I am aware that the West’s best time was essentially at the expense of the rest of the world - but where can one find opportunity and prosperity of those times today? Was this a great anomaly of history? Is it time to hedge your bets on living out the Chinese dream?
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again? (It’s too unsustainable - for the planet, and because superprofits won’t flow as they once did)
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?
The west can’t return to pre-2008 levels of growth and living standards, capitalism has run it’s course, it has peaked somewhere between late 1900s and early 2000s and is now firmly on the decline, modern forces of production have reached such a high level of automation that the rates of profits are all but razor thin across almost every single industry and that the return on investment on further innovation or infrastructure projects are close to 0 if not negative.
All recent attempt from capitalists to create new ways to generate value in our ultra automatized society, from bitcoin and NFTs to AIs have failed or are about to fail, because as Marx and Engels showed machines and financial assets cannot create new value, only human labor can. On top of that, the western fantasy that Europeans and Americans don’t need to work in fields and factories anymore and can just have their entire economy be desk and retail jobs is evaporating as the growing BRICS block start allowing global south country to get around the unequal exchange based imperial order that allow the west to pull their wealth, resources and low end and industrial goods from the global south.
As a result, in the imperial core infrastructure is rotting away never being properly maintained let alone replaced, and “innovation” is now a pointless spectacle of billionaires going on stage to wow crowds of techbros with promises of new shiny technologies that either never materialize or end up never living up to the promises, and standards of living for the common peoples are decreasing as capitalists try to get what they can’t get out of innovation, assets and imperialism anymore out of us instead.
Capitalism is utterly incapable of going back or solving the problems it created for itself. The only way for Europe or the US to improve their situation would be to have a revolution take control of the most important aspects of the economy and guide it to make sure it does what needs to be done like China is doing. Something the free market neo-liberals would never dare do.
AI is coming and it’s going to be transformative. It’s also going to be extraordinarily bad for workers. There has never been a better time to be a capitalist.
This is why things will never improve. As long as things improve for the bourgeoisie they’re more than happy to turn us into batteries for the AI god
Yes and no, certainly excluding the workers from the production process as much as possible is something the bourgeoisie want to do and that the AI technology, as much as they are merely stochastic parrots, make possible.
However, as I said, they won’t be able to make much profit from it if any at all, it’s just too high a level of automation for surplus value extraction to be feasible, in fact the AI business is already unprofitable right now, only the less than a hand-full of AI companies aren’t in the red and only because of massive subsidies and ridiculously overvalued stock prices due to the AI hype bandwagon.
AI is in a financial bubble, right now the bourgeoisie can’t shut up about it because line go up so must buy stocks and firing workers make line go up but sooner or later it will pop, the capitalists will realize they can’t extract profit out of it and panic as competition prevents them from going back to extracting surplus value out of actual workers, this will likely trigger a massive crisis of overproduction that will cost the bourgeoisie trillions, the biggest in history and possibly the last. The day AI is systematically implemented by capitalists across most industries will be the day the rates of profits finally tick down to 0. They can’t win, no matter their economic power they still can’t go against the way the capitalist system works fundamentally, it’s the basis of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
I do agree, tough, that it will be hell for the proletariat, our condition are gonna worsen like no previous crisis of overproduction had never made them worsen before. But that also mean that the fight for socialism is now or never, now is when we must push forward our alternative, because if we don’t start right now when the conditions are still relatively stable, we won’t be ready to take the punch when the approaching boiling point of capitalism’s primary contradiction arrives.
There will be no surplus value gained from it on net, maybe a little, but it represents a massive shift in the allocation of surplus value from the worker to the capitalist. Pretty much anything that is currently being done in an office is going to get annihilated.
The things that require no business context-- copy generation, image creation, entry level coding-- have already been wiped out. There are innumerable companies with really smart people currently working out the filtration piece. Someone is going to crack it.
To the point below AI is a bubble and going to burst, but some things will survive. The things that survive are going to be giants. Capital markets are already starting to price this in. The rotation into the mag 7 represent the partial capture of future labor spend of literally every single enterprise.
This is like looking at covid coming over the horizon in late 2019 or early 2020. The conditions in the US were set up in such a way that you knew, when this thing landed, that it was going to be a death blow. The atomization, the lack of solidarity, for profit healthcare, no paid sick leave, vaccine skepticism. Just the perfect breeding ground for disastrous outcomes.
Now for AI, zero worker protections, no solidarity, fifty years of precedent for dying for the line, threadbare social protections, endemic fascist tendencies, heightened political tensions. AI is going to break this place
I agree
I agree with all this, but still, ultimately these survivor cartels are going to be the “sick man of capitalism”, they will survive and be able to maintain themselves for a time but they won’t be able to thrive (by today’s corporation’s standard I mean) and they won’t be able to go anywhere.
Their economic path is a dead end, with so many jobs gone and labor so devalued by the high level of automation, these companies’ ability to mass produce on a scale never seen before will matter little because most peoples would only be able to buy the produces if they lower the prices so much that they would be systematically selling at a loss, and the few large bourgeois that will remain won’t account for even a 1 000 000th of the demand they would need so selling to them as luxury product won’t cut it either. So it’s all going to rot away with the only way out being revolution.
Quite the opposite I think companies are going to rip. The beneficiaries of these technologies are the owners of the means of production. A huge part of the population will just be locked out of the economy. We know what that looks like already, just look at what’s happened in the black community, or how this place treats indigenous peoples. If you don’t make money you don’t exist. Only this time everyone is getting redlined. Favelas are coming to the US.
A small elite will sit on an increasingly large hoard of wealth and the dispossessed will shoot each other over the scraps. Revolution basically.
What’s interesting about the US now is there is no good outcome. The scenario I paint is if AI succeeds. The alternative is economic collapse 2008 style. Either way this place is cooked
It’s going to be the second one. The chatbots can’t do the things they are selling them to do and eventually the check will come due, there’s absolutely no way they turn this into a never-ending bonanza of riches and productivity. Value still comes from labor.
Value comes from the pairing of labor with technology. A farmer is nothing without the plow, a plow pales in comparison to a tractor.
LLMs are tractors for knowledge workers. But it’s a poison pill in that most of the value shift that comes is in the automation of rote tasks. The point I’m making is that businesses won’t get dramatically more productive, maybe a bit on the margin, but they’ll be able to strip out a massive amount of labor from their operations. This will be a huge boon for return on capital which is the only productivity the capitalists actually care about.
And my point is that they can’t actually strip out that much labor because these chatbots can’t actually replace workers. Tractors actually do the job they’re made for, chatbots can’t do even close to what they’re selling them to do. They can maybe reduce a small amount od labor on the margins, but that’s it.
That’s exactly why they can’t profit from it. The tractors for knowledge workers comparison would be accurate if the capitalists were merely expecting to cut down their human workforce, but they aren’t, what capitalists are trying to do isn’t just reduce the workforce but eliminate it entirely, they want to do away with the artists, the researchers, the programmers, the accountants, the lawyers and even the very workers who are making these AIs for them in the first place.
But that cannot work because as you said value comes from the pairing of labor and technology, so what’s going to happen is that, at first, the first few companies to figure it out will, yes, increase their profits massively by taking advantage of their more efficient than average production process to propose a slightly lower price than competitors can offer, but only for a time.
As Marx showed, once a new productive technology spread through the industry competition and the price war comes back with a vengeance and forces the prices down to the level of the new value = the cost of materials and running the machines (dead capital) + the value created by workers using the machines to produce (the worker’s wage + the surplus that the capitalist takes).
In other words, if AI works out the way the bourgeoisie wants and they are able to eliminate labor completely, there won’t be any workers to create new value i.e. no surplus for the capitalists to pocket. They will be stuck selling at the break-even point (or at best so insignificantly above it that it doesn’t really matter) without being able to walk away because any who try to hire labor again will have their costs go up and therefore be out-competed by the fully AIs companies.
AI as the capitalists want to implement it makes profit making impossible. Sure, that doesn’t mean they will lose their wealth, as I said they will be forced to sell at the break-even price neither profiting nor losing so if they make sure to plug any wealth sink they might have they will be able to keep their fortune.
But the point is, that’s the end of the road for them, without the ability to continue accumulating profits there is nowhere for them to go, no direction in which to take their ventures, all they can do is sell everything and spend the rest of their lives off off the huge piles of cash they managed to make when business was still profitable.
I also drank 2 IPAs so there’s a good chance I’m arguing with myself lol
Is it tho? The first few iterations of LLMs were pretty impressive and showed promise but it seems to me like progress is slowing down, also pretty much all AI companies are operating at a loss with seemingly no end in sight, these things suck up all the hardware and electricity you can get and even the best models are not even all that useful right now, they still make mistakes and can’t really do anything original. The only real winner in the AI race is Nvidia lmao.
It’s definitely a bubble that’s gonna pop, some of it is going to survive but I don’t at all expect society to fundamentally transform due to these things.
Yeah it really is. I was the world’s #1 hater and without getting into this much detail I ended up being in a position where like it or not I do this for a living. The technology is real. You can draft contracts without a paralegal, you can process invoices without accountants. As the technology progresses more and more will be subsumed.
Yeah writing boilerplate documents/emails/code/whatever is what it’s good at, not much more.
I’m a software developer by trade and in my experience those things aren’t all that good at coding unless you’re really really specific about what you want and it’s not super complicated. I like using it for some utility scripts and some boring boilerplate stuff but beyond that it’s just not all that useful.
So a good example is we had to refactor some models to use pyspark, and our data scientists were able to speed up the process probably 3x by using Claude. Like it won’t take you start to finish, this process that is being sold is a definitive lie, but it will dramatically increase productivity when properly applied. And as people figure out how to improve the results through proper context application, the use cases will grow. That shit destroys jobs. Because now a data scientist can do 3x as much.
The things can’t think, but they are basically intellectual mech suits, and the societal implications are profound. A lot of folks on hexbear I think dismiss the tech prematurely without really understanding what it is or how it works
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