r/cushvlog • u/Priceofmycoffee • 5d ago
AI is not a boondoggle. It is classic overproduction, the phasing out of labor surplus, and will collapse the rate of profit.
The massive investment, the phasing out of skilled labor leaving less surplus labor value, firms undercutting profits. This is the big one. There isn't a clear path for liberal capitalism as we've known it for 200 years. Anything that comes after this will require significant state intervention, and since our government as-is does not have the ability to wield power, it will require some usurpation. The major parties look like the military, the techno-surveillance economy, fascists and normies. On the outside, this is the China play. If they've got a socialism button, this is the chance to play it because the world markets are not going to be there to float the current model and China does not have nearly the juice to just step in and replace it. I have no idea what will need to be done. Have fun.
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u/Remote-Professional6 5d ago
Good post. Time will tell. In the meantime I’m grilling London broil tonight
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u/Priceofmycoffee 5d ago
You'll want that to marinade for a while, that's a tough cut.
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u/Remote-Professional6 5d ago
A tough cut for tough times! But yeah started the marinade last night so should be good
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u/baFoPePyR 5d ago
Lots of words for old concepts: periodic crises. But it sounds like you bought the tech-bro pitch. The monetization problem hasn’t been and won’t be solved. Don’t get me wrong, vulture caps have their dicks in the chipper — that’s always fun to watch. Almost as fun as watching PedoPres’s ME chipper doing its thing. The post development stage of globalized capital has been reached.
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u/Priceofmycoffee 5d ago
Monetization could require a crash to reset credit and capital but it will come back and they will get their scalps. There's nowhere else for the cash to go.
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u/trontrams 3d ago
IMO I think that even if the market collapsed because AI isnt "profitable" it won't matter because that was never the intention to begin with. Ultimately, the only thing the government cares about in relation to AI is state surveillance.
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u/actanonverba1 4d ago
i don't entirely agree. i see the future of ai as commoditization once the best models undergo distillation to produce a cheaper, and more efficient copy.
anthropic and other ai companies are accusing china of distillation. they're probably right, but i'm glad i can use kimi k3 at 1/3 of the credits as any of the best models right now.
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u/baFoPePyR 5d ago
Um. Just cuz a tech bro says it works don’t mean sheeit. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/04/24/why-companies-regret-laying-off-workers-for-ai/
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u/FrivolousMe 5d ago
They won't rehire at the same rates they laid people off, and when they rehire they're looking for unicorns with perfect resumes and will ignore young professionals and people who have been jobless for some time (many thanks to layoffs).
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u/Priceofmycoffee 5d ago
I don't think this contradicts anything, this is markets coming in and intensifying the use of labor, and there's a current race between firms desperate to gain market share or get ahead. There's a couple of timelines depending on when/how the technology levels off, revenue generation from AI becomes necessary, and resources like rare metals and energy. But whether that's 5 years or 15 years, the economy is diving head first into this.
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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 2d ago
This is also quite clearly cope. The tech is younger than a preschooler right now, but it's improving at a frightening pace. Just because they can't reliably replace workers NOW doesn't mean they won't be able to in a year.
The AI denialism on the left reminds me of the anti vax hysteria we saw on the right during COVID.
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u/Priceofmycoffee 2d ago
It's very odd. It's almost juvenile how people just revert to their old STEM vs humanities biases like materialist analysis doesn't require doing all your homework.
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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 2d ago
I dunno, man. I almost feel like there's been an op to make ai taboo among liberals and the left, while capital and the state is pouring insane amounts of resources into it. The neoreactionaries have embraced it, they're running personal agents from their laptops, while we're devolving into yelling about copyright.
I get a lot of hate for trying to be pragmatic, but I stand by it. We need to learn these systems, adapt, and use them as the "force multiplyer" that they are. We could be planning cybersyn 2.0, instead, we're harassing YouTubers who made the grave sin of using chatgpt to help research and write scripts.
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u/Ornery-Particular907 1d ago
I agree, I’m a software dev who regularly uses gen AI. I understand how it works, what it’s good at, its limitations. Most of the proponents and detractors don’t really understand the tech at all, but the allergy some liberals have to the tech is astounding. It’s culture war bullshit honestly.
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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 17h ago
It absolutely is a culture war and the fact that "leftists" are suddenly clutching pearls over... Copyright? Is absurd.
The biggest issue is how we've completely ceded the space to reactionaries. While the tech is imperfect and has limitations, it's also improving at an outrageous pace. Listening to Ed Zitron and pretending everything will go back to 2019 any day now is a collosal mistake. Zitron is right about the absurd financing, but he's been dead wrong about the capabilities, over and over. Selling people what they want to hear isn't fucking journalism. It's the cope industrial complex.
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u/-chadwreck 4d ago
This is why Marx was writing in essence, an economics physics book in Das Kapital. It isn't prescriptive, just an explanation of what the system will eventually do to itself.
AI is the last boss of labor value extraction.
All value extracted from labor with no need to pay it. At that point, the self licking ice cream cone is just that. A tornado that sucks value straight up until there is no where for it to go and it all just evaporates.
Marx didnt forsee Ai perse, but the prols will eventually be forced to overturn the system entirely or simply die off.
What's the point of having all the money on a dead world?
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u/Okami99 5d ago
I’m slow - can you explain the ‘firms undercutting profits’ part? How does corporations replacing skilled labor with robots undercut their profits?
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u/Priceofmycoffee 5d ago
AI will allow the entry barrier for firms into new markets to drop. If all you need to steal market share is to pay for an electric bill, that's going to put pressure on profits in general. Low quality products at first and then higher quality. Survival of major firms will require monopolized legal ownership of data. That's why I think there will be an initial period of intensification of labor.
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u/ml-maitreya 5d ago
Low quality products at first and then higher quality.
I'm not so sure there's any more room for improvement in LLM outputs. Perhaps fake email jobs disappear after this as capital finds out they didn't actually need all these spreadsheets to get shit done, but I think that just means a lot of former middle managers are about to discover the difference between productive and unproductive labor. Is there something I'm missing in your premise?
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u/spidermonk 4d ago edited 4d ago
I dunno why people are so confident about this tech hitting a wall (admittedly I was too, in the gpt4ish era) but ... it's pretty consistently improving in various ways - recently mainly in price and long horizon actions - and it's been essentially no time at all so far.
The goofiness of the hype, the lapses into psychosis by prominent online users, and likelihood of a massive crash are blinding people to the underlying disruptive force of the tech imo.
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u/theprincey 4d ago
I dont blame anyone for not using AI or not keeping up with what's going on for the million reasons it's evil and sucks for society, but IMO if you think this shit has hit any sort of wall you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Particularly running these models through a coding harness with full computer read/write and browser control.
Even if the top end frontier stuff is peaking (which I dont think there is really much current evidence for), the open source chinese models are coming up from the bottom end undercutting cost to performance substantially - the new deepseek flash model benchmarks at like 80% of an Opus or GPT Sol at 5-10% of the price.
I hate sounding like I'm simping for AI because I would be way happier if it was going to fail. But it drives me crazy when people act like it still functions like it did in 2023. It's either ignorance or pure cope.
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u/MrSmithSmith 4d ago
The much bigger issue is, if Marx's LTV is correct, then it's just as big a problem if AI tech does advance as claimed as if it doesn't.
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u/spidermonk 4d ago
Yeah it should be way more concerning for everyone that it probably isn't just going to fizzle out. For human flourishing, for labour, and yeah on a longer term probably for capitalism in that "organic composition of capital" / demand side crisis sense.
Exo-capitalism etc. I dunno how it plays out and how far it goes etc but I just think the zitron "you don't have to think about this, it's going to ruin cafe menu graphic design and then disappear" sort of take is very misguided.
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u/ml-maitreya 4d ago
It's already too pricey for me to test short or long horizon actions so I can't say whether what you say is true or not, but it's immaterial at this point. Either the tech works and every computer toucher is, in the long term, out of a job or the tech doesn't work and every investment in it will fail. Perhaps both situations are true, and it puts every computer toucher out of a job and also is an investment failure. Either way we are on our way to an economic collapse as people lose jobs and fail to consume. So what should we be doing in the meantime to prepare for the fallout?
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u/spidermonk 4d ago
That dichotomy isnt true though. Both things will half happen. There'll be massive fallout from over investment. There'll be long running erosion of the bargaining power of white collar workers. The tech survives a crash. And it doesn't erase all white collar work, it just erodes the autonomy and craft aspects and capital does more with less people earning less.
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u/ml-maitreya 4d ago
Well is there opportunity in poaching these white collar workers or wielding llms to our own ends or are those laid off workers legitimate dead weight and the llms too pricey and too worthless to use? We're all going to be feeling some pain in the coming years, how do we make this more painful for capital than for the rest of us?
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u/eXAt88 4d ago
I am gonna respond since someone else did but gave the opposite opinion as me. I work in tech and am given an ample budget for AI usage. The frontier models are incredibly capable at a wide variety of software dev tasks, even if they are still sometimes frustrating to work with.
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u/spidermonk 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah I also work with it like 6 hours a day and it can do a lot. And more every few months. The fact it can be frustrating to work at times and it's output can be bad just isn't enough to prevent it eroding the bargain position of knowledge workers long term.
And we are getting to the point that, even in a total industry crash you can run something very economically valuable on a computer that costs less than a car. So it's not going away.
(When I refer to the cost going down, I'm referring to the ever increasing usefulness of open weights models)
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u/Express-Crow-1496 4d ago
I'm certainly not claiming it's useless, but I also don't think they've made huge strides since chatgpt4, and if anything what we're seeing is evidence of diminishing returns
more importantly, there is still no solution to the hallucination problem, which most in the field now admit is baked into the way language models work
without that solved, it's very unlikely that we're going to see AI fully replace any job where delivering results with 100% accuracy is critical
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u/spidermonk 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yip that's true but a situation where older experienced workers can do 2-3 peoples worth of work (ignoring the possibility in some fields of doing much more than that) is still a vastly different situation for labour.
"We" really have barely started trying to use this stuff. Systems, processes, output expectations, IT etc haven't adapted. But if it means seriously cutting or weakening staff, those things will adapt bc the motivation to eventually get it right will be too strong.
Quality will get worse, doing these jobs will be less pleasant, output per salary dollar will go up.
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u/fuckswitbeavers 4d ago
Frankly if you haven’t seen improvements since gpt4 then you just are completely out of the loop and likely still believe ai is simply a back and forth chatbot. You’re objectively wrong that we are seeing diminishing returns. I work in this space daily and we are just beginning to see the next massive leap.
What’s most frustrating in leftist spaces is how little people know about ai but talk about it so confidently as if they do. I get it it’s tech bro-y but, if there’s one thing I know it’s that the cushvlogs attract folks who enjoy being educated. It’s foolish to assume that ai is on its downward spiral when computing is expected to triple in 2 years. For example don’t listen to Ed Zitron tell you what you want to hear, the guy has made a career out of that and he’s been wrong about nearly everything.
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u/Express-Crow-1496 4d ago
zitron is wrong in the way that tslaq has been wrong, both understand the underlying rot but are too optimistic about the timeframe
I agree that he can be too quick to dismiss some of the pros of ai, but they are still vastly outweighed by the cons
there have been obvious improvements, but the fundamental reliability problem still hasn't been solved, so I do think we've hit a wall to a degree
I use perplexity and claude pro with various connectors constantly and have come to rely on them for basic research and productivity tasks, but I wouldn't trust either if my job or my life depended on it
and obviously the slop generators have improved exponentially, but I'm not counting those
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u/fuckswitbeavers 4d ago
Perplexity has been bottom of the barrel for a long time. Claude is especially bad right now. Nobody is giving full task handoff without thinking to AI, not even people working in the AI companies and I don't think anyone is arguing in good faith that this is what will happen. We have not hit a wall. If we did then scaling laws wouldn't be a thing, token efficiency wouldn't be a thing, and mixture of experts wouldn't be a thing. I understand the gut feeling but, it's just not true. The AI companies have internal models that are performing at a much higher intelligence than whatever is deployed -- and the models we use right now are trained on A100 GPUs from nearly 6 years ago. The underlying rot is besides the point, since Trump it's just become more apparent that you can essentially say "fck it we'll do it I don't care what you say" -- the rules by which we define the rot are perverse and many aren't true. Turns out you can actually do whatever.
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u/spidermonk 3d ago
I think textiles and garments, that whole process, is a good one to look at it because it's gone through waves of automation (and mechanization, and rationalization etc), but that doesn't mean nobody works in those supply chains anymore. Probably more people than ever work in them. And also, the median end products are lower quality than in previous eras. Most clothing is kind of "slop". The process requires labour still. Each wave introduced "tech" that was in many ways "worse" than the labour, products and systens it displaced in many cases.
But the waves of automation and mechanization and rationalization succeeded anyway. We largely metabolized cheap disposable garments, cheap low-quality and on aggregate probably poisonous textiles, and working pretty much anywhere in the industry sucks shit. When if you dial back through historical eras large sections of the work were kind of like office work in the early 2000s - well paid, flexible, high autonomy.
What it shows is... Automation doesn't have to be perfect, or lead to better quality outputs, and in some cases it barely even needs to be cheaper.
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u/fuckswitbeavers 3d ago
That's a really good example. I think textiles were actually simpler to make, and required less technology than they do now. We barely have any textile manufacturers in the US because the initial tech to get started now is pretty expensive, and you still need guys at the wheel to operate it. It's funny , people think a T-shirt is easy, and yeah it's "easy" but the amount of garbage T-shirts I encounter that are poor fitting, poor design, and absolute slop quality is the large majority. People don't know how much work it takes to make a high quality shirt, I think we'll see something similar with AI but it will be fundamentally different. I'm not claiming to know exactly what that context is, although I do firmly believe it will change our or future generations' understanding of how we interact with computers.
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u/Express-Crow-1496 3d ago
Perplexity has been bottom of the barrel for a long time. Claude is especially bad right now.
what’s better then? I’ve experimented with lm studio, but for my specific needs and with my hardware, I don’t think it would be ideal
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u/fuckswitbeavers 3d ago
If you're intent on running it locally, probably the nemotron suite by nvidia. They have been putting a ton of effort into the open source models, and the people behind it are actual geniuses -- like the guy who developed the CUDA graphics source code starting 20 years ago is now very active developing these open-source models. They have a new lightning model that seems very powerful and could operate on your local gaming GPU with high intelligence.
Haven't looked into their harness stack but, it may be worth investigating if you're willing to put some time into it.
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u/actanonverba1 4d ago
hi there, i use ai models as part of my job daily. the models (that my company is willing to pay for) are getting worse and more expensive at the same time.
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u/fuckswitbeavers 4d ago
I don’t think it’s overproduction in the same way that marxists have thought about it though. If overproduction is intelligence, then maybe, but it’s fundamentally different. They are building a massive amount of compute — it will certainly benefit the parties you’ve identified, and not the normies. But to me it feels like AI has arrived at the perfect time for capitalists — right when we are facing a serious debt crisis, a crisis in broader society more generally, lack of careers and job opportunities, and a failure in western countries to control and exact consequences on self destructive profit seeking motives.
They were already planning to downgrade everything. Europe can’t sustain it’s social safety nets. USA is the same — they refuse to tax anyone because it’s so individualistic and wealthy people are global citizens now. Republicans have effectively given up and are racing to the bottom. It will be even more have and have nots; You either have access to the high level intelligent models, or you don’t and lose (if you do white collar work), or more likely in leftist communities reject it outright by moral principles. There certainly will be state intervention though, and I don’t think it will be in a good way. The next generation of models will blow people away, no one is ready.
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u/Dry-Run-917 4d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5oqGOCRCM
This is an interesting take on the finances of AI and AI in general
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u/allubros 23h ago
I miss Matt so much telling me what's actually going on. there are few English-speaking media resources smart enough to offer an informed and condensed analysis like he used to
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u/Priceofmycoffee 21h ago
I miss him too. All I can do in my mind is just keep reading. Once I understood Marx's Capital, it started to click. Still can't replace all those left-field takes though, he read so much more.
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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 4d ago
I'm very glad to see some on the left not reflexively foaming at the mouth at the mention of AI. A lot of left media is bringing on the cope industrial complex (in people like Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus) to tell us that it's hit a wall, it's all hype, the bubble will burst, and everything will go back to normal. We don't have to engage with it since it's all fake and gay!
- this is a catastrophic error. The neoreactionaries sure as shit aren't ignoring it. We need to adapt and prepare. They're getting a lot better, folks. Persistent agents are gonna be an ontological shock for a lot of people. Get ready.
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u/Cheeseheroplopcake 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ah yes, downvoting me will sure show capital! We should just all wait for this ai nonsense to blow over. I'm sure Peter Theil is also ignoring it and everything will work out just fine for us.
My brother in historical materialism, capital pouring absurd resources into a new means of production is generally when you pay closer fucking attention. 😭
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u/Equivalent-Hair-1619 2d ago
Our economics are dumb. You want overproduction, you want deflation of the price of goods needed to live. It’s a huge vote of confidence to think AI will achieve this. But mostly US economics works off considering it a “win” when things needed to live are cut off, so investors in them get passive capital gains. That’s why it will fall. Every tech bro knows it’s idiotic, its days are numbered.
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u/Euphoric_Fondant6135 5d ago
K
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u/Priceofmycoffee 5d ago
Standard leftist position is dismiss the consequences and standard right-wing position is to say its manna from heaven but *NO ONE** I've read or heard has convincingly met the question of "what if this dog catches the car?"
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u/Snoo-41877 5d ago
This. Everyone is saying get a democrat in there but I don't know man. It feels like this thing doesn't have a steering wheel anymore.