People have got to remember that unlike the AI in movies, real AI is held back by the same material and logistical realities as anything else. It doesn’t matter how hypothetically clever its thinking is when it runs up against the same boundaries as we do. For example, chatbots can help with loneliness in some cases as harm reduction, but they can’t fix loneliness. Why? Because they can’t actually go out into the world and address the material causes of loneliness. And if they could, they’d now be up against the system of capitalism and its enforcers (which is causing much of the loneliness), and they’d face the same kind of challenges that humans do when organizing, including the possibility of being vilified as enemies of the state.

As Mao says, “Political power derives from the barrel of a gun.” That’s an important underlying principle about power to understand, the enforcement required in it. AI is not such a principle in itself; rather, it’s a facet of mechanization and automation. A tool that can, in the hypothetical, be applied to anything from life-saving to life-destroying. But the specific application of it is not a matter of ideas and willpower alone. It requires conscious implementation and runs up against material limitations.