I’m curious as to what appeals to you about AI. With so much contoversy nowadays I’d like to hear some people’s opinions.

First let me just say that this isn’t “theory” in the usual sense—I’m not connecting to anything specific in Marx or anything, though my world view is heavily influenced by a disorganized mishmash of Left theory. I’m not great at citing sources or remembering names and arguments. So, I’m sorry if this is the wrong flair or wrong sub for this post. I just don’t know where else to put these thoughts and get human feedback from fellow Lefties who don’t knee-jerk hate AI for existing.

So:

I keep seeing comments on other subs about the AI bubble and how it’s just a fad that will eventually run out of steam, and then the price of RAM, etc. will return to normal. They say the companies investing in AI are inflating its value as a scam to milk investments or something. Everyone hates data centers.

Ok

But that all assumes that the biggest fish in the capital class are either wrong about a giant investment (unlikely considering their resources and the inside knowledge that brings), or they’re all playing out this particular scam at the same time because… it will benefit them more than the usual scam of capitalism already does? No. I think the “AI will pass” arguments are all copium. People just don’t want to face the possibility that AI is changing the world. Honestly, it reminds me of COVID deniers back in ‘20.

Except AI is going to change the world more than COVID. It’s the next printing press. It’s the power to make any program imaginable, to solve any problem that is solvable. It’s still in its infancy, but look how far it’s come just in the last year. Look what you can do with Opus 5.5. Now imagine what AI devs are doing with it—each advancement in AI will feed into the next advancement in a positive feedback loop. I used to be skeptical of the whole singularity idea, but when I think of what AI devs might be capable of now, using current frontier models, I think it’s basically inevitable.

But that’s all setup to my real point, and probably stuff most of you already assume or at least think about.

The real point is data centers. Centralization of compute — and emptying the market/pricing people out of necessary components. They know AI is the future. Compute is tomorrow’s equivalent of yesterday’s land—the ones who hold it will be the lords over all.

Data centers are an ongoing land grab on computing power, and only the big companies even know it’s happening.

My prediction? The elements necessary to run AI will never be cheaper than they are today. Just like land, the price will continue to increase and never come down. It may fluctuate here and there but it’s an upward trend from here on.

So—am I way off base? I don’t really want to argue for this position, but I would like to be talked down from it. I’d much rather believe in the bubble, to be honest.

Nicolas d Villarreal, whose two self-published books I have read, seems to have a lot of insights in regards to how the structuralism of LLMs interweaves along with the labour theory of value from eighteenth-century historiography.

Do check out Daniel Tutt's other interviews with him, along with his Substack, to get a taste of how he brings his own experimentations with LLMs and programming.

Will it with our labor augmentation today.

His free writings

https://substack.com/@nicolasdvillarreal?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3b6dwt

Tasmania, Australia, wants AI data center operators to help fund local communities, cover their own infrastructure costs, invest in renewables, and publicly report their energy and water use.

Not exactly seizing the means of production, but its a start.

These companies depend on public infrastructure, shared resources, and human labor to build their AI empires. So why should communities shoulder the costs while shareholders pocket the gains?

Now, the proposal still needs teeth. Without enforceable obligations, a community benefit fund can turn into little more than a corporate tip jar.

But theres a useful principle here. AI infrastructure isnt some private kingdom floating above society. Its built on collective resources, and the public should have a say in how its developed and who benefits.

For the left, that means pushing beyond compensation toward public ownership, democratic oversight, worker bargaining power, and a share of the productivity gains.

We dont have to choose between letting corporations run the show and opposing technological development altogether.

Make them pay their share. Then fight for a seat at the table, ownership of the table, and control over what gets built on it.

Daniel Erasmus has spent about 25 years doing scenario planning for banks, governments and companies, and his starting point is that experts are bad at predicting the future. In 2006, a scenario he worked on helped one bank prepare for a global financial collapse. When the crisis hit in 2008, it was one of only two banks in the world to grow its assets.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Daniel explains how scenario planning works and how scenario work during COVID flagged a food security risk, which led a bank to start a program that has since given away about 120 million meals. We also talk about ClimateGPT, the open climate model he built, why he thinks climate is a bigger danger than AI, and how he answers the critique that AI uses too much energy.

Daniel Erasmus is head of AI at Internet Archive Europe and a member of the Club of Rome. He built ClimateGPT, an open source and open access AI model focused on climate and the social decisions around it.

That's FUCKING NUTS and we don't appreciate how utterly literally magical this would seem to anybody from the past. We're too busy worrying about regulations or culture wars or benchmarks, etc.

Imagine a World's Fair 100 years ago. There's an army of robots you can get to do any task, talk to about anything, etc. Seismic. People would bow in front of it.

The printing press, the railroad, the telegraph, the wheel, paper, agriculture, cooking, pizza, the internet, cars, etc....what AI can already do puts it significantly towards the top of that list.

Imagine how much better this could get in the next 5 years. What will we treat as boring and get annoyed when it fails when it's basically magic that it's happening at all?

Who really thinks at this point that we need more data centers?

A team effectively open sourced major Adobe Inc. tools and supposedly they're competitive in terms of quality. If smaller teams can achieve this using AI to accelerate development, then the prospect of earning money doing this as a service is nearly nothing. The costs have plummeted to almost free, and the moat doesn't exist.

The future for a company like Adobe is going to be very interesting. Software as a service can't be profitable if it doesn't cost anything and it's all open source.

It makes sense that's how it'd happen, every time someone switches to using an open source tool it takes money away from software companies which then leads to layoffs. I don't really know what that looks like, have you noticed any other open source alternatives that are actually drawing attention?

Ownership and control of the means of production should be contested.

Heres something worth paying attention to coming out of the Philippines.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN AI scientific panel co-chair Maria Ressa and the journalists at Rappler arent just criticizing corporate control of digital infrastructure. Theyre actually building alternatives.

Theyve developed RAI, an AI chatbot grounded in their journalism, MUNI, a decentralized communications platform built on the open Matrix protocol, and Rappler Communities, connecting independent newsrooms through shared infrastructure.

In her latest piece for The Atlantic, Ressa puts it sharply.

"Infrastructure is law that doesn't pass through a courtroom."

And theres a lot packed into that. Whoever owns the infrastructure has enormous influence over how information circulates, who participates and what institutions can actually do.

Now, Rappler isnt a worker cooperative or socialist enterprise. But theres something worth learning here. Independent institutions pooling resources, sharing technology and building capacity outside the usual corporate platforms.

Thats a material alternative, not just another critique of Big Tech.

Open protocols and shared infrastructure dont settle every question of ownership or class power. But they give people something to organize around, develop and govern collectively.

We dont have to choose between corporate monopoly and technological abstention.

The commons doesnt build itself.

Since I am in a study group, I'm thinking of the metaphor for LLMs. I think the most fitting is the LLM as a social tech, which can be used both socially and antisocially.

With that in mind, Henry Farrell provides a lecture along with his Substack posts on the matter.So it deserves a repost here.

If I was Martin Saint Lither and a literalist, LLMs are merely that: LLMs. Yet here we are at the means of interpretation, of interpretability. I think this one fits the best.

Thoughts appreciated.

Lula is making AI sovereignty part of his economic agenda for another term. Brazil wants its own AI companies, computing infrastructure, Portuguese-language models, and public investment rather than leaving the whole field to American and Chinese tech giants.

This isn't just campaign talk, either. Brazil already has a R$23 billion national AI plan, recently expanded research cooperation across Latin America, and passed new incentives for data centers.

Lula put it plainly in September. "I don't want to remain dependent on Chinese artificial intelligence, much less American."

Of course, there's a difference between national sovereignty and public ownership. Subsidizing private infrastructure doesn't necessarily give workers or the public control over it.

But this is where the political fight actually happens. Who builds it, who owns it, who governs it, and who gets the benefits.

Brazil isn't trying to uninvent AI. It's trying to determine its place in the industry.

The question for the left is whether that translates into democratic control or just a Brazilian version of the same corporate arrangements.

Sharing a few examples of my latest antics. Been working on new harness that allows for windows controls along with a couple of other neat feature.

The first image was created in ms paint.

Initial prompt: Open microsoft paint - done
2nd prompt: Draw a purple sun using MS paint - done

The second image was created in P5JS

Prompt: Open the browser - done
2nd prompt: Use P5JS to draw something - done

Niether prompt used a reference image and the codex is currently running through the haness. The first image was done using the windows control skill and the second image was done using the same skill then JS in the browser. The project is aimed at better live windows controller skills and learning without having to adjust weights. The harness is a cobbled mess of parts from all over the internets that is supposed to work like the limbic system. Learning happens through an apprentice loop. And the sole reason I even started this was to watch codex play LOZ Minish Cap.

I'm so tired of seeing people treat AI, a tool that greatly increases efficiency if used correctly, as something nobody would ever want in a utopia. As something inherently evil and exploitative, even outside of capitalism. People treat efficiency as a negative when it comes to AI.

How many leftists right now would like to advocate for "Socialism/Communism except we don't use factories", "Socialism/Communism except we forget how to make lightbulbs", "Socialism/Communism except we don't have computers and do every calculation on an abacus"? I would reckon a tiny tiny percent. And how many leftists in a few generations will want "Socialism/Communism except we don't use AI models"? The same amount.

People are blinded by their hatred for this thing, and it's infiltrated leftist spaces and turned them against the concept of automation. They draw the line at every automated process before AI, seeing all the displaced workers as necessary for the world they live in, if they consider the past at all. In their ideal world, automation exists but stops the moment those two letters get involved. It's stupidly hypocritical and regressive.

Whatever happened to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

I still found this statement really interesting. Primarily because electricity and water are utilities.

I think his confusion is about OpenAI selling it, where in reality OpenAI will be irrelevant and bankrupt as competition skyrockets and everyone is running their own local models.

Why would a utility like electricity be sold by a private entity?

I think using AI as a tool to portray this clearly is something we can all do.

The Australian Greens are drawing some lines ahead of Labor's proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, which covers social media, search engines, online games and AI chatbots.

On October 12, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young laid out three demands. Give people the right to sue platforms and seek compensation for harm, address addictive algorithms, and calculate corporate penalties as a percentage of global revenue rather than handing billion dollar companies fines they can shrug off.

Theres a distinction here worth discussing. Regulation usually means the state sets rules and regulators enforce them. The Greens want individuals to have legal recourse too, rather than depending entirely on a government agency to act.

And this isnt coming from nowhere. The Australian Greens have been developing a broader position around digital rights, AI oversight, workers having a say in deployment, and Australian control over technological infrastructure.

But theres also a question of how far accountability gets us without changing ownership.

A company can comply with regulations, pay penalties and still retain control over the platforms, models, infrastructure and data that shape everyday life. Giving people stronger rights against corporate power matters, but it doesnt necessarily redistribute that power.

Theres another tension around regulating harmful content and algorithmic behavior without creating broad discretionary powers over lawful expression.

This isnt a standalone AI bill, and the Greens havent secured these amendments yet. Its a negotiating position on legislation that also covers AI services.

Still, its a concrete political intervention. Rather than arguing about whether AI is good or bad, the fight is over enforceable rights, corporate obligations and who gets to hold these companies accountable.

And thats a debate worth having.

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has unveiled a new platform called "AI Under Control," calling for a temporary freeze on training and releasing the most powerful AI systems until federal safeguards are established.

The proposal includes a Cabinet level AI regulator, mandatory incident reporting, whistleblower protections, emergency response procedures and restrictions on AI systems helping develop their successors.

Its part of a growing tendency among American progressives to treat advanced AI development as something that needs to be stopped first and governed afterward.

There are legitimate questions about corporate secrecy, accountability and the power of a handful of companies to make decisions affecting everybody else.

But theres a political problem with making a development freeze the centerpiece.

The companies already controlling the largest models, data centers, chips and distribution networks dont disappear during a pause. Their infrastructure remains. Their market positions remain. And a licensing system built around expensive compliance could leave smaller developers, universities, cooperatives and public projects facing barriers the giants can afford.

El-Sayed is proposing federal oversight, not public ownership of the AI industry. Those arent the same thing.

And how would a freeze work internationally, especially with open weight models, decentralized development and competing national industrial strategies?

None of that means companies should be free to do whatever they want. It means regulation needs a political destination beyond slowing development.

If the objective is democratic control, then ownership, public compute, worker participation and access to the technology belong in the program too.

Otherwise we risk freezing the existing distribution of power while calling it progress.

The Socialist Equality Party and its youth organization, the IYSSE, have joined opposition to a proposed $1.25 billion University of Michigan and Los Alamos computing facility in Ypsilanti Township.

Their October 6 statement calls for canceling the project, ending classified military research at universities, disclosing project arrangements and organizing workers, students and residents against the development.

But theres an important distinction in their argument.

"Opposition to this war project must not be conflated with opposition to artificial intelligence itself."

They explicitly describe AI as an advance in productive forces, with potential applications in medicine, energy planning and organizing production around human needs.

Their objection is to who controls the computing infrastructure and what its being built to accomplish.

Thats a materially different position from opposing every data center because AI exists.

The SEP argues that the infrastructure should be taken out of corporate and military hands and placed under democratic working class control. They also criticize the broader AI freeze campaign for leaving existing ownership untouched.

Of course, calling for expropriation is one thing. Building the political organization capable of accomplishing it is another.

Still, this is a useful intervention in a debate where opposition to military AI, opposition to corporate ownership and opposition to the technology itself routinely get mixed together.

A data center built to support nuclear weapons research and one built for publicly accessible scientific computing are not politically interchangeable just because both use electricity.

The question isnt only whether infrastructure gets built. Its who controls it, what its used for and who gets a say.

On October 9, the Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council issued new guidelines on developing what they call "new quality productive forces." AI is explicitly part of that strategy.

The guidelines call for accelerating AI innovation, integrating it into traditional industries, expanding its use across the economy and establishing systems for monitoring technological risks, issuing early warnings and responding to emergencies.

Theres a familiar Marxist vocabulary here, but also a pretty concrete industrial strategy. AI isnt being treated as some isolated consumer product. Its being incorporated into a wider program of industrial development, technological self reliance, economic modernization and state coordination.

And unlike the growing calls for indefinite pauses in parts of the Western left, China is explicitly pursuing development alongside oversight.

That doesnt settle the socialist questions. State direction isnt automatically worker control, and technological development doesnt automatically translate into democratic ownership or shorter working hours.

But it does give us something substantive to examine. What industries are being transformed? Who controls the infrastructure? Who benefits from productivity gains? What power do workers have over deployment?

The interesting comparison isnt simply whether China is more or less enthusiastic about AI than Western governments. Its how different political economies organize its development, distribute its benefits and manage its consequences.

Those are questions the international left should be discussing far more seriously.

Spain's Socialist led government is working on tougher regulations for large data centers, and the interesting part is that this fight isnt primarily about chatbots or generated images. Its about electricity, water, infrastructure and who gets to use them.

The proposed rules would impose stricter energy efficiency and water use standards, along with digital sovereignty requirements. One particularly ambitious provision would require large data centers to back at least 80 percent of their electricity use with additional renewable generation matched hourly.

Thats a much more concrete argument than just declaring data centers good or bad.

Compute is physical infrastructure. It consumes resources, competes for grid capacity and depends on political decisions about land, energy and investment. Somebody has to decide whose needs come first.

Spain is putting some of those decisions into the regulatory process, although the industry is already pushing back and the decree hasnt been approved.

Theres a socialist question sitting underneath all this. If governments can regulate where compute is built and how it consumes resources, why stop at environmental compliance? Why not also discuss public ownership, access for universities and cooperatives, and whether the infrastructure serves public needs?

Environmental planning and technological development dont have to be opposing projects. But they do require choices about who controls the resources and who receives the benefits.

Thats where the politics gets interesting.