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Finally something that explicitly ties AI into the culture war: Why I HATE A.I. Art - by Vaush
I endorse pretty much all of the points he makes in this video. I do recommend watching the whole thing all the way through, if you have time.
I went into this curious to see exactly what types of arguments he would make, as I've been interested in the relationship between AI progress and the left/right divide. His arguments fall into roughly two groups.
First is the "material impact" arguments - that this will be bad for artists, that you're using their copyrighted work without their permission, that it's not fair to have a machine steal someone's personal style that they worked for years to develop, etc. I certainly feel the force of these arguments, but it's also easy for AI advocates to dismiss them with a simple "cry about it". Jobs getting displaced by technology is nothing new. We can't expect society to defend artists' jobs forever, if they are indeed capable of being easily automated. Critics of AI art need to provide more substantial arguments about why AI art is bad in itself, rather than simply pointing out that it's bad for artists' incomes. Which Vaush does make an attempt at.
The second group of arguments could perhaps be called "deontological arguments" as they go beyond the first-person experiential states of producers and consumers of AI art, and the direct material harm or benefit caused by AI. The main concern here is that we're headed for a future where all media and all human interaction is generated by AI simulations, which would be a hellish dystopia. We don't want things to just feel good - we want to know that there's another conscious entity on the other end of the line.
It's interesting to me how strongly attuned Vaush is to the "spiritual" dimension of this issue, which I would not have expected from an avowed leftist. It's clearly something that bothers him on an emotional level. He goes so far as to say:
and, what was the real money shot for me:
Now, on the one hand, "leftism" and "Marxism" are absolutely massive intellectual traditions with a lot of nuance and disagreement, and I certainly don't expect all leftists to hold the same views on everything. On the other hand, I really do think that what we're seeing now with AI content generation is a natural consequence of the leftist impulse, which has always been focused on the ceaseless improvement and elevation of man in his ascent towards godhood. What do you think "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is supposed to mean? It really does mean fully automated. If everyone is to be a god unto themselves, untrammeled by external constraints, then that also means they have the right to shirk human relationships and form relationships with their AI buddies instead (and also flood the universe with petabytes of AI-generated art). At some point, there seems to be a tension between progress on the one hand and traditional authenticity on the other.
It was especially amusing when he said:
I guess everyone becomes a reactionary at some point - the only thing that differs is how far you have to push them.
We really need fewer sweeping generalizations. Leftism is not transhumanism, that's just a theistic reactionary's cudgel to attack the Neo-Babel of social progress and attempts to «immanentize the eschaton». Marxism certainly isn't transhumanism, despite some vaguely congruent mutterings of Trotsky and weird blood transfusion experiments, which I believe have more to do with the ideology having taken root in Russia and consuming Russian Cosmism, its inherent pull to be used later as an extra carrot in the space race.
A joke not 10 years old.
My turn: what problem do you think «socially necessary labour time» is supposed to solve in the Marxist framework? It's supposed to protect rights of laborers (a perennial focus of leftist movements) against relative devaluing by automation, by denying legitimacy to the notion of market value, and by forcing society into the path where things that take little human labor to produce have little cost for humans either, and things that take no human labor at all are value-less. While we're at it, what is alienation that Vaush has mentioned? It's the concept that's meant to prevent human laborers from being reduced to tools – and eventually deemed obsolete.
Vaush is, contrary to your impression, staying true to the Orthodoxy, which was always meant to handle this failure mode.
A somewhat related comment from January, on the matter of /r/antiwork:
That's not only not a failure but the truest part of Marxism, which is of course not just a descriptive but primarily a prescriptive theory, conceived of to build a society that can survive alongside superhumanly productive economy (i.e. so productive that human labor cannot pay for itself). Moreover, Orthodox Marxists were always acutely aware that necessary advances will be forged by the engine of capitalism.
I'd go so far as to say that they rely on a near-inevitability, on a truism like «humans die» or «you get more of what you incentivize», whereas their opponents rely on blatantly dissimilar cases like industrialization, wishful thinking, discredited tabula rasa assumptions and inapplicable arguments like comparative advantage (that does not account for countless things, like common resource market and human inefficiency at utilizing resources). It is increasingly clear that market forces in technology make labor market largely, if not wholly obsolete. That not only can we make robots generally intelligent, cheap and nimble enough to automate most/all jobs currently manned by humans below ~95th percentile by IQ (and not in the business of selling their human body specifically), but that humans are not anywhere near flexible enough to learn qualitatively different tricks.
And that there won't be a compensating explosion in conveniently simple bullshit openings like «robo nanny consultant» or «pattern connoisseur» or whatever either, because there's no need for so many midwitted PMC parasites in a world of endlessly scalable knowledge.
It is the inevitable consequence of capitalism that humans increasingly need not apply (and that supply can easily outstrip demand limited by purchasing power of humans who need not apply). Antiwork is just a rejection of Landian/NRx accelerationism which resolves this conundrum with a simple, parsimonious and historically proven «let them freeloaders starve then», which, of course, is the unspoken instinct of every good Protestant, and especially a high-IQ one that works in STEM or finance and does not expect to starve anytime soon.
Certainly they're not identical, no. But, this book was published pretty recently:
Sounds like transhumanism to me. Marx speaks positively of the outcomes of increased automation in The Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse, saying that it will lead to
Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism offers an interesting perspective on this, tracing the intellectual heritage of Marxism from ancient esoteric traditions that taught of the inherent divinity and perfectibility of mankind and the necessity for man to aspire to godhood, down through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and ultimately to Marx himself and his faith in humanity's power to radically reshape the "natural" order. I don't know how you can deny that a belief in progress and a belief in the capacity of man's reason to reshape the world and overcome social problems are central to leftism, and I don't know how you can deny the affinity between those same principles and transhumanism.
As I know you are already aware, there are people who are opposed to the whole idea of humans transcending their biological limits - forget whether it's possible, they don't even view it as desirable! To such people, the difference between orthodox Marxism and your preferred brand of transhumanism looks like merely an internal squabble over implementation details, and perhaps also over the scope of the project.
It's a sufficiently generic concept that anything I said about Marx's motivations for developing the concept would just be speculation, absent a more explicit source that discusses the matter.
Alienation for Marx is a result of capitalist social relations, not automation qua automation.
Yes, absolutely. Capitalism was always understood to be a necessary stage of development, and that it would furnish the tools of its own destruction, at which point those tools would be appropriated for allegedly more pro-social ends.
Every capitalist in the world would be more than happy to embrace socialism in a post-scarcity world. There's no practical difference between prince and pauper in a world like that. I'm aggressively right-wing and if we were actually in Paradise I would not care.
Ascending past all restraint and limitation isn't left or right-wing. Whether you imagine it as an angelic idle life in Heaven, or uploading yourself to the Great Machine, or being cared for by robots in your eternal nursing home, everyone yearns to be free of the human condition. It's one of the few dreams I'd call universal.
Well...
Certainly I acknowledge that the vast majority of people, of any political persuasion, if asked if they would like to live in Paradise (whatever we ultimately mean by that term), would answer "yes". The main historical debate has been over whether such a condition was possible, and that debate has been quite vociferous. The most forceful exposition of the view that mankind is inherently flawed and incapable of transcending his limitations is of course found in Christianity. Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.
Even still, it cannot be called a universal dream. Orwell's Can Socialists Be Happy? provides some hints in this direction:
I don't think Nietzsche would have wanted to live in Paradise either. Although, in his typical style, he approaches the issue only obliquely; it's more of an ethos that has to be absorbed from reading his entire corpus, rather than an issue he tackles directly in any one place.
This technically violates the rule against consensus-building--"we know" is too strong. More subtly, I know "Christians" (in the sense that they identify with Christianity while doubting the metaphysics of it) who see the Kingdom of God as unattainable but worth striving for as an ideal, so you need to be careful about making assertions regarding what "we" know, as well as what the "Christian position" is.
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