"We believe that AI’s emergence shows the potential for state capacity to be oriented toward a different mission that centers the ambitious creation of socially useful green infrastructure like clean energy, healthy schools, libraries, social housing, and public transit."
The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive, technologically revolutionary, and disruptive.
The failure here is that the technological revolutions since should have been a wake-up call for the progressive/liberal/left leaning politics to update priors, but instead there's a conservatism that has ingrained itself as a reaction to the technological revolutions since. The left leaning politics of today remains the same politics of the 19th and 20th century with the same rhetoric and discourse. It's frozen in time, and wants to conserve the politics of that era.
What would a left liberal politics look like if it were updated with the technological fundamentals of today?
> "The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive.."
Subversive to what? A winner-take-all, might-makes-right feudal mindset?
It was subversive to the ruling class, and the politics of that time. Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before. Thereby leveling the playing field.
A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all.
Nationalizing or demanding a democratized project for frontier level intelligence that's easily accessible to all Americans, for example might be an idea.
This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation.
"Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before"
This had more to do with giving people knowledge and was very inexpensive. We now have the Internet, which allows for the masses to meet, protest, and be subversive.
The only thing threatening our freedoms is Left-leaning politics that have already taken over countries like the UK. I've been following left-leaning politics my whole life. It always starts out wanting freedoms for all. When they actually get power, step 1 is finding ways to censor dissenting viewpoints.
"A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all."
This involves taking from the people that are providing these resources and giving it to the masses, by force (called the government). I don't really see how they are the same.
"This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation."
I can get access to the near-latest LLMs for less than $100/month. Everyone I know is already using some form of LLM at work or has access to it. I'm unsure what your proposal will solve, when it's already so accessible.
A very small percentage of people have the knowledge or desire to use agentic AI.
So you think a philosophy needs to welcome all change in order to be coherent, and that there's an inconsistency to promoting things you believe are positive while opposing things you believe are negative?
It is a pretty unlikely proposition that AI progress will be a net negative, especially over the long term. There is no great technology in the history of mankind that was a net negative. Even for the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power, the pros still far outweight the cons. Why should AI be different?
Well... No. I'm saying that's generally the position of conservatism/right wing/authoritarian politics.
A left leaning politics does not just address the change, or accept change as is, but fundamentally invents the change. It is the revolutionary movement that leverage modernity, that is to say newness, your scientific revolutions, your enlightenment ideals, etc. to create new politics. Politics that are emancipatory.
The left is supposed to be a politics of historical invention. Using modernity to create new institutions, new rights, new publics, and new forms of collective life. Contemporary American left-liberal politics has become largely defensive and curatorial instead.
In other words the left generally invents the future, and dictates the changes in politics, that's what makes it 'progressive', that's why it's against reactionary politics.
So I'm saying the left leaning politics of today has fallen prey to closed, diminutive, reactionary politics, and there is new real new left politics that's inventing anything. At least not in America.
There was a glimmer with early technology, but the left rejected that politics in favor for stale institutionalism (the same ones from the 19th and 20th century), and ceded that technological ground to techno-fascists/rightwing/authoritarian/etc.etc. politics.
Left-leaning politics is not at all like early 1900eds left-leaning politics.
Left-leaning politics has moved to very mild, not-even-social-democracy policies, taxation of wage income, a decreased focus on capital owners.
Left-leaning politics has thus been transformed beyond belief and has very little to do with what it used to. Most politicians have no idea about physical reality, which is the ultimate source of technology, but live sometimes in a world of administration, sometimes in a world of laws and sometimes in a world of politics only.
Left-liberals don't exist. Liberalism is a right-wing ideology: free trade, laissez-faire.
So I don't understand at all what you mean. What are the SocDems who have gone from being SocDems to not knowing what social democracy is and who now think about things like welfare and administrative stuff and living in a world of compromises attached to?
I can't see that they're attached to anything, and I think I despise them for it. At least someone who looks back to the past can look at it and critique it and see what ideas were valuable, what the real goals were, that led to different positive achievements.
The economics and politics remain the same. Do we want to allow massive wealth disparity and fascist policies to prevail, while social safety nets and civil rights are dismantled? Technology doesn't change that.
If the progressives and liberals are arguing that there is no longer any change in politics, then I think perhaps you've become conservatives/reactionary.
There is a somewhat of organic path to it. Keeping the feelings of optimism or pessimism aside, destruction is a part of any cycle. The good thing is, there is this inherent self sustaining nature of the species and it would use the second opportunity better after such an event.
1. Containment requires realtime adjustments to control fields which benefit from very powerful specialized machine learning models.
2. Designs require advanced simulations which benefit from AI both in building the simulations and running them.
3. Material science benefits from models learning how particles interact and materials behave in certain conditions so we can predict which materials are worth producing.
These are odd the top of my head and I'm not a fusion physicist. There's probably a lot more examples.
And it's not the only thing being prioritized over people and planet, although it's related to ongoing promotion of fossil fuels and wars, along with increased political propaganda.
The federal government believes that the US will be locked out of the future forever if we are not first, or at least at parity, on AI with adversaries. They believe it is not a normal technology, but a singularly important one which will define national capacity.
The federal government believes that if China achieves AI dominance and we are not competitive on either the industrial or cognitive stacks, the people and planet will be at the whim of China and will not do better anyway (and come on — look at how China's fishing fleets treat the parts of the world they have unrestricted access to).
You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis.
I prefer to think that all compute Open AI has access too was actually given to Altman by Santa because he was once a good boy. "You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis."
Do you see how putting "it's a perfectly valid thesis" at the end of any completely unsupported claim doesn't actually make it any more credible?
This is a narrative framing from the tech companies who started and continue the AI race. The current administration is following this framing because the tech billionaires helped them get elected, so they are getting their pay back. It's crony capitalism.
I do not work at an AI company. If you gave me a magic button, I would press it to halt all frontier AI development globally.
But, I do not have that button, and I believe the thesis that for the US to thrive, or even survive, we have to win at AI. So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.
> So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.
In other words "If others give me exactly what I want, without me making any effort for it, I will stop doing this thing I regret having to do". Someone might object that it's possible, achievable, and useful to produce partial success on the road to a comprehensive solution. Still others think it's best to not have a ceasefire while you negotiate the peace.
"We believe that AI’s emergence shows the potential for state capacity to be oriented toward a different mission that centers the ambitious creation of socially useful green infrastructure like clean energy, healthy schools, libraries, social housing, and public transit."
The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive, technologically revolutionary, and disruptive.
The failure here is that the technological revolutions since should have been a wake-up call for the progressive/liberal/left leaning politics to update priors, but instead there's a conservatism that has ingrained itself as a reaction to the technological revolutions since. The left leaning politics of today remains the same politics of the 19th and 20th century with the same rhetoric and discourse. It's frozen in time, and wants to conserve the politics of that era.
What would a left liberal politics look like if it were updated with the technological fundamentals of today?
> "The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive.."
Subversive to what? A winner-take-all, might-makes-right feudal mindset?
It was subversive to the ruling class, and the politics of that time. Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before. Thereby leveling the playing field.
A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all.
Nationalizing or demanding a democratized project for frontier level intelligence that's easily accessible to all Americans, for example might be an idea.
This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation.
"Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before"
This had more to do with giving people knowledge and was very inexpensive. We now have the Internet, which allows for the masses to meet, protest, and be subversive.
The only thing threatening our freedoms is Left-leaning politics that have already taken over countries like the UK. I've been following left-leaning politics my whole life. It always starts out wanting freedoms for all. When they actually get power, step 1 is finding ways to censor dissenting viewpoints.
"A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all."
This involves taking from the people that are providing these resources and giving it to the masses, by force (called the government). I don't really see how they are the same.
"This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation."
I can get access to the near-latest LLMs for less than $100/month. Everyone I know is already using some form of LLM at work or has access to it. I'm unsure what your proposal will solve, when it's already so accessible.
A very small percentage of people have the knowledge or desire to use agentic AI.
This sounds like a solution in need of a problem.
So you think a philosophy needs to welcome all change in order to be coherent, and that there's an inconsistency to promoting things you believe are positive while opposing things you believe are negative?
It is a pretty unlikely proposition that AI progress will be a net negative, especially over the long term. There is no great technology in the history of mankind that was a net negative. Even for the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power, the pros still far outweight the cons. Why should AI be different?
Well... No. I'm saying that's generally the position of conservatism/right wing/authoritarian politics.
A left leaning politics does not just address the change, or accept change as is, but fundamentally invents the change. It is the revolutionary movement that leverage modernity, that is to say newness, your scientific revolutions, your enlightenment ideals, etc. to create new politics. Politics that are emancipatory.
The left is supposed to be a politics of historical invention. Using modernity to create new institutions, new rights, new publics, and new forms of collective life. Contemporary American left-liberal politics has become largely defensive and curatorial instead.
In other words the left generally invents the future, and dictates the changes in politics, that's what makes it 'progressive', that's why it's against reactionary politics.
So I'm saying the left leaning politics of today has fallen prey to closed, diminutive, reactionary politics, and there is new real new left politics that's inventing anything. At least not in America.
There was a glimmer with early technology, but the left rejected that politics in favor for stale institutionalism (the same ones from the 19th and 20th century), and ceded that technological ground to techno-fascists/rightwing/authoritarian/etc.etc. politics.
Left-leaning politics is not at all like early 1900eds left-leaning politics.
Left-leaning politics has moved to very mild, not-even-social-democracy policies, taxation of wage income, a decreased focus on capital owners.
Left-leaning politics has thus been transformed beyond belief and has very little to do with what it used to. Most politicians have no idea about physical reality, which is the ultimate source of technology, but live sometimes in a world of administration, sometimes in a world of laws and sometimes in a world of politics only.
Left-liberals don't exist. Liberalism is a right-wing ideology: free trade, laissez-faire.
So I don't understand at all what you mean. What are the SocDems who have gone from being SocDems to not knowing what social democracy is and who now think about things like welfare and administrative stuff and living in a world of compromises attached to?
I can't see that they're attached to anything, and I think I despise them for it. At least someone who looks back to the past can look at it and critique it and see what ideas were valuable, what the real goals were, that led to different positive achievements.
The economics and politics remain the same. Do we want to allow massive wealth disparity and fascist policies to prevail, while social safety nets and civil rights are dismantled? Technology doesn't change that.
If the progressives and liberals are arguing that there is no longer any change in politics, then I think perhaps you've become conservatives/reactionary.
The optimist in me sees AI as a path to fusion thus having the energy to undo at least some of the damage done via co2 sequestration etc.
The pessimist in me sees every other outcome
There is a somewhat of organic path to it. Keeping the feelings of optimism or pessimism aside, destruction is a part of any cycle. The good thing is, there is this inherent self sustaining nature of the species and it would use the second opportunity better after such an event.
How exactly is AI a "path to fusion"?
1. Containment requires realtime adjustments to control fields which benefit from very powerful specialized machine learning models.
2. Designs require advanced simulations which benefit from AI both in building the simulations and running them.
3. Material science benefits from models learning how particles interact and materials behave in certain conditions so we can predict which materials are worth producing.
These are odd the top of my head and I'm not a fusion physicist. There's probably a lot more examples.
Advanced AI could be very useful for science and engineering tasks. AI-accelerated fusion R&D will achieve success sooner than without AI.
And it's not the only thing being prioritized over people and planet, although it's related to ongoing promotion of fossil fuels and wars, along with increased political propaganda.
The federal government believes that the US will be locked out of the future forever if we are not first, or at least at parity, on AI with adversaries. They believe it is not a normal technology, but a singularly important one which will define national capacity.
The federal government believes that if China achieves AI dominance and we are not competitive on either the industrial or cognitive stacks, the people and planet will be at the whim of China and will not do better anyway (and come on — look at how China's fishing fleets treat the parts of the world they have unrestricted access to).
You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis.
I prefer to think that all compute Open AI has access too was actually given to Altman by Santa because he was once a good boy. "You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis."
Do you see how putting "it's a perfectly valid thesis" at the end of any completely unsupported claim doesn't actually make it any more credible?
This is a narrative framing from the tech companies who started and continue the AI race. The current administration is following this framing because the tech billionaires helped them get elected, so they are getting their pay back. It's crony capitalism.
I do not work at an AI company. If you gave me a magic button, I would press it to halt all frontier AI development globally.
But, I do not have that button, and I believe the thesis that for the US to thrive, or even survive, we have to win at AI. So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.
> So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.
In other words "If others give me exactly what I want, without me making any effort for it, I will stop doing this thing I regret having to do". Someone might object that it's possible, achievable, and useful to produce partial success on the road to a comprehensive solution. Still others think it's best to not have a ceasefire while you negotiate the peace.