Boom, Boom, Out Go The Lights...

It's gratifying to know sometimes that there are other people in the world that agree with one's intuitions on the future of society, and in addition add a depth of research, knowledge and erudition that cements those intuitions into a concrete basis for actual progress to potentially happen, given the right circumstances. Paul Mason, writing in last week's special AI edition of The New World, is one such person; calling out the AI 'revolution' as potentially precisely that: a revolution, but not one that the tech bro's and billionaire owners of the technology would either recognise or wish for. He posits the notion that within the bounding constraints of traditional capitalism and the adversarial zero-sum politics that we still insist in engaging with, AI will eventually crush its makers economically, as more and more workers [particularly middle-class, white collar workers - a trend already pushing more people into effective poverty] are edged out of work into redundancy by the technology, taking yet more people out of the consumption side of the economy and reducing the flow of money in the process.

The sci-fi notion of universal leisure through technology has been found wanting since the Industrial Revolution, due to that technology replacing people and not passing on any of the benefit to the displaced, rather shunting them around to other work [if any] to be further exploited: an economically inactive lumpen proletariat benefits no-one, but affects only the margins of society. An economically inactive population is a disaster for all, including the billionaire class, whose wealth depends on financial inequality, yes, but whose actual survival depends on society and the workers within it itself. No workers equals no food, no water, no medicine - no power, even - no nothing, boys. The survival of these blind fools is predicated on the very thing that their technology is threatening: society itself.

Mason argues that the AI boom may well be a worse bubble than the dot-com one, or the sub-prime fiasco more recently; taking down the pension funds, savings and investments of millions, due to the current wild and wildly overheated over-subscription in the technology: inflating the market-worth of rubbish companies that will inevitably tank in the very near future due to the very market forces that they are generating. This could happen on a scale to rival the Great Depression, dragging entire countries to their knees and pushing millions, once again, into poverty.

Mason also argues - and this is where I find a kindred spirit - that the solution to this is not to completely demonise the technology as the bad actor, but rather capitalism itself as the force of wrong here: that a completely different economic model is [and has been for a couple of centuries] required, where the accumulation of of dead wealth in the hands of a handful of individuals is outlawed, technology is utilised to assist rather than exploit, and that value be given to the production and maintenance of the staples of life and society; and yes, to leisure and learning. In short, a society that values life itself over economic 'growth', itself a concept that is more meaningless now than ever.

Mason cites the writings of Paul Romer, Kenneth Arrow and yes, Karl Marx; but he is not arguing for yet another rehash of the tired old revolutionary approach to counter the ailing capitalist model - communism is indeed as stale and outmoded - but for a third way [not bloody centrism, either] that remodels the social order itself by removing the standard capitalist model from the equation altogether: think Open Source and Public Libraries as models [I'll return to that another time after I've read around the literature more]. Under normal circumstances, one would cynically say things will never change, but the potential severity of the economic backlash to this current boom might just force that change to come about, regardless. As always, we can only hope that good will come out of whatever bad happens. Talk later...