This is the first issue of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter, about the intersection of

Fully Automated Luxury Communism Newsletter This newsletter is about fully automated luxury communism: how technology can help bring about a high-tech, post-work, post-capitalist society. Every two weeks you will receive technology stories from areas such as labour-saving technology, self-driving cars, space exploration, reproductive technologies and of course leftist shenanigans.

This is the first issue of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter, about the intersection of left politics and technology. I started it because new technologies, from AI to space travel, saw major advances in recent years, but at the same time contain deep political repercussions. Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings. This week we’ll dive into self-driving cars and space mining. This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are strongly welcomed. Please let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com

Credit: 9kand1

State investment and self-driving cars

Wired made a short documentary about the DARPA Urban Challenge, a self-driving car race. The current self-driving car boom can be traced back to this race. “Congress had tasked the Pentagon skunk works with developing driverless cars to help keep American soldiers safe, but Darpa didn’t give out contracts to its usual stable of defense contractors. It decided to put on a race, with a $1 million prize for whoever built a self-driving car that drove 142 miles through the Mojave Desert the fastest.

"Anybody could show up, and you saw everybody show up,” says Melanie Dumas, a software engineer who had a day job working on voice recognition for use in Abrams tanks, and was exactly the sort of person Darpa hoped might be able to make a driverless car. “It felt like it was anybody’s game.”“ Right now private companies such as Google and Uber are bringing self-driving cars to market, but the original development seems to have been stimulated by the US military and the university system. In this case by having university teams compete for DARPA money in a race. This brings to mind a Mariana Mazzucato quote about another technology: “In fact, there is not a single key technology behind the iPhone that has not been State-funded.”

Self-driving cars and class composition

Much of the political discussion about self-driving cars revolves around replacing the labour of taxi and truck drivers. Yet it is not certain this will inevitably happen.

Capitalism does not just replace labour just because it technologically can, it does it for profit and demobilising workers. The composition of the driver labour force is thus key to understanding self-driving cars. Some notes towards that: The driver labour force is partly well-organised, partly not. Taxi drivers have a strong guildlike structure in many countries, and truck drivers seem to have good traditions of struggle in certain regions as well.



Drivers’ job’s cannot be moved to low income countries, there is no spatial fix for them álá Beverly J. Silver.



In many US states truck driver is now the most common job.



On the other hand precarisation has been particularly aggressive towards drivers, with platforms like Uber undermining traditional structures of taxistas.



Trucking companies in Europe, on the other hand, have been in employing Eastern-European drivers to work in Western-Europe for Eastern-European wages in abysmal conditions.

A recent Politico article quotes a Green MEP saying: “There was a truck driver on the road for eight months who wasn’t allowed home even when his first child was born. He was paid the Romanian local wage of €233 per month.”

Waymo and a crashing bus

To conclude the section about self-driving cars, here are two interesting news items from this week:

Waymo’s fully self-driving vehicles are here – Waymo – Medium medium.com Two years ago, we completed the world’s first fully self-driving trip on public roads, when Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, traveled from a park to a doctor’s office without anyone in the driver’s…

Socialist space mining

Aaron Bastani, who is working on a book about fully automated luxury communism, wrote a piece for LRB on space mining. Private companies are going into space at an unprecedented rate, from Musk to Bezos and Branson. Mining asteroids does not seem that outlandish in this context, so why not bring socialism up there? So how would investors – or in the case of SpaceX, Elon Musk – get a return? One solution would be to follow the example set by the diamond industry after the discovery of South Africa’s abundant reserves: artificially restrict the supply, and sell mined space commodities at a price marginally below the cost of production of any mine on Earth, keeping the drills of our home planet permanently switched off. Customers would have a cheaper product, mining would no longer contribute to climate change, and resource scarcity would no longer be a problem. This is the scenario that Peter Diamandis, the CEO of Planetary Resources, must have in mind when he says that ‘the first trillionaires will be made in space.’ But there is an alternative model of collective ownership that would see the price of precious metals and minerals, all with multiple applications, drop close to zero. Combined with the emergence of general artificial intelligence and ever-cheaper renewable energy, it would be the basis of what’s become known as ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Space is a potential terrain the left can fight on: As outlandish as it sounds, space exploration, like AI and renewables, is an important terrain on which a rising left must fight. The technology is changing, as are the legal frameworks; we need a politics which understands the possibilities of the future and puts them at the service of social justice and abundance – the province of us all – rather than private profit and scarcity.

Interplanetary Gold Rush « LRB blog www.lrb.co.uk Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, has said he expects to see the first delivery of cargo to Mars using his new Interplanetary Transport System as early as 2022, with the first manned mission following two years later. A manned mission to Mars may sound implausible, but so did just about everything else that Musk’s company has achieved in the last fifteen years.

Luxembourg space nation

Meanwhile Luxembourg is doing what it does best: selling its sovereignty. Not for tax evasion this time, but for space mining.

Luxembourg could do for the space-resource trade what it had done for the eurodollar market, international holding companies and multinationals: provide a safe, reliable base where they could operate in tandem with a keen and cooperative – or, by his detractors’ assessment, pliable and sycophantic – state.

How a tax haven is leading the race to privatise space | News | The Guardian www.theguardian.com The long read: Luxembourg has shown how far a tiny country can go by serving the needs of global capitalism. Now it has set its sights on outer space. By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Bye...

This was the first issue of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter. This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are very much welcomed. Please let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com

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