"We believe that AI’s emergence shows the potential for state capacity to be oriented toward a different mission that centers the ambitious creation of socially useful green infrastructure like clean energy, healthy schools, libraries, social housing, and public transit."

The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive, technologically revolutionary, and disruptive.

The failure here is that the technological revolutions since should have been a wake-up call for the progressive/liberal/left leaning politics to update priors, but instead there's a conservatism that has ingrained itself as a reaction to the technological revolutions since. The left leaning politics of today remains the same politics of the 19th and 20th century with the same rhetoric and discourse. It's frozen in time, and wants to conserve the politics of that era.

What would a left liberal politics look like if it were updated with the technological fundamentals of today?

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Avicebron 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive.."

Subversive to what? A winner-take-all, might-makes-right feudal mindset?

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lacy_tinpot 14 hours ago | parent [-]

It was subversive to the ruling class, and the politics of that time. Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before. Thereby leveling the playing field.

A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all.

Nationalizing or demanding a democratized project for frontier level intelligence that's easily accessible to all Americans, for example might be an idea.

This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation.

	▲	jazz3k 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before" This had more to do with giving people knowledge and was very inexpensive. We now have the Internet, which allows for the masses to meet, protest, and be subversive. The only thing threatening our freedoms is Left-leaning politics that have already taken over countries like the UK. I've been following left-leaning politics my whole life. It always starts out wanting freedoms for all. When they actually get power, step 1 is finding ways to censor dissenting viewpoints. "A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all." This involves taking from the people that are providing these resources and giving it to the masses, by force (called the government). I don't really see how they are the same. "This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation." I can get access to the near-latest LLMs for less than $100/month. Everyone I know is already using some form of LLM at work or has access to it. I'm unsure what your proposal will solve, when it's already so accessible. A very small percentage of people have the knowledge or desire to use agentic AI. This sounds like a solution in need of a problem.

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add-sub-mul-div 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So you think a philosophy needs to welcome all change in order to be coherent, and that there's an inconsistency to promoting things you believe are positive while opposing things you believe are negative?

	▲	Marha01 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is a pretty unlikely proposition that AI progress will be a net negative, especially over the long term. There is no great technology in the history of mankind that was a net negative. Even for the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power, the pros still far outweight the cons. Why should AI be different?
	▲	lacy_tinpot 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well... No. I'm saying that's generally the position of conservatism/right wing/authoritarian politics. A left leaning politics does not just address the change, or accept change as is, but fundamentally invents the change. It is the revolutionary movement that leverage modernity, that is to say newness, your scientific revolutions, your enlightenment ideals, etc. to create new politics. Politics that are emancipatory. The left is supposed to be a politics of historical invention. Using modernity to create new institutions, new rights, new publics, and new forms of collective life. Contemporary American left-liberal politics has become largely defensive and curatorial instead. In other words the left generally invents the future, and dictates the changes in politics, that's what makes it 'progressive', that's why it's against reactionary politics. So I'm saying the left leaning politics of today has fallen prey to closed, diminutive, reactionary politics, and there is new real new left politics that's inventing anything. At least not in America. There was a glimmer with early technology, but the left rejected that politics in favor for stale institutionalism (the same ones from the 19th and 20th century), and ceded that technological ground to techno-fascists/rightwing/authoritarian/etc.etc. politics.

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goatlover 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The economics and politics remain the same. Do we want to allow massive wealth disparity and fascist policies to prevail, while social safety nets and civil rights are dismantled? Technology doesn't change that.

	▲	lacy_tinpot 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the progressives and liberals are arguing that there is no longer any change in politics, then I think perhaps you've become conservatives/reactionary.

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impossiblefork 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Left-leaning politics is not at all like early 1900eds left-leaning politics.

Left-leaning politics has moved to very mild, not-even-social-democracy policies, taxation of wage income, a decreased focus on capital owners.

Left-leaning politics has thus been transformed beyond belief and has very little to do with what it used to. Most politicians have no idea about physical reality, which is the ultimate source of technology, but live sometimes in a world of administration, sometimes in a world of laws and sometimes in a world of politics only.

Left-liberals don't exist. Liberalism is a right-wing ideology: free trade, laissez-faire.

So I don't understand at all what you mean. What are the SocDems who have gone from being SocDems to not knowing what social democracy is and who now think about things like welfare and administrative stuff and living in a world of compromises attached to?

I can't see that they're attached to anything, and I think I despise them for it. At least someone who looks back to the past can look at it and critique it and see what ideas were valuable, what the real goals were, that led to different positive achievements.

	▲	lacy_tinpot 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Left-liberals don't exist" This is straight out of the 19th and 20th century. Like old-socialist rhetoric (emphasis on the old). Even the revolutionary politics is basically a conservative regurgitation of the 19th and 20th century. Like this is de facto how the socialists and communists have always thought about the liberals and even enlightenment era thinkers, accusing the entire project of fascism, Western European imperialism, and so on. It's almost like a caricature of the 19th and 20th century at this point. There is no new politics. No new frontiers. Nothing new. Even as the entire world has completely changed, and the ground completely shifted.