Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter:
Artificial intelligence has produced a rare kind of popular curiosity. Not only among investors and founders, but among people who open a browser, type a question, and feel—however inaccurately—that something on the other side is thinking with them. That phenomenology matters. Whatever we think about hype, hallucinations, or OpenAI’s capitalization table, AI arrives as a technology whose uses are discovered after deployment, whose boundaries are porous, and whose side‑effects appear in places nobody designed for. “Generative” is not just a marketing word; it names a genuine instability.
For socialists, this instability poses a specific challenge. And their reflexes are familiar: Regulate platforms, tax windfalls, nationalize leading firms, plug their models into a planning apparatus. But if socialism is to be more than capitalism with nicer dashboards—if it really is a project of collectively remaking material life, not just of redistributing its outputs—it has to answer a harder question: Can it offer a better way of living with this technology than capitalism does? Can it deliver a distinct form of life worth wanting rather than just a fairer share of what capital has already made?
Once you pose the problem like this, something embarrassing appears. For a tradition obsessed with maximizing productive forces, socialism has been remarkably quick to bracket some of them from politics. It treats technology as a neutral kit to be dropped into better institutions once these exist. Take railways, nuclear plants, or language models: If capitalism misuses them, socialism promises to finally aim them at the common good. The real question, however, is whether even the most ambitious recent socialist theory escapes this limitation—or whether it reproduces neutrality at a higher level of sophistication.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.