Hey fam,
I've been having more and more discussions with comrades across different organizations, and I keep hitting this wall when it comes to AI and robotics.
Simply put, most people just don't understand the capitalist/imperial consequences let alone the communist opportunities that these innovations entail
Keeping in line with a Lenin-esque analysis of understanding the various material inputs (energy, agriculture, steel, etc), I'm hoping to begin brainstorming collective solutions that we can begin to circulate in our respective fields and orgs
Starting with some founding principles
- Avoiding dependence on any foundational model given the ability to surveil users (but keeping their usage as an option because all current llms are known to have publicly available jailbreaking methods)
- Targeting and elevating use cases which can be implemented with open source, local, and offline models to avoid surveillance, enhance portability, and also reduce the climate impacts of this tech
- Using this tech to enhance sociality between people and the planet. None of the use cases should be to replace people/workers or reduce the reliance on our communities
I don't have much at this moment, but so far
- Real time, multilingual translation, we are increasingly organizing across different communities, and we don't always have translators available. Everyone should be included at the table, and this is one step to lowering that barrier of entry
- Using AI to vet protest plans, especially if you have access to your local police, national guard, etc. training and operating manuals. Obviously needs to be done offline, but a second pair of eyes goes a long way
- Contingency planning, especially in understanding how the police will react and mobilize force
- Learning how to make wireless jammers and tuning them to the spectrum used by police and military drones
- Coming back to the jailbreaking vulnerabilities of all current llms, you can use them for more "illegal" endeavors to pretty accurate ends. Not advocating for such, but it's an option
- Liberation companions, as we move more into agentic ai, finding ways to embody the knowledge of our liberatory elders to educate and reflect on current methodologies. Everything from a study companion/group to an llm tuned towards modernizing their perspectives to our modern context
None of this is meant to be prescriptive, but rather the beginning of an ongoing discussion
Also drop links to other discussions if this has already been addressed elsewhere
This is my favorite idea so far, especially in regards to toppling the ideological hegemony that liberalism holds
For the nuts and bolts:
There are already large scale implementations of this like perplexity.ai or notebookllm that use explicitly retrieved resources to make their claims and enable you to verify their veracity
A first demo would be archiving something like Marxists.org or the prolewiki into a vector database for real time RAG lookups
Pull the text from the site itself or archive.ph and have the llm generate the critiques and additional content from there
The most seamless interface would likely be a browser extension vs a separate site, but baby steps and mvps ftw
TBH, I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been done already