If George Floyd was the catalyzing event that finally radicalized me against police, AI is the event that has truly radicalized me against capitalism.

Before: "yeah it's bad and sucks and hurts us, but like...idk"
Me now: "jesus christ burn it to the ground, it is simply a parasite on even the ECONOMY let alone the people."

AI truly feels like a pinnacle of extraction of workers and environment. To turn the world into a theme park for the wealthy. It makes me think of a...post somewhere online that's like "If you want to live in a walkable city but all the people working at restaurants and coffee shops can't afford to live there, you're living in a theme park." It's what they want. Because service industry jobs WILL still exist, but everything that makes us human will be extracted and sold. I might feel differently if that money were, i don't know, given back to us. But it never would be, never could be.

And it is ever more painful because I nearly feel like I *must* use it or be fired in short time if it comes to light I haven't been. If I don't, I will be unable to pay rent and they will hire someone else (IF ANYBODY?) to extract more from. And it'll be me and many people (so many more qualified than me, at that) competing for the scraps of not-all-in-on AI companies of which there will be increasingly few. Where are my morals except given away to the dollar for survival. Or competing for trade schools or whatever husks remain.

You might say "Jon that's pretty selfish that you didn't get radicalized until it might impact YOUR job and life" and like yeah, you might be right. But hey at least I got there? It's hard to be truly mad at things in an abstract, and admittedly my radicalization had been building but the past...6 months was just a breaking point.

to clarify: always thought capitalism was bullshit and exploitative, just hadn't quite hit "burn it to the ground" levels until recently.

@anderson_jon While I think it's important to at least acknowledge the selfishness (neutral) inherent in not acting on something until it affects you personally, people throwing shame at others for it all the time are fucking insufferable.

It's the same energy as telling an introvert "oh, look who finally decided to join us". If you get shamed regardless of which path you choose, there's no incentive to choose the correct one.

@anderson_jon

"always thought capitalism was bullshit and exploitative"

Indeed, but keep in mind capitalism is a spectrum, going from slavery and gilded-age all the way to social democracy. What we're seeing is a return to gilded-age capitalism. I'm reacting the same way as you are.

@anderson_jon We literally had to commit to "AI Fluency" expectations for the year. I need a new job, badly.
@anderson_jon It's a scary world out there as AI is imposed upon more and more asoects of our lives. The wirst thing is that AI actually isn't intelligent and everything is based upon historical theft of human creativity and data.