I understand why people are exhausted by AI hype, and why those of us squarely in the corner of "human dignity uber alles" see AI doomerism as self-serving hype, but I really think people on the left broadly need to start thinking seriously about the possibiltiy of the hype being...true.
What I mean by "hype being true" is that the models actually are able to replace millions of workers - which is the core economic promise that tech oligarchs are making.
- via Chris Hayes
There's an ongoing discussion in the art world about how it is vulnerable to slop because so much "art" created under capitalist incentives is already slop. I think there's some of that when it comes to the question of AI job replacement too. Bullshit Jobs may be replaceable by AI. Not b/c AI is good, but because we have produced bad jobs.
In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber interviews many people who understand their job exists mainly to justify managers' power structure and t/f paperwork is basically invented for them to pointlessly do, when they get work at all. These jobs are likely very replaceable by AI because they aren't real jobs.
You can easily imagine a world where Bullshit Jobs are replaced by a bullshit AI budget as a signal of managerial power. But it doesn't address the reason those jobs actually exist & get filled: we live in a world where we must work to live and actual managerial usefulness is not well aligned w/power
In reality, replacing bullshit jobs with bullshit AI does not solve for anything and eventually the manager with a bullshit AI budget will be rendered useless to the manager above them, who realizes they can get more budget and power by firing a useless bullshit middle-manager.
None of this solves the underlying problem which is that we live in a system where we must be employed to survive; where slop jobs exist pre-AI because the system must render itself relevant; where we force people into doing shit work for no reason.
AI questions about copyright, art, slop, jobs, etc... but they're all the same question: capitalism is too broken to provide a stable platform for humanity. What is the alternative?
These are not separate issues. They are one issue: Why does the world work this way? Why is everything slop?
Capitalism is the problem. AI merely makes that problem more visible than it was before because now, instead of millions of areas and people where the market has fundamentally failed, there are now about a dozen products.
Capitalism will not provide the solution.
AI Slop == Alienation from labor == Bullshit Jobs == Copyright Impossible to Enforce == Bombing people for Oil == replacing vaccines with BS supplements == so on & so on.
They are all one problem. Capitalism has failed. We are living in it unraveling. Our lives sit in the gasp of its collapsed lung.
Nothing is slop, nothing is enshittified. Those are new words for old problems. It was always like this. It has been like this for 20 years, at least. We will live through it. The next generation may not. It is a moral imperative to fix it.
You can't slap a patch on it. It is too far gone. What's next?
I'm so tired of getting a new name for the same phenomenon every 3 to 5 years. The phenomenon is 'too big to fail', slop, bullshit, enshittification, regulatory arbitrage, gig economics, surveillance capitalism, etc... it's our economic system, its how we've decided to run the world. It's capitalism.
Join the DSA, it won't solve everything, but that's the thing, the problem is massive and we need every person working on it that we can. In every way we can approach it. Gotta start somewhere and at least this is a preexisting organization that recognizes the fundamental problem.
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