Musician Grimes is ready to drop some knowledge: AI is the pathway to the workers’ utopia.
The big picture: Grimes’ vision has a name — Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) — and it kind of makes sense, provided you forget about the meaning of all of those words.
Driving the news: In a TikTok video posted earlier this week, Grimes told her followers that “AI is actually the fastest path to communism.”
“We could totally get to a situation where nobody has to work, everybody is provided for with a comfortable state of being, comfortable living,” she continued.
“AI could automate all the farming, weed out systemic corruption, thereby bringing us to, as close as possible, genuine equality.”
Between the lines: FALC was coined by the writer Aaron Bastani in a 2019 book of the same name that essentially posited this question: What if we could all live in “Star Trek”?
In “Star Trek,” all material needs are taken care of by advanced technology and the limitless energy produced by, I think, dilithium crystals?
“Living on the USS Enterprise, visiting far-flung planets, going on adventures with your friends while wearing a modular outfit and a cute pin,” Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2019. “Now that’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”
The catch: There are a few, foremost among them the fact that so far AI and automation have done more to increase economic inequality than narrow it.
The bottom line: If nothing else, putting the “luxury” in Fully Automated Luxury Communism puts a happier, more tech-friendly spin on a movement that, historically speaking, has not had a great track record.
Because, as Grimes put it in her TikTok, “enforced farming is really not a vibe.”
Source: https://www.axios.com/grimes-artificial-intelligence-communism-equality-0d8a8801-1efc-4082-90ad-10f5bc75c76b.html
