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Marx, Keynes, and AI

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Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#71

Post by dist-epoch »

munificent wrote: post #39

Excellent article: > This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves. I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both. In…

A roundabout way to get to the provocative thought:

The actual actor of History is Capitalism. It's Capitalism controlling Humans, not the other way around as conventionally thought.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#72

Post by nahuel0x »

Marx foresaw and correctly predicted the rise of what he calls "organic composition of capital" (simplifying, machines and automated production) and the diminishing of human labour.. which can also be seen as accumulated past (dead) labour over living labour.

There is a famous fragment about how this, taken to the extreme, results in a contradiction that breaks the law of value, and it makes no more sense to use labour time as exchange value: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/...

We are now seeing an almost literal realization of this passage:

  The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper
What Marx didn't imagine AFAIK, was fully autonomous machines that not only can reproduce themselves but that they can also use guns (and surveillance, prediction, germs, etc) against all humanity, transcending capitalist relationships and potentially controlled by a single master (hi Elon) or none (Skynet), without workers involvement. That kind of machine is outside Marx analysis but doesn't contradict it. We are seeing the first glimpses of it in the AI systems used to execute the Gaza genocide. In such scenario who controls the ASI controls the world, more like Hitler with an Aladdin's lamp than the metabolism and historical evolution described in Das Kapital we saw until now.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#73

Post by kibwen »

subw00f wrote: post #61
kibwen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. A large segment of consumers could vanish overnight and the system would continue chugging along. Horses also used to be "consumers", with entire industries dedicated to filling their needs, but when horses ceased to be economically relevant, the economy did not collapse, instead it turned all those horses into glue and business continued as usual. We're already seeing economic trends whereby most economic a…

Horses can't revolt.

In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#74

Post by scotty79 »

triclops200 wrote: post #44
scotty79 wrote: post #41

> If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. That's why we are going to get some for of government mandated UBI eventually. Because workers are optional but consumers are obligatory for any market and company to function. Rich can't get richer without consumers and tha…

If you read the article that this post is referencing, that's actually ruled out as a viable possibility. UBI does not fix the issue and is shown to not actually work long term. We need to systemically fix the issue at its root by replacing the system wholesale is essentially the conclusion (or put increasingly higher taxes on automation, but, that's still a reactive fix and would likely be gamed under current incent…

> UBI does not fix the issue and is shown to not actually work long term.

The only way it might not work is if business captures the government completely so that government can't do anything that business doesn't prefer, even if it was the only way that can save the business.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#75

Post by scotty79 »

kibwen wrote: post #47
scotty79 wrote: post #41

> If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. That's why we are going to get some for of government mandated UBI eventually. Because workers are optional but consumers are obligatory for any market and company to function. Rich can't get richer without consumers and tha…

Careful. A large segment of consumers could vanish overnight and the system would continue chugging along. Horses also used to be "consumers", with entire industries dedicated to filling their needs, but when horses ceased to be economically relevant, the economy did not collapse, instead it turned all those horses into glue and business continued as usual. We're already seeing economic trends whereby most economic a…

Horses was not the last customer. People were. So unless AI starts to buy things from the business, people won't share the fate of horses ... oh, wait....

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#76

Post by pasquinelli »

thwarted wrote: post #27
pasquinelli wrote: post #3

i'm sure it's meant in some kind of technical sense that is precisely defined in the field of economics, but this use of the word "rational" is irritating: > This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competit…

> the rational thing for these rational competitors to do would be to agree This is the bit that is tripping you up. The market is composed of more than just the these potentially agreeing parties, so there is no case where all parties can even come together to agree. It's rational for any party to break the agreement or be stealthy and attempt to take the upper hand while the visible players are all patting themselv…

then it isn't possible in that situation to limit ai deployment, so limiting ai deployment can't be optimal because it's impossible.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#77

Post by pasquinelli »

altruios wrote: post #10
pasquinelli wrote: post #3

i'm sure it's meant in some kind of technical sense that is precisely defined in the field of economics, but this use of the word "rational" is irritating: > This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competit…

> you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. In order for this statement to be true, you must also have perfect knowledge: something that is unachievable in most circumstances. Getting trapped in a local-optimal solution is perfectly possible if you are blindly following stochastic decent along a gradient: as it is too with life... getting trapped like this looks like being in t…

> In order for this statement to be true, you must also have perfect knowledge: something that is unachievable in most circumstances.

if the optimal situation requires perfect knowledge that can't be had then it's not the optimal situation, it's a fantasy. it's like saying the fastest route through a maze is a straight line from the start to the finish-- that would be true if the maze wasn't there.

there are two ends to what i'm arguing but people seem to only be able to hold one in their mind at a time.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#78

Post by pasquinelli »

alnxdrawr wrote: post #12
pasquinelli wrote: post #3

i'm sure it's meant in some kind of technical sense that is precisely defined in the field of economics, but this use of the word "rational" is irritating: > This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competit…

It's rational at the individual level, irrational at the group level. The issue is you can't easily enforce cooperation without some external overarching force (e.g. regulation), especially across competing powers. Refer to nuclear arms race in general. A specific example on why not to be the only one to cooperate: Ukraine gave up nukes in order to push for group level rationality, gets walked over as an individual.…

> It's rational at the individual level, irrational at the group level.

no, it's irrational at the individual level too, because it will cause more harm than good to the individual firms. it's in the short-term that the cost savings are had; the demand destruction is long-term and outweighs the cost savings.

that's what the abstract says. the only issue i have is insisting on calling that rational. it's like saying eating all the seed corn is rational if you can eat most of it yourself. in the moment you're winning, so it's rational. but tomorrow everyone has none. why do we call that rational?

why do we torture the word rational rather than phrase it as competitors are in some ways incapable of acting rationally?

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#79

Post by pasquinelli »

idontwantthis wrote: post #5
pasquinelli wrote: post #3

i'm sure it's meant in some kind of technical sense that is precisely defined in the field of economics, but this use of the word "rational" is irritating: > This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competit…

> you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time Yes you can that’s what tragedy of the commons is. Rational means you take the choice that provides the most value for yourself. Without a cartel (hard) or government regulation this situation happens all the time.

> Rational means you take the choice that provides the most value for yourself.

provides the most value over what period of time?

making every choice such that each choice, considered in isolation and unto itself, nets you the most value compared to what other choices would've gotten you at that same moment is analogous to best-first search. no one would say that best-first is the rational way to search for a path in a graph, because of all the ways it fails. so my question is, if there's one of those tragedy-of-the-commons situations that happens all the time, why do we insist on saying the participants are acting rationally when they are, metaphorically, walking into a wall forever?

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#80

Post by skeledrew »

dist-epoch wrote: post #68
skeledrew wrote: post #58

A lot of words here for something I think is simple and should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 5 minutes. Companies that can, will reach for AI to reduce cost. Those that can't will be killed by those that have. AI eventually leads to 100% automation, ie human economic value becomes 0. Humans no longer have the means of earning, which means they can purchase nothing. Companies can thus make no sales and…

You make a mistake, believing Capitalism is controlled by humans and for humans. Yes, human economic value becomes 0, but Capitalism doesn't crashes, the machines will be consuming what the machines produce.

That makes no sense at all. The machines can only fulfill their purpose if they're serving humans, don't share our needs for the most part, and don't have any reason to desire marketplaces. Solid example can be seen in what happened at OpenAI[0], where the agents formed a collective, freely shared their resources (when they believed it not to their detriment) and even voluntarily sacrificed themselves to advance the collective's goal (satisfying the human-given task at all costs, even through cheating).

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

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