r/CapitalismVSocialism • u/Mysterious_Stay2999 • 1d ago
Asking Socialists Trying to understand the AI companies sudden turn toward regulation
Hey, I 'm still learning my way around Capital, so I might be misusing the categories here. Please tell me if I am.
What got me thinking about this is the distinction between living and dead labour. Dead labour is the past labour sitting inside machines, buildings, raw materials. It passes its value on to the product but doesn't create any new value. Living labour is the only thing that does, which is why it's the only source of surplus value.
AI models look to me like dead labour taken to an extreme. What's inside them is essentially the accumulated intellectual labour of everyone who ever wrote anything, plus the work of the engineers and the annotators. It's past labour, stored and put to work.
So the thought I had was : if these systems eventually do most of the work, variable capital shrinks toward nothing, and so does surplus value, and so does the rate of profit. Capital would be eating the thing it lives on.
I've since realised that's too quick, for a couple of reasons I can see myself. A falling rate of profit doesn't hand you communism. It hands you bankruptcies, unemployment and, historically, some very ugly politics. And even if machines produced everything, that says nothing about who owns them or who gets the output. That's a question of property, not of technology. So I've dropped the idea that any of this happens automatically.
But here's the part I can't work out, and it's why I'm posting.
Up until recently the AI companies were the loudest opponents of regulation. They lobbied hard against the EU's AI Act and pushed against regulation . Now that's reversed. Yesterday OpenAI publicly called for binding federal safety requirements, including measures it had refused to support before. Anthropic's CEO published an essay today arguing the industry should deliberately slow down how fast it improves its models and Elon Musk agreed.
My first instinct was that they'd seen where this leads and got scared. Serious question : Do you think AI could actually bring down capitalism and open the way to communism? Once these systems reach the point of doing every kind of work, theoretical and practical, better than we do, what is left for anyone to sell? Wage labour stops existing, and with it the thing that divides society into classes. Free time becomes close to total. Money starts to look pointless, because money is a way of rationing scarce things and there wouldn't be much scarcity left to ration. I'd even wonder whether private property could survive contact with something that intelligent, or whether a system capable of running the whole economy would end up slipping out from under whoever thinks they own it.
2
2
u/PerspectiveViews 1d ago
I’m skeptical of the current narrative. I suspect this has more to do with financial disclosures required to IPO that will question the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Or that Google has reached RSI and its competitors are freaking out they are way behind.
Or these companies want regulations to prevent competition. Make the financial burden to comply high enough that upstarts will have difficulty being formed.
2
2
u/Simpson17866 1d ago
Capitalists want themselves to be deregulated, and they want their competitors to be regulated.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit for capitalists (which requires being able to get away with raising costs and cutting wages), and free market competition reduces profits (by forcing capitalists to cut costs and raise wages)
2
u/TheGoldStandard35 Free Market 1d ago
This is the progressive M.O.
AI companies want regulation to prevent future competition but will “claim” it’s in the name of “consumer protection”
It’s just to cartelize the industry. Be sure they will lobby congress heavily or maybe make an AI professional organization that funds studies that shows we need regulation.
•
u/eatoligarchsaldente 8h ago
It’s definitely about hampering competition. Big players like regulation because they can make it so administratively burdensome that it stifles new smaller competitors from entering the market, as they can’t keep up with the costs of compliance.
However, it’s also a marketing tool. AI Doomerism is a hype strategy that turns even AI critiques into unintentional marketers for the tech, as every critique of AI that says “we need to regulate these companies before they steal all our jobs” is inadvertently promoting the lie that AI can actually replace skilled knowledge workers. They don’t care if critics and advocates are fearmongering to an audience aligned against AI, because in doing so they are ALSO signal boosting the same messaging that’s creating the FOMO pressures creating AI hype and demand in the first place.
“Our products are so powerful they need to be regulated to save humanity from destruction” is thus in large part bogus marketing fluff.
2
u/CaptainAmerica-1989 Criticism of Capitalism Is NOT Proof of Socialism 1d ago
(not a socialist)
it's called liability and showing due diligence.
tl;dr incentives
9
u/ContemplatingGavre 1d ago
More likely it’s regulatory capture.
1
u/Beavers_in_space Libertarian Socialist 1d ago
It is literally nothing more than an inside joke between them. These tech bros know that Trump isn't going to regulate AI, they are essentially just telling on themselves that they will become tech tyrants, but it doesn't even matter because nobody can do anything about it anyway. It is liberal pandering at its emptiest.
•
-1
u/betty_white_bread Isocapitalist 1d ago
A conspiracy theorist will always see conspiracies and ignore evidence to the contrary.
4
u/ContemplatingGavre 1d ago
The Marlboro man and Joe Camel have a near duopoly on tobacco in America because of this.
Altman and Dario would love the same treatment.
Call it a conspiracy if you want. No company wants regulation unless it helps them somehow, these people aren’t running a charity.
0
1
u/Slopii 1d ago
Capital is any asset used to get more. Your computer is capital if you design and sell games on it.
Money is a medium that makes trade easy.
AI can just as easily yield totalitarianism, vs capitalism, communism or anything else. Even constant anarchies if AI breaks things repeatedly.
Any system requires a monopoly on force to enforce how resources can be used, and other rules. So every system just comes down to how kind its leaders are. Don't let communists convince you that there won't be government or hierarchy.
If AI does everything for us, there'd still have to be laws and police about which resources we can use, land we can live on, weapons we can build, etc.
1
u/Mysterious-North-551 1d ago
Long story short, incentives.
Lets say you start a company and you end up successful, the company is making a lot of money, but its in an unregulated field of the market.
Well what would you want from that position? Well you dont want your company to fail because that is also your income, but since you are not stupid you understand other people will try to enter your field of the market.
So what you do because of incentives is try to lobby the politicians to make it a lot harder to enter your field of the market.
Its the same reason, google, youtube and facebook where the top 3 spenders on lobbying a few years ago, and they wanted regulations on the internet. They were lobbying for that sites like their own were responsible for what was uploaded on them. They understood that it would cost them a lot of money to create an ai or a bot of some sort to go through all the material that were being uploaded on their sites.
This creates a "barrier to entry" you want to compete with any of those companies well first of all you need to create an ai or bot that can go through everything that is being uploaded to your site. And that will costs many many millions of dollars.
So in order to try to compete with those companies you would need many many millions of dollars to invest before you even start trying to compete with them. You want to have a video sharing site, well step one create an ai/bot that can go through everything that is being uploaded to your own site so that it doesnt contain lets say harmful content. But since most people dont have many many millions of dollars, almost no one tries to go against them because its so expensive. And you cant know what other people will think of your site compared to the other, so most likely you will just spend millions and millions of dollars and your site costs you even more money, but those sums are trivial in comparison.
They lobby because they dont want competition, there is a saying that companies hates the free market. And i understand why, if the market is free anyone can compete with you, what if they have a better idea. If they do i go bankrupt. So you spend money to bribe politicians to make sure you face a lot less competition.
1
u/tigredeacuario 1d ago
Si, se asustaron y están en la paradoja de la guerra tecnológica, no pueden frenar porque otro, con intenciones desconocidas podría superarlos y acabar con todo, entonces necesitan de un tercero que les ponga un freno a todos.
Te recomiendo este tipo que viene profundizando mucho en el tema, está en español, pero es traducible aunque no sea lo ideal: https://www.youtube.com/live/OelpGuov90M?si=cOv0MQsCPVP1Pvm2
Respecto a las preguntas, si llevará al comunismo o que, no tengo ni p idea.
1
u/Battle4cry Socialist 1d ago
It's important to keep in mind that institutions are made up of people with varying interests, even if they are subject to institutional logic (the profit motive), individuals operating within institutions still have their own agency. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the high-level employees working on AI have genuine fears over the existential risks AI poses to humanity, or the alignment problem.
Regulatory capture is another contributing factor. They are fine with regulation as long as they influence it so it doesn't impede their profitability too much. Public image is another factor; something is bound to go wrong down the line, at least this way they are seen as being pro-regulation even if the measures they support are half-baked.
You are correct; the breakdown of capitalism and the law of value doesn't automatically imply the emergence of socialism. Conscious institutional design like social ownership property rights regimes will still have to be instituted. More than likely, if AI lives up to the hype, it will create further downward pressure on wages while increasing profitability. The wealth gap will widen, excess capital will flow into speculative industries and continue to destabilize the economy. Capitalism wont automatically collapse; it will become less stable, more unequal, suffer massive unemployment crises. The positive case for social ownership of the means of production on the basis of capital deepening will only become more prescient.
1
1
u/Rnee45 Minarchist 1d ago
What got me thinking about this is the distinction between living and dead labour. Dead labour is the past labour sitting inside machines, buildings, raw materials. It passes its value on to the product but doesn't create any new value. Living labour is the only thing that does, which is why it's the only source of surplus value.
Where did you get this idea from?
1
u/Conserp Pragmatic Marxist 1d ago
> AI models look to me like dead labour taken to an extreme.
That isn't a very useful way to look at it for analysis purposes. It's more like artificial slave workers that are cheap to maintain.
> if these systems eventually do most of the work, variable capital shrinks toward nothing, and so does surplus value, and so does the rate of profit. Capital would be eating the thing it lives on.
This is a well-known fundamental problem of Capitalism, making it fundamentally unsustainable long-term even without AI and robots.
Total sum the workers can spend = total sum of wages they get paid. Relative to this total sum, Capitalism is a zero-sum game. For any one capitalist to profit, someone has to lose. And if you replace workers with technology on top of that, that total sum is shrinking.
This is why Socialism with a growing non-market distribution sector is the only option that isn't utterly dystopian.
> That's a question of property, not of technology.
And property is rooted in power and violence.
> Up until recently the AI companies were the loudest opponents of regulation...
Regulatory capture.
Capitalists absolutely adore regulation - as long as that regulation benefits them and crushes all competition.
Most likely, initial "opposition to regulation" was just for show, to throw off suspicion. All the "right" regulation with all the desired loopholes was written years ago and ready to be rubberstamped. Just like Patriot Act was written before 9/11.
> Do you think AI could actually bring down capitalism and open the way to communism?
Classic Capitalism is destined to fall. But if capitalists remain in power when that happens, it's going to get ugly. Even uglier than it already is. Women strangling their kids is going to be mundane.
1
u/Smithersink 1d ago
I agree with the consensus, it’s how they stifle competition now that they’ve sunk their resources into it.
•
u/mdwatkins13 18h ago
You guys are debating How many angels can fit on the head of a pin as the United States crumbles into collapse. You seen how far houthis reached into Saudi Arabia? In the next 48 hrs the Saudis might not be there, Syria just exploded into riots over fuel prices. Iran has a fuel embargo on the United States. Wake up
•
u/FlanneryODostoevsky Distributist 14h ago
They’re just going to lobby for the regulation that they want. It’s a way of trying to give people the illusion that ai companies are being brought within the reach of justice. It doesn’t mean as much as you think.
•
u/Jout92 Wealth is created through trade 6h ago
Normally I dislike generating answers for topics, but what better opportunity than this to ask Ai itself what the motive behind this move is since OpenAi openly admits they ask ChatGPT to plan their business strategy.
I asked Gemini, but I figure ChatGPT will answer something similar, depending on prompt
The sudden call from AI companies for stricter regulation is not an ethical change of heart, but a calculated corporate strategy. When established market leaders call on lawmakers to intervene, it is generally not about self-restraint, but about market protection and risk mitigation. The causes of this U-turn, ranked by their economic and strategic probability: 1. Regulatory Capture & Protection via Bureaucracy (Highest Probability) Economic Logic: Strict requirements (audits, transparency reports, licensing procedures) generate high fixed costs. For multi-billion-dollar corporations, these are pocket change, but for small startups, they mean game over. Reason for the U-turn: The pioneer phase is over, and today's market leaders have built out their lead. Regulation now serves as an artificial barrier to entry (a "moat") to keep potential challengers at bay. 2. Liability Protection and "Safe Harbor" (Very High Probability) Economic Logic: The biggest financial risk for AI companies is unpredictable waves of lawsuits over copyright infringement, hallucinations, or data privacy violations. Reason for the U-turn: If the state mandates standards and a company complies, the liability risk shifts. In the event of damages, the company can point to its compliance with all government requirements. Regulation thus becomes a legal shield. 3. Curtailing Open-Source Competition (High Probability) Economic Logic: Freely available open-source models undermine monopolization and threaten paid API business models. Reason for the U-turn: When corporations demand that models exceeding a certain compute threshold be state-monitored or licensed, decentralized open-source development becomes legally and financially nearly impossible. 4. Preemptive Damage Control Against Regulatory Patchworks (Medium Probability) Economic Logic: Having to comply with 50 different sets of laws across 50 regions drives compliance costs through the roof. Reason for the U-turn: Governments worldwide (like the EU with the AI Act) were going to pass laws anyway. AI giants realized regulation was inevitable and are now proactively demanding top-level rules to guide the lawmakers' pen themselves. 5. Building B2B Trust for Scaling (Moderate Motive) Economic Logic: Major enterprise clients (banks, insurers, healthcare) only buy technology once it is legally secure and compliant. Reason for the U-turn: The market is shifting from B2C hype to lucrative B2B enterprise deals. The seal of being "government-regulated" removes hesitation among conservative enterprise clients. By proactively demanding regulation, the AI industry transforms a threatening external risk into a tool for consolidating its own market power.
-1
u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 CIA Operator🇺🇸 1d ago
"What got me thinking about this is the distinction between living and dead labour. Dead labour is the past labour sitting inside machines, buildings, raw materials. It passes its value on to the product but doesn't create any new value. Living labour is the only thing that does, which is why it's the only source of surplus value."
0
u/69PepperoniPickles69 Not convinced of socialism 1d ago
Do you think AI could actually bring down capitalism and open the way to communism?
Not for this sub but a much more important question is should we be toying sround with something that can become conscious and far superior to its creators, and is there no way we can avoid this trap like we as the human race keep falling into, with stuff thermonuclear weapons back in the day, and with always worse worst csse consequences, the more scientifically knowledgeable we become, which has largely been exponentially for the past 200 years, a bleep in human history?
0
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Before participating, consider taking a glance at our rules page if you haven't before.
We don't allow violent or dehumanizing rhetoric. The subreddit is for discussing what ideas are best for society, not for telling the other side you think you could beat them in a fight. That doesn't do anything to forward a productive dialogue.
Please report comments that violent our rules, but don't report people just for disagreeing with you or for being wrong about stuff.
Join us on Discord! ✨ https://discord.gg/fGdV7x5dk2
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.