According to Karl Marx class equilibrium enabled Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to become emperor. Neither the bourgeoise, petty bourgeoise or peasantry were dominant in France in 1851, making it possible for someone as incompetent as Louis to remain in power. There have been some rather unkind, but justified, comparisons between Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew and Boris Johnson. However, Johnson was not the only Prime Minister of recent years who struggled to govern the country, so perhaps there is something in what Marx said and class equilibrium is a thing.
Technological advances have played a major part in making Britain ungovernable and AI technology is unlikely to make life easier for the current or, for that matter, a future government.
During my teens I spent 18 months operating a capstan lathe. This job disappeared with the introduction of Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) lathes. The tapes fed into these machines were created by the same people who designed the components manufactured on the lathe. The short time I spent as a draughtsman saw this job largely ‘deskilled’ with the introduction of Computer Aided Design (CAD.) Turning a threat into an opportunity I set up my own computer company. The last years of my career was spent as a journalist for a telecoms magazine. The nature of the work changed when the magazine went on-line and there was less time or money available for research. Given we were now, according to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, entering the age of ‘friction-free capitalism’ I set up my own publishing company and sold research covering medical electronics and low carbon technology. However, ‘friction-free’ was an accurate description of the slippery slope at the bottom of which research was given away for free.
When the robot set of for its job interview with the market research company where it would no doubt demonstrate its access to ChatGPT or some other Generative AI software, I was reminded of that capstan lathe which had overnight become both capital and labour. It seemed history was repeating itself; first as tragedy, then as farce and finally as spectacle. The robot’s sudden interest in 3D printed components was particularly worrying or would have been were I not retired – the world looks a lot different viewed from Costa for those of us not hunched over laptops.
Those of us who did not fall by the wayside during fifty years of breakneck innovation – as many in the coal, steel and heavy engineering sectors did – drifted from one class to another as the nature of our employment changed, in my case from working class to middle class and then becoming a member of the petite bourgeoisie (the latter transition made twice over.) Companies used high technology capital equipment to reduce the input of labour required by unskilled working-class employees to generate surplus wealth. The result was a rapid decline in organised labour in the UK and all that prevented a total impoverishment of the working class was consumer capitalism’s (as the name suggests) reliance on consumption. To prevent economic collapse governments were compelled to pay the unemployed, via various benefits, to consume the goods capitalist’s manufactured. The result was a narrowing of the ideological difference between the Left, which no longer exclusively represented the interest of the working class, and the Right, which frequently found itself at odds with capitalists. So ended Britain’s class war. (Although ‘war’ is something of an exaggeration, stood around an oil drum filled with burning wood outside the gates of a factory while holding a piece of cardboard with ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ written on it in felt tip pen, was hardly the storming of the Winter Palace.)
The growth of the Internet, Web and social media to the point where online communication has become ubiquities has automated many of the tasks carried out by the middle class and petite bourgeois which now find themselves in much the same position as working class were in latter half of the previous century. They are now split between the shrinking number still producing information in what has increasingly become a middleclass version of the working-class gig economy and the displaced who are rewarded for consuming the information.
The more politically astute, and one suspects given recent history, this does not include Britain’s last five prime ministers, might question where the real power now lies. They might even wonder if one of those existential risks ‘godfathers of AI’ keep banging on about is political upheaval – although this sounds rather dramatic, and alarmist. In fact this would probably play better in France (Viva la Revolution, man the barricades) than in Britain (mustn’t grumble, things could be worse.) Even so for neoliberal politicians, a Marxist style revolution is about as ‘existential’ as risks get.
We already have a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ of sorts which came in under the radar while our politicians were asleep at the wheel – if you need convincing spent an hour or so on Twitter. The dictators in question are the handful of tech companies who control the major networks. The potential influence of these became apparent during that conversation with the robot.
Interestingly, the techniques the robot employed to predict whether the young student was about to purchase an iPhone were much the same as those used by the Stasi fifty years ago to determine just how influential any one person was amongst a group of fellow dissidents. The Large Language Model accessed by the robot’s AI software resembled a digital version of the 18 km of files containing information on the citizens of East Germany. This use of AI technology, which first came to light during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is politically agnostic: as at home motivating consumers in capitalist Britain as it is reinforcing party loyalty in communist China.
During the Bletchley conference Rishi Sunak suggested Britain and China are on the same page in regard to their approach to AI,: this is not true. China, having witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, realises experimenting with capitalism in the information age can prove catastrophic. It has put economic ahead of political reform and attempting to reign in big tech and control networks rather than let political power fall into the hands of companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent or, even worse, Google, Meta and Twitter. Sunak, by contrast, is vacillating, appearing in the thrall of big tech and all that AI offers which, despite the predictions of those godfathers, remains a known unknown. What is clear however is the increasing political and economic power of network operators will bring to an end a period of class equilibrium during which anyone could become Prime Minister (and pretty much anybody did.)