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A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
I'll actually give a limited defense of "What's your job on the leftist commune?"
I don't think the people engaging in that thread understand themselves to be sincerely laying out a plan for a total society. On the contrary, the idea that it's a commune probably suggests that it's a small, utopian community within a larger implicitly capitalist society, if anybody is even thinking that far ahead. But I don't think they are, because "what's your job on the leftist commune?" is not a question about politics at all.
What the question is actually asking is, "What would you do if you didn't have to work?", or perhaps "How would you want to spend your life if you didn't have to participate in a capitalist economy?" The details of how the commune works are beside the point. If you didn't have to do anything you don't want to - how then would you want to contribute to society?
It's a utopian fantasy, and I think there's actually a place for utopian fantasy thought experiments. Throw realism out the window for a minute and - what would you like to do? Then once you've reflected on that a bit, take the insights you find from the process and bring them back to the grubby real world of toil and compromise.
The answers people give are cringeworthy, but all fantasies tend to sound cringeworthy when you voice them out loud, and I'd defend this kind of fantasy as a reasonable thing for people of any political orientation to do. Maybe it's a hippie commune. Maybe it's a trad farming community. Maybe it's on a Culture orbital. Maybe it's a royal palace, or maybe it's being an ascended digital being with god-like power. It doesn't matter. But I think that the job on the leftist commune is basically the same thing as, say, Bostrom's Deep Utopia. It's immature but perhaps useful - and if this makes me think more of random Twitter leftists and less of Nick Bostrom, then that's all properly balanced.
It is political at least in the sense that such fantasies are the way any such system is marketed to the general public. People don’t buy systems, he’ll, they rarely buy products, instead they buy images of a better future. People don’t like chatbots just because they’re useful (I don’t think they at present are doing anything that a well thought out google search couldn’t do) but because AI represents a fantasy replete with images of a future society without scarcity and where work is obsolete. You imagine yourself a “winner” in this future, so it means a life of luxury and leisure. The reality is probably not so good, as humanity is unlikely to distribute goods to people who do nothing to earn them. We rarely did so, and when we did it tended to be meager goods and cause problems.
The problem with such utopian fiction is that as marketing for a new system, they encourage that system when people believe it, and thus they fight to bring it about. Too late they realize that reality is nothing like the fantasy. The rich white women who overthrew Patriarchy in the 1969s and 1970s imagined themselves in executive suites making easy decisions, they to some extent still think it possible. They never imagined they’d have to do ordinary work and keep house on top of it. They never imagined that having strangers raise the vast majority of children via daycare would cause social problems while eating 3/4 of her paycheck. The greens are in a similar path. They imagine a modern industrial lifestyle with green-branded versions of things they already have. To actually combat climate change and reduce carbon to the degree they think has to be done would require a massive downgrade in lifestyle. You probably won’t own many things, you’ll live in a two bedroom apartment, where you won’t have much in the way of personal possessions and privacy is a luxury. Your food will be very much like what it was in 1900– common foods, only what grows locally, and probably much more expensive than what it is now. Clothing likewise will be much more utilitarian and expensive and you won’t own that many, so they won’t be fashionable or change all that much. You will be limited in travel— you won’t own a personal vehicle, and as far as vacation, you’ll be stuck pretty local maybe camping near your home city, but certainly not internationally unless you’re filthy rich or live within an easy distance from a border. But marketing hides this, until after the work of tearing down the old system and replacing it is done. Once the system is built people wake up from the fantasy only to discover the reality is not remotely what they were sold.
Beware people selling fantasies.
C'mon dude. That "well thought out" bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting. All, or at least most, of the knowledge a doctor possesses is 'out there' somewhere in the vast expanse of the internet, and probably indexed on Google too. I would suggest not trying to replace doctors with Google searches or WebMD, even if doctors use Google and WebMD themselves. Knowing what to ask and how to ask it, alongside weighing it all? That's what you pay us for. I am more than happy to concede that LLMs are a far more existential threat to the profession than Google.
Besides. Google search can't write a poem, generate a picture in the Ghibly style or write your code for you. And it sucks more than it ever has, both due to SEO and Google's own enshittification. Google has given up and begun to use LLMs to solve the problem in search. So, in a way, you're stating that LLMs are only as capable as LLMs.
Hang on again. The people who floated the possibility of AI utopia are, to a first approximation, the same people who raised severe concerns about the risk of extinction or permanent disempowerment courtesy of the same. Who do you think came up with the whole paper-clip maximizer idea, or even the concept of a p(doom)?
More importantly, AI has the possibility of making us all obsolete. Elon Musk or Buffet too, in that their intellectual output becomes strictly redundant. The possess far more power, courtesy of owning stock in the companies working away at creating Machine Gods, but there's no qualitative difference here.
The better frame is to imagine some idly rich petrostate, where everyone, from king to sheikh to prole, all lives off the largesse of the land. None of the citizens need to work, because
AIforeign workers do all the actual labor.We have some degree of redistribution in most countries today, for people who for noble or ignoble reasons, can't work on the free market. Eventually, that will be everyone.
Poser spotted.
I hate you guys so much -_-
We love you though.
Help mommy, the weebs are grooming me :o
(Love you too)
From falling for bipolar gf's to becoming one... I guess they really were right about staring into the abyss, huh?
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