AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

Scope of AI’s Impact on Morality and Society

• Several commenters argue the article is overly alarmist and wildly optimistic about agency in an AGI world; others say it gives AI too much credit relative to broader forces like late-stage capitalism and social media.
• Some claim “modern society has no moral foundation” already; others say AI and social media merely expose and accelerate existing decay, not create it.

Leaders, Power, and Moral Responsibility

• Debate over whether political leaders’ morality reflects the populace: some say there’s little moral difference among recent leaders, others insist current administrations differ “by an order of magnitude.”
• One view: “power reveals rather than corrupts” – elites are simply what many people would be with fewer constraints.
• Another thread frames morality in developmental stages (pre‑/conventional/post‑conventional) and argues we’re structurally rewarding narcissistic, pre‑conventional behavior in tech and geopolitics.

Value, Scarcity, and Labor in an AI World

• A recurring theme: does AI “destroy value” by making many outputs abundant?
  • Some say that’s utopian abundance; others call it dystopian, because existing institutions funnel gains to owners and discard workers.
• Long back-and-forth on:
  • Price vs value, use‑value vs exchange‑value.
  • Labor theories of value and whether labor is the moral basis for income.
  • Post‑scarcity analogies (books, digital media, energy) and the artificial re‑creation of scarcity via IP, DRM, and paywalls.
• Several predict AI will erode meritocracy myths: if intelligence and creativity are easily automated, justifying extreme income gaps via “talent” gets harder.

Work, Creativity, and Dignity

• Strong anxiety from creatives and knowledge workers: AI training on their work without consent, mass “AI slop,” and the risk of deskilling and making humans “dumber” by removing incentives to learn.
• Counterpoint: if a human can be replaced by AI slop, that role was already a bad use of a human life; AI should free people from such work.
• Some report feeling demotivated (“my work isn’t special anymore”), others say AI tools massively increase their ability to ship projects and actually make them create more.
• Comparisons to Luddites: were they anti‑automation or anti‑being dispossessed? Several insist the core issue is distribution, not technology itself.

Ownership, IP, and Legitimacy

• Deep disagreement over whether training on creative works without consent is a moral violation or just how information has always flowed (fanfic, learning by reading).
• Some reject the idea of “owning” information entirely; others see current AI practices as another capitalist extraction of labor and culture.
• Concern that AI centralizes power in “neo‑monarchs” who own compute and models, flattening human differences while concentrating wealth at the top.