Reader Howard Berman called my attention awhile ago to this fascinating essay by sociologist Randall Collins, which I recommend to everyone looking for some informed “big picture” analyses of what we face. He makes many astute observations: for example, that LLMs produce “not a human-like intelligence at all but a statistical memory bank which estimates which words tend to follow from other words”; or  “the root cause of climate change is the same as the cause of high-tech displacing the labor force, the capitalist economy.” It’s the latter (following up on yesterday’s post about labor’s declining share of income) that I want to call particular attention to. Professor Collins writes:

The big issues in the future of technology are sociological. The central controversy from here on out will be the threat by high tech to eliminate jobs of a substantial portion of the labor force.

The optimistic argument is that technological innovation has eliminated jobs in the past, but new jobs have always emerged. The argument relies heavily on the historical period of the industrial revolution in the 1800s and early 1900s, as factory machines replaced manual labor; but each mechanical innovation was compensated by expansion of white-collar workers, administrators, and professionals. The difference is that AI is now taking away jobs not only of low-level clerical workers, but managers, scientists, and programmers in the AI industry itself. AI is now being trained to shadow the daily work of the middle class elite, in effect making them train non-human replacements for themselves.

Cheerleaders for AI and robotization declare it’s wonderful; everyone will have more leisure, machines will do all the work. Technological innovation will create new products for people to buy, a future of yet unimagined luxury.

This ignores a fundamental fact about the capitalist economy: profit depends on selling your product. If customers with money don’t exist, it doesn’t matter how great your product is, if no one can buy it. The prospects of putting 50% or eventually 80% of the population out of work would create a depression far deeper than the one beginning in 1929 that reached 25% unemployment….

[W]e are [then] back in a mega-Marxian crisis– the reserve army of the white-collar unemployed, demanding government intervention if not socialist revolution.

Ironically, this means future government will continue the trend towards ultra-bureaucratization. Politics will focus on doling out tax money from the few surviving mega-capitalists so that the masses can buy their products and keep their businesses from bankruptcy. Politics in democracies will be an ongoing tug-of-war  over how much will be doled out by the equivalent of depression-era bread lines and soup kitchens.