easily repair our own devices. But this would make enclosure more difficult, thereby also impeding rent-seeking. These inefficiencies of capitalism are features, not bugs, where the capital class are concerned.