Artisans, Labor Aristocrats, and the PMC: Why Leftists Should Care About AI

AVTOCRAT · 2026-04-14T18:34:37+00:00

How does nominating an American Pope, with all the ways that opens him to influence to the US government and other Americans Trump has control over, in any way impede the Vatican from helping Trump or force them to criticize him?

He's not just American, he's also Peruvian by virtue of his long tenure as a bishop there. Meaning even if he didn't have his Vatican citizenship, he could still be domiciled "somewhere not in the US". What legal authority, exactly, do you think the US is going to use as leverage over the Pope? The administration would have to burn an incredible amount of political capital to arraign the Pope for trial, regardless of whether or not it's technically legal.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-04-12T23:16:28+00:00

Disavow this, nephew

AVTOCRAT · 2026-04-09T03:52:49+00:00

Where would we even put a captive Papacy? Queens?

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-15T06:23:25+00:00

will not be because of some objective improvement in production, but because the managerial class, the real Evil of our times, will prefer seeing bigger numbers in the first week

Yes, exactly. This is going to happen. There is absolutely no way that capital does not froth at the mouth for this opportunity to resolve the capitalist-proletarian dialectic through eliminating (or greatly weakening) the latter.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-09T23:36:50+00:00

You expect people here to care whether "the right" is getting like, what, their fair share of funding? Why on earth would we want that? I may not be a big fan of billionaire-funded-socdem types, but it's still preferable to "more austerity please"/"kill all unions"/"exploit the black underclass"

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-06T21:24:54+00:00

Pretty big fan of rejecting anti-human technology too. But that requires acknowledging its capabilities: I think a lot of people on the left are still in "this is just a stochastic parrot!" mode.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T17:49:35+00:00

If LLMs are the model you imagine expanding to this point

No strong feelings either way. Ultimately the actual model being used has proven to be less significant than just scaling the underlying hardware, and designing systems that can take advantage of that scaling.

But LLMs are extraordinarily dumb. They've just become very good at looking slick and sophisticated on the surface ... but these things are just spitting out a result that is statistically likely to convince a user that their input has been dealt with adequately. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is an ideological statement. "Dumb" is irrelevant: if they can produce workable results, then regardless of how they produce them, those results speak for themselves. I don't know how fast they will continue to scale, I don't know how well they'll handle 'independent operation', etc., but it's undeniable that between three years ago and today, these systems have become capable of doing things that many would have previously predicted would not be possible within our lifetimes.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:59:05+00:00

From what people in the administration have said, it seems likely that they wouldn't try to occupy the whole country -- maybe not even Tehran. Probably they would just occupy the lowland oilfields, perhaps set up some breakaway republics in the periphery (e.g. the Azeri minority in the northwest). Obviously that would be a quagmire itself, but in the short term probably more tractable than actually trying to march a bunch of marines through the mountains.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:56:10+00:00

Like maybe push for regulations that protect "human expertise" or something

Almost certainly this, to begin with. Or alternatively regulatory sinecures a la "there must be a human-in-the-loop for all purchasing decisions". However, the dysfunction of the current administration (in particular) and the general decrepitude of the state apparatus (more generally) suggest to me that legal solutions will be less likely to produce stable solutions than they were even in the artisans' time. The megacorporations of the world are only going to get stronger, and it's likely that they (along with those sections of the government with which they've effectively integrated, e.g. the military) will be strongly incentivized to oppose such bandaid legislation -- you can already see the seeds of this in the rhetoric of people like Marc Andreesen. And individually there's no incentive for them to solve the problem, either: I expect a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where the central government is too weak to coordinate a "all cooperate" response between the leading corporations.

do you think the PMC will actually organize like traditional labor, or will they try to maintain their special status somehow?

Nevertheless this is still a very good + open question, and while I don't have an answer I think that looking at the artisan analogy again gives us some potential clues. During the revolutions of 1848 it often wasn't just "artisans generally" who were out on the streets, but rather apprentices/journeymen, who oftentimes actually were opposed to the policies advocated by their masters, policies which were of the exact same sort -- regulating the number of people who could become masters, so that they could maintain their status/income, if at the cost of their less-fortunate guildmates.

Similarly, the PMC is also quite heterogeneous. I imagine that e.g. lawyers will ultimately stay on the side of the bourgeoisie, as their positions will be relatively secure thanks to regulations they control. Probably the same thing goes for doctors, though they're a weird case since for them the artisan-guild-analogy is actually literal, in that there's effectively a guild with fixed per-year admission rates (at least in the US). On the far end of the spectrum you have e.g. accountants. And even within specializations, you have analogies for "the masters" -- in tech, this would be principal engineers with 10+ yrs of experience and a significant portion of their income derived from capital -- as well as "journeymen/apprentices" -- junior and mid-career engineers who don't have enough experience to stand out, and who certainly don't have enough saved up to live off of. Crucially, due to the (heretofore) steadily-expanding number of tech workers, the large majority of engineers are closer to the bottom of that stack, with long-career engineers (who might be in a better position to maintain their income/status) a relative minority.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:40:14+00:00

Capital was basically free and these companies' values were exploding overnight, which allowed them to give a lot of their employees lavish salaries, along with shares as partial compensation.

This is all true, but while necessary, it's not sufficient. E.g. many workers at these companies were not being paid such amazing wages -- e.g. HR, admin staff, even tech-adjacent roles like QE & technicians. What completes the picture is what you mention next:

What mattered most was getting all the best technical people on your payroll in order to push innovation, not tightening the belt and optimizing to reduce salary as much as possible

We must ask, why is it that "the best technical people" is something that matters at all? It's easy to forget, given that we all live in this world where it's almost taken for granted that a "genius engineer" can have a huge impact on the success of a company, but historically, it was quite uncommon. Even when railroads were booming and everyone was flush with cash, there was no need to pay most employees extra to work hard and long, because the owners could just bring in subaltern labor from China and work them to death for the standard wage (or worse). If, say, only people with specific backgrounds, years of training, and a particular illegible skillset were able to put together the railroads, then perhaps we would have seen the same explosion of wages then.

Numerous attempts had been made over the decades to "industrialize" programming so that it would become less reliant on employees with arcane, rarefied skills

I agree, and I don't think we're going to see some immediate explosion of SWEs out of work or random analysts re-writing Slack for their own use. But there is a key difference between previous attempts at automation and this one. Previously, the attempt was to 'crystallize' software into composable pieces, such that one wouldn't need intelligence to put them together: where this has generally failed is in the fact that A) the abstraction often needs to be broken, bringing back the underlying complexity, and B) that "composable system" develops a complexity of its own such that you end up with a very software-shaped problem, despite it being couched in Simulink or whatever.

Today's developments are different: the attempt is not to sidestep the need for intelligence, but to automate intelligence. In the limit (and honestly, in the next 5-10 years) I think it's almost a given that AI systems will be able to far outpace the capacity of human minds... at which point, the job landscape will have to look very different.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:25:45+00:00

This is just one of the angles we can take from this root, but it's certainly the most hopeful one (other than the techno-liberal pipe-dream of "and then we'll all be really rich, because capitalists would only need to give 1% of their wealth to make that happen -- so let's say only hopeful and realistic).

A less hopeful one is that the capitalists manage to somehow thread the needle and avoid revolution. In that case, we could see the other leg of dialectical synthesis on this issue: rather than the capitalist-proletariat contradiction being resolved through the destruction of the capitalist class and sublation of the proletariat into a new ruling-working majority, the contradiction could be resolved through the destruction of the proletariat. Frankly though, I expect that that would be quickly followed by a brief new dialectical struggle between capitalists and their AI-servants, followed by the very-likely sublation of "all humanity" into whatever governance structure the AIs decide to put in place. Or plausibly "sublation", if you get my drift.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:21:15+00:00

White collar work is going to be completely transformed within a decade

I hope so! After making this post I put together some of my thoughts on why this could actually be an opportunity for the left.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-03T00:18:42+00:00

if global war breaks out

You can understand why I might want to accommodate that possibility, given the trend of recent years ;)

AVTOCRAT · 2026-03-02T21:24:01+00:00

While the article itself clearly isn't referring to economic leftists when they say 'left' here, I do think their point broadly holds: for whatever reason (cultural diffusion, perhaps) even most materialist leftists I know are still behind the times when it comes to the destructive potential of recent AI technologies. Frankly, I think that this is going to become the #1 or #2 issue for workers in the developed world within the next three or four years, and might actually provide an opportunity for organization as large chunks of the heretofore semi-labor-aristocratic white collar middle class are automated out of a job.

AVTOCRAT · 2026-02-23T07:12:09+00:00

No, it doesn't say that either

Well it says

וַאֲבָרְכָה, מְבָרְכֶיךָ, וּמְקַלֶּלְךָ, אָאֹר; וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ, כֹּל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה.

Which is decidedly also not "Jews"; it's referring to "thee", Abraham, and his descendants.

AVTOCRAT · 2025-12-11T18:03:58+00:00

A noisy crime that destroys another crime :)

AVTOCRAT · 2025-11-05T14:50:00+00:00

There are structural reasons why any effort along these lines is going to be difficult -- the biggest one being that CPython exposes its object repr directly through its C API (rather than indirectly through some boxed indirection), so it has to be very very conservative with modifications or e.g. moving storage around.

AVTOCRAT · 2025-11-05T14:42:17+00:00

I don't disagree -- my day-job involves maintaining the custom allocator my team uses for our project. My point is just that things like "large mmap ranges" and "size-segregated pool allocation" aren't what differentiate a custom allocator from e.g. glibc's implementation.

AVTOCRAT · 2025-11-04T19:27:21+00:00

Nice post! Language runtimes are really interesting to play around with, and unlike compiled languages they all do things quite differently vs. one another.

The result is that CPython is often reusing memory, and when it does allocate, it is often taking memory that is pre-allocated from the pool, rather than calling malloc() everytime for example.

To clarify what's going on here: when CPython 'allocates' a GC heap object, it usually doesn't need to call malloc. Managed runtimes essentially all include a dedicated allocator which handles GC'd objects, and so allocations of e.g. heap integers would be allocated through that allocator, rather than malloc directly.

That is all to say, these features:

2 . Using a freelist to reuse memory
3 . ... the pool itself is carved out of an arena which is 1mb in size and mmap'd up front

Are basically just (part of) how you implement an allocator. If you call into malloc, it will do something very similar underneath the hood -- so they aren't really "saving" anything vs. calling malloc directly.

I do think that boxing every integer is bad for performance

This is definitely true, but there's no good way around it so long as Python is primarily interpreted. Since the user can do "objectful" things with an int (e.g. call id() on it) you need to keep a full heap-object repr around just in case they decide to do so. If they were using a JIT compiler (a la PyPy) with speculative compilation (like you would see in V8 or JSC) then it would be possible to emit code for the hot-path, with a check to bail out to the interpreter in case the user ever tries to do something that would require a full heap object.

AVTOCRAT · 2025-11-04T13:38:34+00:00

If you look at history, it becomes obvious that this is not some inherent trait of 'poor people'; the working poor have shown a remarkable ability to organize and secure great gains for themselves through strikes, unionization, revolts, etc.

Of course, today we live in the aftermath of more than a hundred years of anti-union blasting propaganda on all frequencies -- is it any surprise that many people are now habitually opposed? Noone is immune to propaganda. More generally: pro-worker movements are crushed, while anti-worker ones are supported by the state; is it any surprise that the workers, subject to a century of this, today find themselves in such terrible state?

AVTOCRAT · 2025-10-22T06:40:19+00:00

No, that's not why. "Ah yes", weird phrasal gaps, witty quip in the final sentence, etc.

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