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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/
Pull quotes:
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
It will be very interesting to see if AI will lead to any realignment of the existing political blocs.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that leftists will be more hesitant about AI, because it's going to threaten their types of jobs first, and rightists will be more optimistic about AI, because they want to own the libs. But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.
Although I'm still prone to engaging in such discussions myself, I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right". I now view "left" and "right" as two arbitrary designators for two political factions that just so happen to contingently exist in the modern West, much like the terms "Tory" or "Whig". Leftism is just whatever leftists say it is. Call it "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the PMC", whatever you want to call it - it's that thing. The content of the ideology itself can be freely changed based on political expediencies. If rightists take up the cause of the working class, then that is a rightist position, by definition.
"Preacher" seems likely to me to be one of the most resilient jobs against AI. It's a job that's explicitly religious, which means there are no issues with declaring by fiat that a living, breathing human is meaningfully "better" than an AI that could perform all the same tasks in all the same ways. In contrast to secular jobs, where if an AI could do all the same tasks as a living, breathing human, then that human is just shit out of luck.
I do wonder about how, if at all, AI will realign political blocs. I think that conventional wisdom has some truth because of that jobs issue, and the robotics tech to replace blue collar work is less far along than the AI tech to replace white collar work. That said, improving AI will surely be used to accelerate the development of robotics tech, and so that difference might not be a difference very soon.
I feel like I see a sort of alignment developing in the AI image generation space right now, though, with the biggest pushback against stuff like Stable Diffusion coming from people who are very firmly on the left "woke" side. I think this could largely be historical accident, due to most small-time illustrators who are most threatened by the tech being on that side, rather than an issue of ideology. After all, there are leftist/progressive reasons to be in favor of the tools, such as giving greater access to the least well-off and capable to create high quality illustrations. However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing; I'm guessing it's because tech adoption and illustration both tend to have more left-wing people. It's still very early times - Stable Diffusion was released publicly only 8 months ago - so there are a lot of possible ways things could go. I imagine just one politician from one party coming out with one piece of legislation in relation to this tech could have very large effects downstream.
Well, some of the earliest adopters have been 4chan's /g/ and I think their Stable Diffusion thread is still one of the more popular communities. 4chan posters may not qualify as right-wing per-se, but they do tend to be anti-SJW. The developer for Automatic1111, by far the most popular UI, attracted some controversy a couple months ago when people discovered his Rimworld mods included one mocking the George Floyd riots and others like White Only/Yellow Only/Black Only. And one of the up-and-coming UIs is the node-based ComfyUI, which is made by a /g/ poster.
Channers are South Park republicans. They only align with the right as long as it’s contrarian to do so.
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