Directly to the left of a tasteful yet austere exposed concrete pillar are floor-to-ceiling windows, which give my apartment a magnificent vista of the endless sprawling highways and parking lots of the so-called “city” of Houston. It sits on the top floor of a recently constructed luxury mid-rise in a gentrified neighborhood, where I stand ready to renew the lease for another 13 months of this lifestyle. And why not? It’s a nice lifestyle and I can afford it.
It’s affordable because I am awarded handsomely via selling my labor to the highest bidder, and right now the top bidder wants me to engine the oils of capital by writing automated trading software at a mid-tier high-frequency trading firm. Like any good liberal, I of course had a slight distaste for the ostentatious and ferocious nature of Wall Street (not to mention the nagging trifle of wealth inequality that provides a slight pang of guilt when one exists on the winning side of that equation), but I had the notion that capitalism was fundamentally a neutral aspect of society at worst and if I just voted for the guy with a D next to his name—or the two famously unpopular non-guys the D’s nominated—that everything would turn out okay, actually!
Besides, I voted for Bernie in the last primary and I’m going to recast my ballot for the man in the upcoming March 2020 primary. After Bernie wins the nomination, we can finally get rid of this Trump guy for good and get the country back on track to a brighter future, one where we might start correcting some of the problems that I am beginning to see with our economic system as a whole. Of course, no boats need to be rocked because the system can be reformed; it just needs the right leader to steer that ship.
My lease renewal is dated for February 2020, but it’s only January now. The markets are going crazy due to some global events involving a virus that is slowly starting to spread around the planet. I am slightly concerned from a public health perspective, but my trading firm’s profit-and-loss figures for the recent trading days are looking incredibly juicy. I’m not a monster, though—despite the caricature of a well-intentioned yet incredibly naïve dolt that I have constructed through this narrative. Even though my rising personal income is directly tied to this worldwide volatility, I sincerely wish that nothing bad comes of this virus and that we ultimately remember it as a minor historical oddity, reminiscent of the small fright that SARS gave us back in the early aughts.
***
Six years later, I am now a full-blown socialist. On the other side of a worldwide pandemic, it is clear that at the heart of the capitalist system lies the abject rejection of the notion that all human life is equally valuable. Anyone who lived through the haze and confusion of Covid can identify with the feeling that our social and economic system has failed us—it told us that the deaths of millions are an acceptable cost to pay so that the gears of capital may continue to turn and grind indefinitely. Reflecting on my own personal beliefs, my hope and faith in humanity itself is simply incompatible with capitalism. Worse, AI is accelerating this inhumanity, as I will attempt to illustrate in the following section.
I’m a professional software engineer who spends hundreds of dollars a month at my workplace on agentic coding models. I am intimately familiar with the utility that LLMs provide in many circumstances. My opposition to LLM usage (and AI more broadly) stems not from my relationship with my professional or personal usage, but rather from my own convictions as a socialist. To understand my position, you must first understand what I mean by socialist.
What fate will befall us, the working class, when we are no longer useful sources of labor that can be exploited by capital?
To me, a socialist is someone who advocates for and works towards building a society (and I am under no pretense that the economy exists outside of any useful definition of “society”) that prioritizes human need over everything else. Food is a human need. Water is a human need. Shelter is a human need. A society that allows any human being to die due to a lack of a human need is a society that needs to change for the better. As a socialist, I advocate for that change.
Aside: Here is where the real socialists come in to scold me for not once using the phrase “means of production” in my definition. Real socialists will insist that I clearly do not understand socialism on a fundamental, epistemological level—one that is rigorously complex, but at the same time mired in an effervescence that simply cannot be described by mere words alone. The conversation evokes the absurdity of a Rick and Morty fan breathlessly attempting to explain to any passersby why “Pickle Rick” is actually more than simply a joke: it is a transcendental artform unto itself and if you don’t laugh at it you are both fake and gay. I don’t need to quote Daddy Marx to convince anyone I am a socialist. It should be apparent in the types of policies I advocate for (human-centered) and the works that I engage in (community action).
AI, coupled with the economic system of capitalism, is fundamentally not human-centered. Hyperscale data centers, the most egregious examples of which are nothing more than city-sized fossil-fuel plants with some compute units attached, are literally making the planet less habitable for humanity. They are exacerbating the already observably disastrous effects of climate change on the large-scale, while simultaneously making our communities worse places to live on the small scale. And why? So these compute units can crunch the numbers hard enough to the point where CEOs can replace those of us who sell our labor to them? It makes a sort of logistical and financial sense: an agent never asks for maternity leave or demands a minimum wage. Human beings are too needy—too messy; it’s simply more profitable to replace some of us with agents. And then what fate will befall us, the working class, when we are no longer useful sources of labor that can be exploited by capital?
Since AI under capitalism cannot produce a society that fundamentally values all of human life, as a socialist who does value all human life, I insist that either AI has to go or capitalism has to go.
But again, I’m a software engineer that uses Claude every day. Clearly, I believe AI is useful in some instances (and admittedly deeply harmful in others; see Grok’s revenge-porn machine and literally everything the White House posts these days). Used responsibly, however, AI has legitimate uses that can improve people’s lives for the better.
But the crux of the matter is in the qualifier: AI must be “used responsibly.” And as I have argued previously, there is no responsible use of AI under capitalism. The use of AI itself is deeply irresponsible before the face of humanity. Why use it if we are killing the planet? Why use it if we are making people poorer, hungrier, lonelier, sadder, generally worse off? Why do any of this at all?
The point of all of this—being alive and experiencing the chaotic but lovely mess of conflicting emotions, thoughts and actions—has to be more than the endless accumulation of wealth into an increasingly smaller pool of pockets by any means necessary, forcibly with AI if needed. It has to be more than that. I believe it can indeed be more than that.
Agents themselves, as problematic as they are (and boy do they have some fucking problems), must be seen within the broader context of 21st-century global capitalism. Can AI be a useful tool that can actually improve people’s lives? Of course it can. But the toll it asks of our soul is too high under the economic system we find ourselves living in.
Pragmatically, capitalism isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So in the meantime, I will be advocating for policies that limit the use of AI. For the long term, I will continue dreaming of and working toward a brighter future that puts humans first: all humans.
No AI was used in the composition of this text (lmao).