Justin Murphy

Independent scholar. New book: The Independent Scholar (2026), a history from Plato to Nietzsche.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@reconfigurthing Kudos. Thanks for sharing. Will read for sure.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

The most extraordinary development in contemporary intellectual history is one nobody wants to acknowledge, let alone develop.

It's that the AI revolution is becoming a decisive vindication of the Marxist (or Marxish) critique of capitalism.

The surest evidence is that those who are most worried and upset about AI—who believe it could literally extinguish the human species—have been deeply libertarian, pro-capitalist cheerleaders of Western rationality for their entire working lives. Only now do they think the predictable working of market rationality has gone too far and must be paused, or else everyone is going to die.

Everything happening right now in the AI market was fully prefigured 500 years ago in the enclosure of the commons, then the first industrial revolution, then mass media, then digital media, and so forth. Dozens of mostly European critics of capitalism have called it over many generations now.

Yet not a single person who is on about AI x-risk has taken any stock of their decades-long commitment to capitalism, markets, and rationality.

So either AI Safety is correct, and all the AI Safety thought leaders were naive and wrong about markets and rationality their entire lives; or AI Safety is wrong, AI is just normal technological improvement, and all the Marxish critiques of capital have always been wrong, but then conservative American capitalists are screwed because they cannot then protest the Slop Tsunami, reversion to pre-literate oral culture, AI sex bots, or any of the other cultural horrors truly underway, without having to credit the anti-capitalist kulturekritics for being very correct very early on all this.

And anyone in the West who is still explicitly Marxist or even leftist at all—who knows anything about the most sophisticated cultural critiques of capitalism—is too Luddite to know anything about the reality of AI right now, or they went so Woke they're irretrievable, or they are GenX-or-older tenured profs who have no reason or motivation or ability to keep up with such an extreme rate of change in the material and social world right now.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@nickmgallo @thepiraeus Congrats!

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@DocSilverby it's a shower thought

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@William_Blake I'm basically the same though I think it is closer to apocalypse but I'm OK with that

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@William_Blake That’s consistent!

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@michael_blonde you cant think it's mostly good but going to kill everyone

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@GlenPawley In a way, yes. Marx called them simply machines but the logic is all there.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@gfodor Whoa man I’m not calling you names. Apologies if I came off brusk. I don’t think you’re a moron. You were a bit aggressive saying I made no sense, I was a little snappy back. My apologies.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@gfodor I make no sense and yet you agree on the final analysis that Marx’s model of capitalism will turn out to be correct

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@RokoMijic true

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@RokoMijic I agree. I thought you subscribed to x risk.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@RokoMijic Sure that would be the limit of “possible” ofc, but the whole point is it’s believed we could kill everyone before that point. so capitalism requires that we do that! if you want to limit market competition for x-risk sake then you have to say Marx was right

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

I just mean that AI must be maximized; firms must try to build the most powerful AI it is possible to build; capitalism could not allow for anything else, right? bc if everyone in the first round refuses then capitalism pays a zillion times more to any takers in the second round. isn’t this obvious? I’m struck by this conversation because I would’ve figured people like you take off this for granted already?

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

I think you’re being thick here. Capitalism obviously generates unlimited AI escalation through evolutionary game theory. So AI x-risk is the same problem as the destruction of mining communities in North England. Marx or Adorno had more predictive accuracy than the AI Safety thinkers.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@towero21 Correct, and nobody likes it

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@0x49fa98 @vvphilo Bostrom, Yudkowsky etc. are all economic libertarians, what are you talking about?

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@odinsbadeye if you’re not concerned with AI risk, then I think that’s a coherent view. If you think AI risk is an increasingly civilizational issue, then the anti-capitalist tradition is increasingly vindicated

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@RokoMijic So why at no point did any of the x-risk types ever critique capitalism as an x-risk before LLMs inflected?

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

@winradicci Haha right?! Thanks for commenting

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

What?!?! I'm pretty sure you're wrong on this. "Rationalism" is tightly linked to a pro-market, pro-capitalist libertarianism. European social theory is in many ways the implicit, and occasionally explicit, bête noire of Bay Area rationalism, Effective Altruism, etc. Whether that was a topic they spilled much ink on is beside the point; often that which a group most strongly rejects is that which they feel little need to spill ink on.