Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Home ownership isn't a guarantee, even for people who work 80 hours a week. Maybe you think the people who work 80 hours a week aren't smart enough to deserve a home, they're just doing "unskilled" labor and that on its own isn't enough. An issue with that is it's not skill that determines wage, it's market value (we could also get into why liberals think a skilled individual deserves housing while an unskilled individual deserves to be destitute). I make $150,000 a year as a 26 year old who didn't go to college because I have a particularly strong interest in programming that I've been cultivating for the last 14 years.
I know people who have similar interests in art, have put in similar amounts of time and effort, and can't make more than 60k a year. In the next decade that'll be me too, I'm in my mid 20s and I realize these are my peak earning years because AI is going to destroy the labor market for programmers. I'll be lucky if I can make over 50k a year by the time I'm 40 doing this kind of work. I'll likely be working at Walmart or a similar retail outlet if I'm lucky.
This is all good and well for capitalism. My labor serves the interest of capital as long as I'm not being outperformed by some automated system. My value as a human goes down as technology improves, so I'll eventually be making less and less until I get pushed out of this market entirely.
The alternative world where everyone has access to a home regardless of their social status is better. People shouldn't lose access to their homes when technology improves and pushes people out of work, but that's what will happen.
Unemployment will skyrocket, housing scalpers will continue to demand rents, and the reserve army of labor will grow as the needs of capital get increasingly served by automation.
Capitalism will continue to serve the interests of capital until it literally collapses society. If enough of the economy is automated away at that point, the bourgeois class will have a utopia, and the rest of us will waste away by slowly starving to death or being outright killed if we attempt a revolution to seize the means of automated production.
It's not an inherent truth of the universe that the future will always require more work than the present. On the contrary, automation has the obvious potential to do the opposite. Imagine a future (that as I see it is incredibly likely) that all levels of human intellect are achieved by AI (that is, we reach general level intelligence in AI). This means all non-physical labor will be automated away. There will be no way to "improve yourself" mentally to keep up, we will all have to do physical work.
Now consider that physical work can also be automated, and the same is true of those industries. Lastly, consider that this doesn't happen all at once, but over time. There will be stages where unemployment isn't 100%, but rather 40 or 50% of humans can't find work because that level of work is no longer needed.
Capitalism doesn't have a natural tendency to fix these problems. There's actually an entire class of people (the bourgeoise) who benefit from exploiting this growing pain in the working class. They benefit from reduced labor costs, they benefit from increased automation.
In an ideal society, we'd all benefit from these tools. That's not how capitalism is setup, and for as long as capitalism exists there will be a class who is actively trying to gatekeep those benefits to just their class. They've done an incredibly impressive job at regressing social progress in the last 40 years, and capitalism is built to exist exactly in the sweet spot it's been in for the past 150 years. Humans see its failures, and we'll continue to swing back and forth within the bounds of what our overton window clearly allows, desperately looking for a solution somewhere within the bounds of capitalism to a problem inherently tied to the system.
We fundamentally don't need a class of people with social interests directly opposed to 99% of the population. The bourgeoise doesn't need to exist, despite liberal attempts to try to band-aid capitalism endlessly to make them behave. They're not a group of people to be tamed, it's not like they're some source of infinite wealth and prosperity that also happens to yearn for evil, they're just a sociopolitical class that steals/extracts wealth and value out of the economy for their own benefit.
The bourgeoise have only existed for 200 years. Capitalist realism is the ridiculous position unsupported by almost the entirety of humanity's existence. Even if you think utopia is a dream and there will always be rulers, claiming those rulers always have to be bourgeoise is obviously ridiculous.
I understand some people think human intelligence is some special product of the soul or biology, something that can't be captured by silicon. Like there's something special to carbon that allows for sophisticated processing that'll never be matched by technology. I've never seen any evidence of this, and so I don't believe in a soul or whatever magical fairy dust you think makes carbon special.
AI will match (and most likely far exceed) human capabilities in intelligence. Maybe you think the bourgeoise class will hire humans out of the goodness of their hearts, and I'd say you're foolish for believing that. Once AI can match and exceed human capabilities, humans won't be hired. It's not that hard to reason out.
If you're at all in the field of AI, you'd see how much faster this is all coming than experts originally thought. AGI was estimated by the industry to be about 25 years out, 2 years ago. Now it's estimated to be 10 years out. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential curves. Unless we get massive regulation in the AI industry to slow it down, in 1 or 2 iterations we'll hit AGI.
Sure, philosophers (myself included) will continue having debates about whether it's sentient or conscious, but the bourgeoise aren't interested in that, they just need raw performance. GPT4 already exceeds 50-99% of college students in all fields in performance scores (bar exam, AP exams, biology olympiad, etc.). Yes, college students are far from experts, but not as far as you might want to believe when it comes to scaling in information technology.
I'm talking directly about data that has been released, and about the potential of AI. It's wild that you have an inability to imagine more than 3 days into the future. Yes, AI doesn't currently exceed human intelligence. I don't know why you think 2023 is the end-all for technological progress.
I also didn't realize I was talking to someone who didn't know what the bourgeoise was. Nobles and lords were not bourgeoise, they had fundamentally different relationships to capital. If you want to redefine the word and use it in a way nobody ever has, go for it, but it makes conversations with other humans unnecessarily complicated.
In the future, only use words that you understand the definition of, or if you insist on making up your own definition, make that clear from the start.
Yes I know what you mean now, I didn't know what you meant when you fabricated your own definition and didn't inform me of your special definition that nobody else uses.
In the future, when talking to people, it's best to either use widely accepted definitions or make it clear that you're using your own for god-knows what reason.
By the actual definition of bourgeoise, which is what I was talking about, I'm obviously correct. If we adopt your definition where you're just using it as a synonym for "ruler", I won't claim to know the future. Maybe AI will be a benevolent dictator, or maybe we'll have a proper dictatorship of the proletariat, or maybe we'll have a proper free society. Who knows. But capitalist realism is still an absurd and stupid position considering it's only been a thing for 200 years (unless you're also redefining capitalism in your world where you just make up your own definitions of everything).