Thread by @enzoreds

1/15 🧵 AN AI UTOPIA?
Bear with me for some speculative fiction about achieving socialism while leaving capitalism intact. Or how most of us become surplus population.

2/15 Imagine: Capitalists still own firms and physical capital. AI/robotics replace most human labour. AI tech maintains itself. But AI models and robots are collectively owned by workers.

3/15 The AI tech may have been developed privately, but the working class expropriated it. This may be more achievable than seizing all means of production, though it still requires seizing the state security apparatus as well. Set aside what to do with it besides enforcing this.

4/15 Workers' AI does most salaried work. Salaries go to worker-owners (minus running costs). Workers bargain for profit shares by modulating AI labour. Work reduction isn't an issue anymore - it's profit distribution, environmental adaptations, whatever.

5/15 Capitalists still compete normally. Profit-driven innovation continues. No central planning. But remaining human work is rare, undesirable, and highly paid. Some involves monitoring AI behaviour - managed democratically.

6/15 Crucial rule: Capital owners and CEOs can't own AI tech. This applies to co-ops too. All top-level firm decisions stay with humans.

7/15 Eventually, human capitalists might become a fetter on development because AIs get much smarter. If the AI ownership ban holds, we get autonomous capitalist AIs competing with worker AIs.

8/15 Former capitalists become quasi-workers. The system starts resembling market socialism. So the road to socialism passes through worker-owned AI capitalism.

9/15 Is this society capitalist? Yes, if you focus on private ownership of means of production. No, if you focus on the human wage relation.

10/15 This revolution achieves socialism for workers whilst leaving capitalism intact. It doesn't require seizing all means of production - just the tech that blurs the line between workforce and equipment.

11/15 AI brings out the fungibility of human input in production. The boundary between capital and labour is more porous than assumed. This becomes a danger but also an opportunity.

12/15 What's unique about AI: it can be centralised, directly controlled, and replace its owners in ways piecemeal machinery cannot. AI is effectively a non-human double of the working class. And it levels the labour-capital playing field in terms of coordination problems.

13/15 Remember G.A. Cohen's shmoos? Capitalists really are stopping workers from a life of leisure by controlling AI tech. If property relations prevent this world, that shows something very bad about capitalism.

14/15 But what if capital retains control of AI and robotics? Much of humanity becomes surplus population. Capital might be banking on this. Hence: "socialism or barbarism" - heightened.

15/15 AI turned my notes into this thread. Should I ask it to write this up as a short story as well? Essay? Or should I commit it to the flames? 🔥

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