The pessimist in me sees every other outcome
2. Designs require advanced simulations which benefit from AI both in building the simulations and running them.
3. Material science benefits from models learning how particles interact and materials behave in certain conditions so we can predict which materials are worth producing.
These are odd the top of my head and I'm not a fusion physicist. There's probably a lot more examples.
The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive, technologically revolutionary, and disruptive.
The failure here is that the technological revolutions since should have been a wake-up call for the progressive/liberal/left leaning politics to update priors, but instead there's a conservatism that has ingrained itself as a reaction to the technological revolutions since. The left leaning politics of today remains the same politics of the 19th and 20th century with the same rhetoric and discourse. It's frozen in time, and wants to conserve the politics of that era.
What would a left liberal politics look like if it were updated with the technological fundamentals of today?
Subversive to what? A winner-take-all, might-makes-right feudal mindset?
A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all.
Nationalizing or demanding a democratized project for frontier level intelligence that's easily accessible to all Americans, for example might be an idea.
This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation.
The federal government believes that if China achieves AI dominance and we are not competitive on either the industrial or cognitive stacks, the people and planet will be at the whim of China and will not do better anyway (and come on — look at how China's fishing fleets treat the parts of the world they have unrestricted access to).
You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis.
But, I do not have that button, and I believe the thesis that for the US to thrive, or even survive, we have to win at AI. So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.
A left leaning politics does not just address the change, or accept change as is, but fundamentally invents the change. It is the revolutionary movement that leverage modernity, that is to say newness, your scientific revolutions, your enlightenment ideals, etc. to create new politics. Politics that are emancipatory.
The left is supposed to be a politics of historical invention. Using modernity to create new institutions, new rights, new publics, and new forms of collective life. Contemporary American left-liberal politics has become largely defensive and curatorial instead.
In other words the left generally invents the future, and dictates the changes in politics, that's what makes it 'progressive', that's why it's against reactionary politics.
So I'm saying the left leaning politics of today has fallen prey to closed, diminutive, reactionary politics, and there is new real new left politics that's inventing anything. At least not in America.
There was a glimmer with early technology, but the left rejected that politics in favor for stale institutionalism (the same ones from the 19th and 20th century), and ceded that technological ground to techno-fascists/rightwing/authoritarian/etc.etc. politics.
Left-leaning politics has moved to very mild, not-even-social-democracy policies, taxation of wage income, a decreased focus on capital owners.
Left-leaning politics has thus been transformed beyond belief and has very little to do with what it used to. Most politicians have no idea about physical reality, which is the ultimate source of technology, but live sometimes in a world of administration, sometimes in a world of laws and sometimes in a world of politics only.
Left-liberals don't exist. Liberalism is a right-wing ideology: free trade, laissez-faire.
So I don't understand at all what you mean. What are the SocDems who have gone from being SocDems to not knowing what social democracy is and who now think about things like welfare and administrative stuff and living in a world of compromises attached to?
I can't see that they're attached to anything, and I think I despise them for it. At least someone who looks back to the past can look at it and critique it and see what ideas were valuable, what the real goals were, that led to different positive achievements.
goatlover•50m ago