Monday, September 14, 2026
i don't want to call myself pro-ai. i'm neutral about ai. it's just a fancy gui over a search engine. you're being confused by the realistic presentation of the gui. it's not real - it's just a search engine.
i'm pro-technology, pro-automation and anti-capitalist because i'm a communist, and that's what being a communist means. but that also means understanding that it's capitalism that will build the infrastructure that will eventually automate labour, and allow humans to be free from slavery in the capitalist economy, and spend their time making art and living civilized existences instead.
i will reiterate that this is overblown. we're not there yet.
but leftists should actually be excited that the ai is putting us on a path to ending the barbarism of coerced labour that we call capitalism and finally creating an actual civilization, with actually civilized people in it, to replace the pathetic mass of pitiful slaves we've assembled in the capitalist economy as proletariat to generate profit for the capitalists with. this is a symptom of late capitalism. it means we're exiting the capitalist phase (which is defined by capitalists stealing surplus value from people they force to work for them, which is the definition of capitalism, either via physical chains or via imaginary economic chains. it is when you eliminate that relationship of capitalists enslaving the proletariat that you end capitalism, and the way you do it is via automation.), but we need to have the political infrastructure in place to guide us through the transition, or it will fail and fall backwards into feudalism, instead. leftists should be building that political infrastructure to help guide us towards a transition to an automated society that ends the capitalist relation and leave the backwards luddism and fear of change to the ignorant fools on the right. fake leftists arguing for the retention of the status quo because they fear the shifts in the mode of production should be spat upon, cast out and shouted down and treated with contempt. the word for that is reactionary; fake leftists opposing ai are in truth capitalist reactionaries and backwards conservatives. ai is the best and only hope we have to get out of the slavery of capitalism and truly revolutionize the economy. it has to be done right, and there are dangers, but outright opposing it is sentencing us to perpetual capitalism, which is itself delusional - some other society will transition from capitalism to communism and wipe us out, instead.
we don't have the choice to stagnate in perpetual capitalism. we can choose between transition to communism or suffering through a conquest by those that do so first.
the classical ancients only considered a few vocations to be fit for a free individual, and considered the vast majority of human labour to be unfit for the free, and merely forms of slavery. they considered mathematics, philosophy (which we would today call science) and art to be the vocations fit for the civilized, free individual. they would reject almost all labour in a capitalist economy as slavery, and call the people that did the labour slaves; whether they were wage slaves or chattel slaves was largely irrelevant. i agree with them and i align with the historical strain of thought from socrates through to marx and beyond that seeks to one day abolish labour. that's what a left is and, certainly, those that are aligning in opposition to that wonderful dream of a utopian future without coerced labour cannot be called a left.
what do i think is going on with this?
it's more than clickbait. this is clearly being organized.
i suspect that the end result is that the "regulation" ends up written by the industry. i'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but in existing crony capitalist terminology we say that the regulators are captured. what that means is that the regulations are written by the industry to advance the aims of the industry and really aren't regulations but enabling legislation. the direction appears to be towards advertising.
a law that tries to prevent rogue ai from taking over canada is like a law that mandates tiger-banning rocks.
it's probably harmless because it's probably meaningless. it probably doesn't actually do anything at all.
but, i mean, i need to see it before i can deconstruct it. right now, i'm just guessing that the ai companies are seeking "regulation" because they're trying to capture the regulators, so they can regulate themselves.
there should be some regulation to prevent ai companies from warehousing personal data in data centres. you don't want a file with your name and your picture on it that's been scraped from the internet without your consent, and can be used to generate personalized ads. but that's what's coming unless some laws are written to stop it.
this nonsense about ai killing everybody would seem to be a distraction to allow them to capture the regulators without seeing laws passed that prevent them from warehousing personal data.
“Imagine a world where all companies are run by AI, where there are robots all over the place, where basically humans don’t have any work except for nominal work, and even politicians and everyone is deferring to AI because the AI just seems to have such good judgment,” he added. “That’s the kind of future that we’re headed towards.”
that's called communism.
i'm strongly in favour of that future. i support that. i will fight for that and fight against those that want to stop it.
but it won't develop simply by revolutonizing the mode of production, and the projection is not realistic. that is not going to happen any time soon, but i hope that it does happen one day, and i will fight for it to happen, not fight to stop it from happening.
i could understand conservatives opposing ai but it's ideologically incoherent for self-identifying leftists to oppose technology like this. if you're opposed to automation, and you call yourself left-wing, i'm sorry to tell you that you're not very left-wing at all. the whole point of the left is that automation eventually abolishes labour. that's what communism is.
i know that iq tests are not perfect, that they have cultural limitations, but it's the best standard of comparison we have.
i was identified as gifted as a child because i scored in the 99th percentile on the tests they did every second or third year. i also did an entrance level iq test for the government of canada as an adult in my 30s, and again scored in the 99.9th percentile. the interviewer actually thought it was a typo.
he literally told me my iq was impossible, that nobody scored that high. well, i was nobody, i guess. i was applying for the most entry level position at statscan and i guess the guy was a hierarchical douche because the best response he had was that it was higher than the entry level requirements for management positions, so therefore it must be a typo.
well, yeah. 99.9th percentile is nobody. i guess.
my dad, who was not well educated, used to surprise people with his gct II scores, which got him hired as a call center stooge for the tax office (it was a good job for a poorly educated guy from a very lower class background). he was sure he'd score higher than me. he wanted to compete and vanquish his smarty pants kid for good. he was sure he'd do better than me, because he did better than everybody he knew. but he was very quiet and never brought it up again when i showed him the score and it's relatively clear his score was not close to mine.
so i had to go find some stats (which actually took some effort) and when i found them i realized it really was a score that nobody gets. it was way off the charts.
but they didn't hire me because i couldn't pass the situational judgement test, and i actually tried three times.
how are these ai systems scoring on iq tests today, anyways?
that's actually not very impressive, is it? but it's about what i expected. it's interesting that the ai systems show about the same level of variation as humans, but that's a function of the central limit theorem.
you have to be careful. if the test exists on the internet, the ai system might have learned it. it could tell you the answers by finding it in it's database. that is what an ai is - an advanced gui on top of a search algorithm running on a database in the backend. and that's all it is.
so, somebody devised an offline test that no ai had ever seen before.
this is where they were at in 2025, when the issue was fresh:
that's actually not very impressive, is it? but it's about what i expected. it's interesting that the ai systems show about the same level of variation as humans, but that's a function of the central limit theorem.
since this hit the internet, these numbers have started coming up, but i'm skeptical. if i was deepseek, i would consider this bad marketing and want to improve it. the nature of the technology makes this hard.
you could argue it's not fair to the system to ask it to think like a human. ok. the mirror test has been modified for some species to adjust to their perception of existence, and they tend to do better when it has. but if you're going to argue the ai is 100x more intelligent than the smartest human, you need a standard of comparison.
i would not have a lot of faith in the updated numbers, at least not until some kind of truly third party institution can be built that can truly ensure these tests are fully offline.
in 2025, this was random, with no prep. and the results were what you'd expect that autistic kid to score.
"How well do you fancy your chances at being able to deal with a system that is 100 times smarter than the smartest person on the planet?"
i strongly reject the premise.
what is intelligence? is it the ability to regurgitate knowledge? that's not what they test for in iq tests. or is it the ability to think creatively, abstractly and to use novel information to problem solve?
the ai is just a database. if we have already solved a problem, it can tell us how to do it. but it can't solve new problems on it's own.
the ai will never score as high on an iq test as a moderately intelligent human.
you should look at the ai as that autistic kid you knew when you were younger that was impressively knowledgeable and able to run off scores of facts like nobody else, but couldn't write an essay to save his life. that kid wasn't smarter than you, and he didn't do well in life.
the ai is not going to be smarter than the smartest person. it will never transcend the point where it struggles to compete with humans of average intelligence on issues that define actual intelligence.
if you program a bot to be malicious, it can be malicious. there's no question about that. asimov's laws of robotics are not real, or at least not yet.
however, this issue floating around the media - of these bots going rogue on their own - is not real. i went over this once before. the issue at hand was actually a bug, a programming error, it wasn't the result of the bot transcending it's program. that's make-believe.
it follows that you should regulate humans, not regulate ai. and this is the same issue that democrats constantly get wrong - they blame human behaviour on inanimate objects, on make believe diseases and on everything you can possibly imagine, except on the humans ourselves.
an evil person could program one of these things to do evil things. sure. but the ai layer isn't the problem, and that evil person doesn't need the ai to use the computer to do something evil. but that isn't the concern that was being brought up, and you're missing the point, regardless.
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