ALB
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https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html
I am trying to work why all those experts in AI and the bosses of the giant tech companies are warning against the potential threat to humanity from AI. Even science fiction speculation about intelligent machines taking over the world and make humanity extinct. Since that would be a long way off, even if technologically possible, there must be some other reasons for their campaign.
I can see, too, that it will be a threat to so-called “intellectual property rights” (which are entirely artificial) and that people in that field will want to slow it down. But it’s not them that are kicking up a fuss about it. It’s the tech companies themselves.
The only ulterior motive I can think of is that it’s a publicity stunt to get everybody talking about AI with a view to them selling more of it.
It probably does but engagement in campaigns for “immediate demands” is dubious too:
“The party engages in the struggles for immediate demands as long as the workers themselves are directly and actually engaged in the struggle.”
Didn’t Mattick later change his mind and come to a position closer to Pannekoek’s discussed here:
Is he the one who criticises NATO’s Drang nach Osten in Ukraine? That would be an additional, perhaps more important, reason why the German authorities would want to cancel him.
Meanwhile Zelensky’s can trivialise the atom bomb on Hiroshima by comparing it to the destruction of Bakhmut and of course get away with it.
Another move in the only game in town:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65736944.amp
Note the political ignorance of the Labour spokesperson. It wasn’t just Tory PM Heath who introduced price controls. He was merely pursuing the policy of the preceding Wilson Labour government which even imposed (or tried to) a freeze on the price of labour-power.
It won’t work anyway. One reason why the price of basic necessities like bread and milk has gone up is that, with the rise in the cost of living, people are cutting back on less essential things to buy them, so maintaining the paying demand for them and allowing the supermarkets to put up the price of them.
You can’t beat the economic laws of capitalism.
Drones are a useful invention that could be used for in agriculture, monitoring rivers, the environment and forest fires, inspecting bridges and other structures, aerial photographs, deliveries including medicines and food and equipment in remote areas or in a natural disaster. In other words usefully, also in socialism.
But capitalism being capitalism, their main use today is as a weapon of destruction, as we are seeing in current NATO-Russian War in Ukraine.
You can have it all when the working class establish socialism and there is no longer any need for a socialist political party and it is dissolved.
Actually, you are on the right track. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
Just got round to the reading the ex-Militant Tendency’s paper called “The Socialist” (though more appropriately “The State Capitalist”) that we exchanged for ours.
I see that they have reverted to their pre-Corbyn position of calling for a “new workers party”, ie, essentially a new Labour Party. It seems they want to repeat in the 21st century this failure of the 20th (in fact both failures of that century as they are also Bolsheviks).
Even though they are now against Labour, they still campaign like Labourites talking about “Tory austerity” and “Tory crises” blaming these on the Tory government rather than on the unavoidable workings of the capitalist system.
As we say in one of the leaflets we were handing out “The problem is not the Tories (or Labour). It’s capitalism”
No, only the “Communist Party of Britain”. (The Mourning Star brigade). No SWP (though ex-member John Rees chaired one of the sessions) or Militant Tendency (though a couple of people thought we were their current incarnation). A trot-free zone, then.
The leaders of the G7 (US, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada) when they met at Hiroshima last week pledged to support Ukraine until complete victory, including by supplying arms.
They must know that this will result in ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The population of Crimea, for instance, is over 2 million of whom 68% identify as Russian. In the event of a Ukrainian victory and conquest of the peninsula they are unlikely to stay and be “de-Russified” as elsewhere in Ukraine. Over a million will be driven out.
According to Wikipedia, ethnic cleansing
“constitutes a crime against humanity and may also fall under the Genocide Convention, even as ethnic cleansing has no legal definition under international criminal law.”
But there are no reports of the International Court of Cronies at The Hague preparing to indict these “world leaders” with aiding and abetting a “crime against humanity”. Of course not, as they are funded by 6 of the G7 (the 7th being the US which refuses to have its actions judged by such an outside body).
Of course it is not just the ICC that is a joke. So is “international criminal law”, it’s just “victors’ justice”.
1984 is here. Hungary is blocking money from the “European Peace Facility” to supply Ukraine with arms.
Revealing article a few days ago, in of all places the pro-Ukraine regime Guardian newspaper, that shows that they realise that ethnic cleaning on a massive scale will be one of the consequences of the reconquest, with NATO arms, by the Ukraine regime of the territories in the Donbass and Crimea that it claims:
“About 120,000 of Mariupol’s original inhabitants survived and still live in the city. Of those, about 20% supported Ukraine’s armed forces and were waiting for liberation, a resident said. “I think it’s necessary to hang on,” the person explained. The other 80% were divided equally between people who were indifferent to politics, and those who supported Russia and the city’s new administration.
This last group are now the majority,” a resident said. “They are very afraid of the counteroffensive.” They continued: “The mood in Mariupol has changed dramatically. A year ago everybody thought that Russia would win. There was no other scenario. Now even those who back Putin realise something is going on, and that Russia might actually lose.
“They are afraid there will be a battle. They understood that when the territory becomes Ukrainian again they are finished. They will have to leave their homes and go to Russia forever.”Interesting and something we can use to justify our position of doing this sort of thing when there’s no socialist party candidate standing.
But I am not sure why Labourites are adopting it. Reformists there seem to have plenty of other parties to choose from.
Arthur Bough’s letter can be found here:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1443/letters/
He is right that, due to increasing productivity, prices should be falling rather than rising. So why are they continually rising?
The government itself (in fact the G7 and those who slogans with them) openly says that it aims for prices to rise at around 2 percent a year. The only way thus can be engineered is through inflating the money supply. What other way could there be?
What people are complaining about at the moment is not that prices are riding but that the rate at which they are has increased so much. But since much of this is due to supply factors there is not much that governments and central banks can do about it; just wait till this sorts itself out.
Britain is facing the same dilemma — a tough anti-immigrant policy and a shortage of workers in certain sectors.
“Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the UK government will allow an extra 10,000 seasonal agricultural workers to enter the country next year in response to demands from farmers.
The premier on Tuesday told the UK Farm to Fork Summit that ministers had rolled over to next year a seasonal workers program that allows for 45,000 temporary laborers to enter the country for horticulture and poultry, his office said in a statement. There will be the capacity for an extra 10,000 visas if needed, he told attendees.”
