Activists at the COP28 Climate Summit expose links between big oil and the Israeli government assault on Gaza
Workers’ Intelligence, Not AI, Will Create the Communist World We Need
An existential threat to all life on Earth grows relentlessly. Climate change melts glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps. It creates unpredictable hurricanes, floods, and fires worldwide. It drives to extinction species that are critical to life on earth.
Meanwhile, capitalists send workers to die and kill each other in Russia, Ukraine, Palestine/Israel, and many other conflicts.
Capitalist rulers try to distract us with contrived election campaigns, inflation, deflation, and interest rates. With the usual drivel of Christmas shopping. With fake climate conferences like COP28, dominated by fossil fuel industries. And now with the alleged wonders and future economic value of artificial intelligence (AI).
The fanciful – if not insane – lie of liberal and neo-liberal economists is that free market capitalism can “innovate” and “disrupt” and magically reverse the fundamental laws of physics. By simply creating “carbon markets,” they say, we can challenge the laws of thermodynamics and continue consuming like there’s no tomorrow.
By shifting from fossil fuels to less energy-dense materials (also mined from the bowels of the earth) we can continue to amass cars for eight billion people, many of whom are starving. We can drive to our heart’s content because we won’t emit as much pollution. Most cars today are 50% plastic, made from the byproducts of fossil fuels.
They tell us we can safely ignore the horrors of child labor in the mines in Africa and elsewhere so that the global bourgeoisie can fly and drive to the Alps or Aspen to ski down slopes made with artificial snow because real snow is no longer predictable. Carbon credits, they say, will magically offset pollution.
And where would capitalism be without its technocrat bootlickers who ask us to believe that AI, such as ChatGPT, will magically turn the planet into a science-fiction utopia? ChatGPT is nothing but a statistical sleight of hand. It is a “stochastic parrot” that can predict the next word in a long string with good accuracy.
Its predictive abilities are far better than those of capitalist economists who can predict exactly nothing. But for AI to make its predictions, it must be trained on massive amounts of data. Some data is curated by hand by workers who get paid literally pennies per day. And the training takes enormous amounts of power, enormous amounts of cooling, and enormous amounts of space.
AI model training workloads consume three times more power than standard workloads. In 2022, Google’s data centers alone consumed over fifteen times the electric power of San Francisco’s residential consumption.
A new paper in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics has shown that, at one time, the temperature of Venus was only a few degrees different from today’s Earth. How did Venus become inhospitable? The team’s simulations show how a runaway greenhouse process can turn a livable planet into an inhospitable nightmare in which hundreds of millions will suffer and die for the short-term profit of a few thousand people.
None of this needs to happen. A communist society will exist to fulfill the needs of all people in a sustainable way. It can easily mitigate the inevitable effects of climate change.
Communism can eventually build a society where all sentient beings, using their own intelligence, can live a fulfilling life. Art can thrive without being calculated (not created) by the tech companies for profit. Science can advance for the well-being of all, not by using new AI algorithms for the profits of a few.
To accomplish all of this will need the concerted and synchronized struggle of the international working classes. It requires an international party that truly represents the international working classes. Join us in struggling for revolution to create a better future for generations to come.