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Bernie Sanders has posted his thoughts on AI to a Google website:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dthbi4lzO58
I don’t doubt his sincerity, nor that he detests multi-billionaires, and therefore I will not rubbish him. But basically he is saying that the bosses are about to dis-employ a large proportion of the workforce by investing in increased technical productivity, with no re-employment of the “lost” workers being part of the plan.
And with amazing stupidity he then says “I am not a Luddite”. Well he should be one!!
Instead he proposes a 32 hour working week, workers’ election of ≥ 45% of directors, profit sharing ≥ 20%, more employee ownership (what, like Waitrose?), and a robot tax.
He represents a social democratic position, even a workforce-focused one, that is fast disappearing and soon won’t be in existence.
Practice what you preach “Red” and get back to grinding pepper with a mortar and pestle, unless such technology is too advanced for your highbrow attitude. You certainly shouldn’t be posting anything online; you should be scratching it onto pieces of slate and sending them the mods, with a very polite note asking them to transcribe this thread and send it back too you, via the horse mounted courier you hired to have it delivered.
Sanders doesn’t propose UBI in his video, the first thing I’d have thought necessary given the problems he sees. (And he does a pretty good job of explaining them, in my opinion. He isn’t stupid.) Rather his solutions are heavily skewed towards empowering workers, i.e. those who he spends the first part of the video predicting largely won’t exist. And therein lies his blindness, not his rejection of Luddism.
Those few jobs that remain will be held by a minority in society, effectively a cadre of technologists whom Sanders wishes to empower and whom the ruling class of techno-oligarchs will wish to control. No doubt the latter are already studying hard how to achieve it.
Peter Thiel for instance has already spoken of using AI to by-pass democracy. He sees the same problems as Sanders but views them within a so-called democracy as a threat to his power and that of his class. He is a deranged individual judging by his lectures ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist ) but I suspect there’s method in his madness – spouting mumbojumbo about the antichrist and building (à la Jordan Peterson) a following of young males full of devotion to him while devoid of any critical thinking skills allows his opponents to be denounced without there being a need to appeal to reason.
Sanders seems infinitely more rational in comparison so it wouldn’t surprise me to see Thiel’s antichrist-identifying finger pointed in his direction sometime soon. Not that Sanders is a real threat to Thiel; he’s too deeply embedded in a system that’s firmly in the grip of the oligarchy.
@Clark – you do yourself a disservice by posting that kind of thing. There’s nothing wrong with grinding peppercorns with a mortar and pestle. I dunno what kind of grinders you’ve got, but mine don’t work so well with red peppercorns and a mortar and pestle grinds them much better.
Is your fanatical belief in scientific progress not just an overreaction to Jehovah’s Witnessism?
I was perhaps too rude about Bernie Sanders, because to give him credit where it’s due he is proposing a response to a real problem – to wit, the problem of the imminent shedding by the ruling class of a very large proportion of the workforce in the next several years unless something is done. At least he’s not ignoring it or hailing it.
I’d rather live in a tent than under technofascism. How about you?
Problems caused by the end of mass production would be worth it even if the main result was “only” to get people off of smartphones. We are long past the moment when very severe addiction to this mind-destroying and soul-destroying sh*t became the norm. To observe this among children in particular is very tough, as it would be if it were heroin.
The Luddites weren’t against tools. John Zerzan is against symbols, such as words, but that’s poser stuff really.
It’s not hypocritical to use what you want to get rid of. Money being a good example. Or guns for that matter. The internet has got to disappear.
Never mind the “singularity”… When there is a such an extreme concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, you can get a kinda multiplier effect based on “moving fast and breaking stuff”. It’s hard to imagine even in a theoretical sense that this could possibly be sane. It’s all about smash smash and smash and anyone who’s got any objections to it is a “loser”. This said, Silicon Valleyism is only the centre of one particular economic sector (“sector” admittedly being a notion of decreasing utility) in one now declining country. Almost nobody else in the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, even Europe) believes in the extreme ultra-materialist view that every living being and every action by a living being is data. Come to think of it, even Paypal boy Thiel doesn’t, being a fan of Rene Guenon IIRC, dating back to before his Antichrist days. Goodness knows what drugs he’s on.
We’ll hear more of Thiel. Wasn’t he buying up land in NZ to prep for the apocalypse?
It’s a shame his anti-university stuff is so elitist 🙂 (Clark will detest me even more for saying that.)
Correction: not René Guenon but René Girard the mimetic guy.
Dominic Cummings is nodding to Peter Thiel probably, with his latest reference through Arnold Toynbee to “mimesis”.
His raving nuttiness is now in the open, e.g.
“the Tory MPs mostly just sat uselessly for 14 years telling themselves fairy tales, importing jihadis and defending the Human Rights Act prioritising jihadi human rights over the safety of British people, spending taxpayers money on weddings for child killers ‘cos human rights’, repeating NPC scripts on definitions of ‘a woman’ suddenly being ‘really complex’, covering up the Grooming Gangs, and marching to destruction.”
Some would say it has been out in the open for decades. But anyway…
Both Musk and Thiel put a lot of money about to those who can help them. They are what should be called oligarchs, but of course they rarely are. It’s a little known fact that Cummings tried to get money from RFK Jr too, and insurance from Warren Buffett although I think Buffett was canny enough to see Cummings coming.
Musk’s appearance on screen to the far-right demo in London was interesting. If he can get a comms link that’s “resilient” (in the jargon), perhaps next time he will be applauding real-time violence rather than just saying violence is inevitable. Has anyone actually commented yet that he deliberately imitated a film version of Orwell’s “Big Brother”? (Which isn’t particularly deep. It’s just a “f*** you” joke, really. But better to notice obvious stuff than be oblivious to it.)
Musk might not be able to get a comms link to a London demo that’s “resilient” (although he might – it depends on what “defences” the Ministry of Defence has), but next time might not be in London. It could be in South America for example. This could easily be in the script for some point during the next few years – a new way of replacing a government.
“Practice what you preach “Red” and get back to grinding pepper with a mortar and pestle, unless such technology is too advanced for your highbrow attitude. You certainly shouldn’t be posting anything online; you should be scratching it onto pieces of slate and sending them the mods, with a very polite note asking them to transcribe this thread and send it back too you, via the horse mounted courier you hired to have it delivered.”
Or you could look at it like this…
1. We want a world without mods, right?
2. We can’t get it on the internet, because the internet is necessarily “mediaeval”.
3. So the conclusion is…
