Modern leftists are the modern conservatives. You can watch it happening - 40 years later you have people with grey hair and beards reminiscing their times when they coded by hand. They will absolutely be the most conservative voting block to exist -- they will continue opposing technology.
Key there is future. I don't think he ever claimed such an automated communist utopia was the immediate progression after capitalism.
>The fact that modern leftists are (often) anti-technology is puzzling.
Not puzzling at all when the world has experience earth shattering advances in technology in the past 30-40 years, and the economic gains it has brought have not been reflected in similar reductions in labor for the workers. Why on earth would AI be any different than the cotton gin or the self checkout?
Yeah, I'm baffled how hard this seems to be to understand for many tech people: Everyone raves on about the massive increases in productivity we archieved in the last decades thanks to technological progress - meanwhile wages and living conditions of many have become worse in the same period, while some techbros have amassed otherworldly levels of wealth and see themselves as the new masters of the universe. So that's the glorious future that technology is bringing us towards?
As someone who has not read Marx you can clarify - how does it matter who controls the technology? The industrial revolution was not controlled by labour, it still mattered.
Marxism fundamentally is: productive forces change the society, meaning the technology that exists at that point in time shapes the way people think.
Yes, technological improvements are an important factor, but not a purely positive one:
> In Marx's work and subsequent developments in Marxist theory, the process of socioeconomic evolution is based on the premise of technological improvements in the means of production. As the level of technology improves with respect to productive capabilities, existing forms of social relations become superfluous and unnecessary as the advancement of technology integrated within the means of production contradicts the established organization of society and its economy.
In particular:
> According to Marx, escalating tension between the upper and lower class is a major consequence of technology decreasing the value of labor force and the contradictory effect an evolving means of production has on established social and economic systems. Marx believed increasing inequality between the upper and lower classes acts as a major catalyst of class conflicts[...]
> Ownership of the means of production and control over the surplus product generated by their operation is the fundamental factor in delineating different modes of production. [capitalism, communism, etc]
Marx pretty clearly sees capitalist control of technology as a necessary stage in societal development. The capitalists are the ones who are incentivized to invent the technology, in order to bring down the cost of labor and outcompete each other.