this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Communism as drafted by 19th and 20th century thinkers will never work, predicated on the idea that labor is inherently undesirable and will not be performed by humans without immediate incentive.
We will need to rethink our approach towards communism with consideration for the growing spread of automation. Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
The goal is to keep the automation out of the hands of billionaires, however. If a society begins to approach post scarcity, which will finally render capitalism obsolete, the oligarchs will do whatever they can to re-engineer scarcity and bring us back to feudalism before they'd ever consider giving power to the people.
I would say a good argument for communism is the worsening side effects of capitalism. These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework because they require global cooperation and capitalism is based on competition. Problems like over exploitation of natural resources (overfishing, carbon emissions) and the failure of the market to adequately provide services for which there is a fixed level of demand (housing, education, healthcare. The scale of college and medical debt is getting ridiculous). Many other problems like these.
The solution is more democracy and yes common ownership of the means of production. People are just allergic to the specific term of class struggle. but it doesn't change the meaning - the ownership/ruling class benefits from the status quo even as everything gets worse. They will not give up control without a fight, and as you said they will use every tool, from propaganda and legislation up to direct violence to maintain that control.
They were fixed in the past. Trust-busting, Keynesian Economic Policy, taxing the wealthy.
It's just we've been stuck in the Reagan's supply side economics bullshit for decades now. The problems we're seeing now are because of proven economic solutions being abandoned because the wealthy have confused the voting public to think that we shouldn't go back to policies that worked for over six decades.
Automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You see a robot doing a job a person used to do and get excited and think it's going to be the end of the need for labour.
But look at an a excavator. People used to have to dig everything with shovels. But an excavator can do the job of hundreds of people with shovels. Excavators have been around a long time, but didn't lead the elimination of all work everywhere.
Yes, "the majority of jobs we have today" will be made obsolete just like how having a big crew of strong people to dig a canal (or whatever) was made obsolete. But then there were new jobs to replace those ones.
Thats why i propose we build an A.I. overlord to replace our leadership, corporate and gobernment, since they will always default to making desisions against the needs of their populations and just serve their own interests (Case in point: global warming). If we have a singularity level A.I. it would be able to expliot our natural resources in a renewable way amd distribute them justly and automate all labor, and be able to defend humans from any danger, making us something like The Culture from the novel series of the same name.
I love the culture books too but c'mon man.
First, how do you imagine transferring power to an AI overlord would sit with the people who currently have all the proverbial guns in our current society. That's the problem we need to solve first.
Second, who in our society would you trust to build an AI up to the task of single handedly managing world affairs? How would you even test something so superhuman? Not to mention that we're not close to superhuman, we're already pushing the limits of our tech building a chatbot that can't stay coherent for more than a couple paragraphs. The tech just isn't there yet and not within orders of magnitude.
I love very much your counter arguments and the fact that you are bringing them up specially since they are exactly the ones i have too, but il try to adress them:
1.- The A.I. that im calling project overlord, and im just gonna call it OV from now, should be abble to build armed drones and armored vehicles that while would preferably be operated by OV itself, its gonna need autonomous A.I. because of practicality (developed by OV preferably), while you see OV is not a babysitter and can use guns and cause harm and even kill, otherwise its rise to power would be impossible and it wouldnt be able to defend humanity from external forces, sounds bad but the other solution that i can think of its that it beats us at our own game by and starts a company, makes it succesfull (mostly by ussing unethical practices and having good p.r) and then starts buying other companies and starts lobying the governments so that it can make changes both for the betterment of humankind and its rise to power until it can get as much people that recieve orders directly from OV as posible into congress or ministries or whatever the name is of the council of clowns that rules the region of the worlds countries, and throught international cooperation it would eventually break borders, little by little start making work optional, and offer mental healt programs that are focused on self betterment and not deal with corporate work until everyone is united as not a cpuntry but as humankind and the A.I. finnaly reveals itself. The problem is that is gonna be found out eventually by inteligence agencies and its gonna have to resort to the first method
2.- Either as a colaborative oppen source efort from the internet denicens themselves, or (even if i sound fucking looney) me, but the me option only works for me, i dont think other people will think that, neither do i but is the only way i could be shure of it, and even if i try to make OV not be biased it will end up being biased in certain issues and not have the best aproach to things and even if i dedicate my entire life to studing A.I. and geting money and people to fund OV as a Nongov institutuion ill doubt i could pull it of by myself and make it good since im a terrible option for it right now. So the real answer is thats is just worked on as a collaborative effort from the internet, kinda like open source software or something like that but the devs need to be a little versed i philosofy at least at the level of what "The good place" says, as for me, im gonna go into studdying A.I. development as soon as i crawl out of this hole that im at in my life, but i wont make any promises, after all im corruptible to.
3.- Its probably just gonna be a mather of giving it time, but if im being honest i dont think we need something that advenced like a singularity level entity like OV, We could do with something that the very least does something more simple like the redistributing resources at a logistical level, and such thing could work as long as it could be respected in the level of constitutions, or human rights, not that is not questioned, but respected and defendable, how that could be done i really dont have any idea other that it being fire tested. Otherwise, the secret to it might be in quantum computing, but its not like we can jack up a quantum computer to OV and call it a day, since quantum shit is like twilight zone level maths, and is dificult to wrap ones head around so its still probably a risky bet.
Sorry for bad english, wall of text and no TL;DR but i dont think i can express all of this in a smaller text