Common Themes
The books have very different viewpoints, ranging from capitalist to post-capitalist, but share common themes.
The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the books’ key topics of debate…and a huge unknown. The path this collectively leads us down is unknown economically, let alone socially and philosophically. It is simply too early to forecast the aggregate impact of AI on the economy. The great hope of AI evangelists, of course, is that it will boost productivity in a way that unleashes a new wave of growth. The more insidious side of AI includes questions of what AI’s rise means for jobs, the power of corporations versus labor, and even the possibility of an electoral process in a world where most internet content is not generated by humans.
All this is not to mention any practical limits on AI’s productivity boost from the required power consumption of the extra data centers, which may well require power equivalent to the demands of a large country. Some may balk at such statistics, given the desire to reduce the human impact on the planet. Such mundane constraints are not part of this note, which is focused on more fundamental ideas. But they are constraints nonetheless.
There is a dissonance here. Markets leap on prospects of higher growth, and that will be a primary focus of many readers of this note. At the same time, running through several of the works discussed here is a level of anxiety about technological determinism. Jonathan Crary, in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, warns of the suppression of human agency inherent in the development of AI and of the dangers of holding the view that, if something cannot be reduced to data, then it is not ontologically relevant.
Several of these works either directly opine on, or implicitly circle around, the question of the nature of labor and the extent to which it has changed. In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis directly addresses this question in his description of “cloud serfs,” who unwittingly offer their labor freely through using social media. Martin Wolf, in The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, addresses this question from the angle of how the benefits of capitalism and globalization have been unevenly shared by those in the labor force. In The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning, Robert Skidelsky analyzes the interaction of labor and capital, and also addresses how work gives meaning to people’s lives over and above providing a source of income. Crary highlights how in the internet’s early days there were hopes that it would give agency to labor and people’s ability to collaborate, but contends that the internet’s dominant effect instead has been the erosion of any distinction between the work/nonwork and public/private domains.
