In assessing the present-day irruption of artificial intelligence, especially so-called generative AI based on highly effective linguistic-probabilistic systems, the starting point is to recognise that what is at stake is the development of the productive forces. The next step is to relate the critical aspects of AI – so hotly debated in the struggle between capitals who have a stake in it – not primarily to the intrinsic character of the technology itself, but to the fundamental contradiction between the development of the productive forces and capitalist relations of production.
First, for Engels, the brain is a product of labour. It is in the dialectical relationship of mutual action and reaction with labour – made possible by the articulation of the hand freed by man's upright posture, the result of "hundreds of thousands of years" of natural selection – that the brain evolved to perform the most complex functions and develop self-awareness. In turn, labour is an expression of the social relations at the basis of specific socio-economic formations across successive modes of production. Therefore, the brain is a social product, mediated by the hand that wields the tool, by labour that puts it in relation with the brains of other humans, and by the language made necessary by those relations.
Second, this relationship of upright posture-hand-language-brain, and the role played by labour in humanisation, is neglected by current conceptions and is also unrecognised by Darwinian evolutionists themselves. This is because the division into classes and the separation between manual labour and intellectual labour – in the latter's connection with the ruling class and its apparatus (schools, the Churches, etc.) – has led to the prevalence of the idealist conception that gives prominence to the brain and its representations.
Third, humanity has applied science to nature, and nature has thereby been modified through science, technology, and labour. But it has been difficult to go beyond the initial and immediate effects of this transformation, barely taking into consideration its secondary and long-term effects.
Fourth, and even more importantly, science has not been applied to the social consequences of labour and to its implications, from the division of labour to class struggle, thus depriving humanity of a vision of the wider, long-term effects of productive activity. Bourgeois economic science, i.e., classical political economy, has been unable to go any further. In order to regulate human labour activity according to a truly conscious plan, knowledge is not enough; an overturning of the mode of production and social order is necessary.
Fifth, the individual capitalist is concerned only with immediate profit, not with what will happen to the commodity or the buyer afterwards. The same applies to what will happen to nature and – we might add – to human nature itself.
More wars; there could be even a world war! All caused by imperialist competition between powers: the US, China, the EU, India, Brazil, Russia, etc. More nationalism (even with continental flavor like European nationalism), more militarism, more revolts, and possibly internationalist revolutions to unite the global working class against all wars and nationalisms!
"It [Anthropic] said DeepSeek's operation involved over 150,000 exchanges". In my humble opinion, a mere 150k exchange for an LLM could only be a benchmarking and not a distillation! I think the US companies should accept that after decades they have rivals surpassing them, just like they did Europeans almost a century ago.
Gulags were the worst kind of exploitation; that is why we always were anti-Stalinist and always identified the USSR as 'state capitalism'! The fact that a state 'claims' socialism does not mean it 'is' socialist, just as North Korea claiming 'democratic' people's republic does not mean it is 'democratic'. Clear?
Our heros fought and died for 8-hour working days and when we stop fighting, we go back to 12-hour working days! That is why you need to search for theinternationalism.org
We are close to treating PTSD of people who we sent to massacre other people, and we justified their massacre as heroic act. Great achievement for humanity!
I think if you support Netanyahu, you are not in a position to condemn these atrocities. The problem is that Iranian pro-democracy opposition is demolished by far-right sometimes neo-Nazi monarchists!
I bought the latest Intel MacBook Air and after few months they released M1 MacBook Air. Then they release an update, I did as I should, and it broke my laptop! I lost all my data! They fixed it for me in a couple of weeks without providing me a substitute! And they were arrogant enough to behave like they did a favor to not charge me for the repair! It was 2020! My MacBook Air never became like before, and it died a couple of times in a year, which it recovered by itself. And some months ago it died, and it didn't recover! I lost lots of data I spent thousands of hours and I trusted that I can have them even if my laptop dies. Now, I have no way to recover my data!
We still do not have a standardized way to represent Machine Learning concepts. For example in vision model, I see lots of papers confused about the "skip connections" and "residual connection" and when they concatenate channels they call them "residual connection" while it shows that they haven't understood why we call them "residual" in the first place. In my humble opinion, each conference, and better be a confederation of conferences, work together to provide a glossary, a technical guideline, and also a special machine translation tool, to correct a non-clear-with-lots-of-grammatical-error-English like mine!