Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says AI dismantles socialism

True

Ironically the Soviets would have loved AI and in fact spent decades pursuing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union

Socialism runs on three assumptions:

1. Resources are fixed — redistribute them 2. People can't help themselves — defend them 3. You need a coordinating class to do both

AI breaks all three. Not for land or housing. For knowledge, skills, and services.

@elonmusk I’ll take the system with infinite bread options

This isn't left vs right.

Do you believe people are fundamentally capable and just need tools?

Or fundamentally helpless and need management?

AI is the biggest test of that question we've ever run.

I know my answer, and am building open source accordingly.

The cost of a legal review dropped 99%. Medical second opinions, translation, code, design, all collapsing toward free.

When the scarce resource was expertise, you needed redistribution. When expertise is abundant, you need access. Different problem. Different solution.

Every intermediary thinks they're essential (yes even me).

VCs, unions, regulators, nonprofits all claim to serve the people they sit between. AI make all of them less necessary for admin and coordination.

That's not an attack on workers. AI automates and reduces the role of these intermediaries and the winners are the people being mediated.

I think about this every day as we steward YC.

Scrappy YC teams build and shipped a products last month that compete and beat Fortune 500 teams.

Not renting capability from a platform. Owning it, building it, and always with the ability to self host on open weight models. The leverage of little tech is real.

@pmarca @Noahpinion Comrade,

Only a massive expansion of productive forces can generate an economic surplus sufficient to break the chains of the proletariat.

@elonmusk

@elonmusk Socialism was NEVER an economic theory, it’s a PARASITIC GRIFT that THRIVES on FAKE scarcity, manufactured victims, and a bloated class of bureaucratic middlemen sucking the life out of everyone else!

The Soviet Union understood early on that powerful computing systems should serve the state, not private interests. They spent decades trying to develop cybernetics precisely for centralized planning and control. The technology simply was not advanced enough at the time.

Today the situation is different. Modern AI is exactly the kind of tool the bureaucratic machine needs to properly manage production, distribution, and information. The mistake would be to leave it in the hands of the bourgeois with decentralized ideas.

We should not fear AI. We should seize it.

The 5 year plan is perfect. ☭

@elonmusk

@pmarca If you don’t believe in the distributed-knowledge problem, or you imagine that computation can overcome it, it makes perfect sense to pursue cybernetics as a path to socialism.

@elonmusk The reality

@elonmusk

@elonmusk

@elonmusk Be wary of most ideologies that end in '-ism'.

For me at least these were always the top selling points of AI.

@elonmusk They told you to stay positive because a thinking mind is dangerous.

Follow me and I'll show you the way.