Comradeship // Freechat

Thank you!

One problem I see with comparing GenAI with earlier automation like the loom, etc. is that GenAI is in no way paying for itself so far or any time in the forseeable future. It currently loses money hand over fist despite massive breaks in the form of “free” source content and subsidized electricity. I imagine that those previous forms of automation were self-sustaining financially from fairly early after their invention.

There is an economic phenomenon called the Tendancy of the rate of profit to fall (https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall) which correlates with what you are saying; under capitalism there is no clean way out of this which is why you see AI market bubbles in the west that you don't see it in a socialist country like China.

And it is also, as you have rightly pointed out, why the return on investment is generally signifcantly worse than it was before (as a general trend). If one does a course in business administration in the west they do mental gymnastics why the rate of operational profit (ie not fictious capital of share price inflation) in the IT sector as a whole is so abysmal and have ad-hoc theories with no predictive value to explain the phenomenon (ie they don't have a scientific approach).

You'll find, and pretty much every marxist will testify to this, that seemingly puzzling politico-economical phenomenon/contradictions under liberal economics not only have robust explanations in marxism but also very good predictive powers - as a science does, and continually refines theory to reflect better observations seen as a science should.

Edited to add - some further reading just in case you need them if you read the article in the above link:

1. https://redsails.org/capital-v1-summary/
2. https://redsails.org/labour-and-labour-power/
3. https://redsails.org/wage-labour-and-capital/