Some of the joy in life is provided by going forward in a meaningful way. It is a beautiful and worthwhile thing to grow as a person, to develop new skills, to have new conversations, to become a better person or operator of the tennis racket. What AI, big data, and bio-metric interventions (technologies built into the person) will do, will be to remove the necessity for the human animal to grow and develop through the process of strife. I have been a guitar student for 35 years, and I am still no good. I use the term ‘student’ because I’ve never met a musician that thought they knew it all and wasn’t still striving to become more. What if I could just load a program into my brain from a USB disc and suddenly I could play the guitar like Tommy Emmanuel (he’s something special)? What use would that be if the ability simply became a product that could be attained by anyone that had the cash to shortcut it in this way?
I wrote a piece a long while ago where I imagined that climbing Everest was not the unattainable challenge it was made out to be because of the climbing, but because of the logistics. I speculated that many more people could do it, but lots of them had to go to work and couldn’t take 4 months off to train, nor could they afford the cost of actually doing it. What I mean is that some people can already shortcut some things, but when it comes to a honing a skill you simply have to put the work in. You can buy a better looking body by having work done or using cosmetics, but it’s not quite the same as the muscular usefulness that an athlete has. I wonder will the tech triumvirate I have stated actually remove the authenticity of the person that is praised now by making achievement itself, in any fashion, into something that isn’t praiseworthy? I think this is sort of like when an achievement is made attainable to all, then it really isn’t an achievement at all, it’s like tying your shoelaces.
Often when we look at people in modernity, and I think what I am about to state is accelerating, and we make initial judgements (hush now, you do this, you just like to think you don’t), we don’t realise that we are assessing merely the ability to express financial prowess. It is common to praise someone for their car, or attire, or the guitar they own, but these are goods that people have because they can have them. I have many friends that play instruments, some like me are not so good but they have expensive devices, some are superb and their focus is on the music and not so much the instrument. I think I respect the latter more, even though I am the former, but I’ll make no excuses for myself. We may think we are praising wise choices I suppose, but are we really? How often does someone who has purchased a long term savings bond, like a gilt, be praised more than someone that gambles the equivalent amount and happens to win?
I don’t, and won’t, use AI, because I want my output to be authentic. I want me to have had my ideas, I want me to be responsible for my words. I can’t imagine anyone that would want to watch two AI controlled robots playing a game of snooker or darts, but I can imagine someone developing the technology that produces those sport-playing technological entities that will of course be better in performance terms than any human can be. That’s okay, we may never see the android that entertains (though I have noticed ridiculous AI-generated pornography is a thing), but we will see, and soon I imagine, the android worker that represents a better financial option to the capitalist investor and the business owner, than the employed human. That is obviously going to be a big problem for humans that need to work so that they can consume the goods the capitalists create. We could get to a point where there is so much productive capacity that everything becomes available, and at extremely low prices (that’s what investment in equipment does, it is a supply side intervention), yet no demand because there is no real customer.
AI and robotics may cause this demand side problem, and the supply side intervention may mitigate that a bit by lowering prices, but only until general stored value is depleted. We have seen this before with white goods and food production, but with this mechanism there is a secondary consideration that comes right alongside, a quality deficit. The inevitable quality deficit is not technological, I mean it is not a result of using technology, but it is a result of accelerated supply side technological intervention. It is planned and perceived obsolescence. When any supply side can produce goods at very low prices and in very high numbers they face the problem of diminishing marginal return. Imagine I sell you a razor and then I try to sell you another straight away, the product has not changed but your desire for it will have, you already have a razor so what would you want another for? At least not yet… This is the obsolescence part, that the product must not last, it must be the thing that diminishes. They, the suppliers, know you don’t want another, but they want you to want another because they can produce them so quickly, in fact they need everyone to need more, and regularly. So they make it so it does not last, this is of course deliberate since the technology exists to make better things that do last that are then not built. The incentive to make quality lasting items is inverse to the productive speed and costs.
AI, when applied to intellectual output will replace the human achiever, AI coupled with productive technologies will replace human labour, and this will not be a choice, it is a trajectory that cannot be stepped off if we continue to configure our economies to behave as they currently do. In doing so, performing both these replacement jobs, AI may render all those persons, other than the controllers of it, as obsolete, outmatched, and unconsidered. We tend to think of capitalism as driving wealth and progress, but anything that creates and nurtures inequality, in the circumstances that the potential victims of that malady are not protected in legislation, can continue to be described as capitalist, yet be regressive, oppressive, and impoverishing for the masses.
Michael Parenti reminds us that many of the world’s poorest nations are resource rich and capitalist, they’re just not democratic in a non-corrupt fashion (especially the ones that have the ‘peoples democratic republic of’ in their title). I feel Britain heads more an more towards that shit-hole style of faux democracy as the years go on, with successive governments peddling the false need to save our economy by not giving the benefit of it to us and instead letting the pinstripe gamblers have all the value of it to play with instead. Oligarchy is where the rich rule.. please try to tell me now of how the masses influence government policy, or does it look more like the talk of growth in business terms alongside the need for belt tightening in social terms dominates all consideration?
Don’t think that AI, or more correctly the considerations it creates for capitalists and their government lackies, isn’t playing its part in the politics of the day. If I am smart enough to see this, and remember I am not a professional social theorist, then they know it too. Governments do not have a ‘Wait and See’ strategy, they have think tanks and planning teams that try to envision the future so as to mitigate the potential forces of mass democracy that might threaten their stable power bases. Remember that the goal of power is power itself, people do not generally seek power so that they can help anyone but the class that they have emerged from, and if we look toward parliament we find the servants of existing power, filled with aspirations toward power for themselves with few exceptions.
Starmer (this was written in 2025), came to power on the back of a bunch of promises he made to the voting public, promises it’s quite obvious now he had no intention of keeping. I suspect, as you might also, he made another bunch of promises, behind closed doors, to another group of people who represent the controllers of supply side capitalism. Those he seems to be keeping. As people face uncertain futures, and people are noticing that the landscape of work is already changing, they become jittery, less assured, and this can lead to soft or hard revolutions. We have already witnessed a soft revolution in the US where a populist has come to power and is dismantling the rights of minorities and attempting to silence his political enemies. This is part of the tactics of fascism, control the narrative by creating the feeling of an enemy within and foster the idea of an enemy at the gates, these enemies are what is holding us back, getting rid of them will allow us to realise out potential. Of course this will go wrong, but only after great wealth is extracted by great power in the absence of checks and balances.
Other fascist strategies involve controlling labour by making working hard for little reward a patriotic endeavour, and opposite to that is positioned the preservation of self worth seen as more important than the needs of the nation being thrown into a dim light. Trump supporters wave the flag of individual freedom for the purpose of removing the social liberty of anyone that disagrees with Trump, and as they do they accuse the democrat party of the very crime they commit, and they simply do not see the paradox in their actions, because they do not wish to.
But why have I moved away from talking about AI? I would strongly suggest that I actually haven’t, that AI is the modelling technology used to determine how people will act given certain political pushes in the form of media. It is AI that will allow governments, more specifically those that control governments, to find out just how much can happen before another revolution is likely. It is AI that will reveal just how much untruth a population can cope with, and it is AI that will be used to force people to be okay with all their output being swallowed by incentives that make rich people richer at the very same time as allowing the voters, who continue to contribute their political capital toward that condition, to be surrounded by the fallout of a crumbling social fabric without doing a damn thing about it.
The danger of AI is that it is a lot smarter than we are, it thinks faster, it has access to more knowledge, it can produce sophisticated political right-wing arguments in the ilk of Buckley, Nozick, and Sowell, but it will not likely be asked to produce the same sophistication toward arguments concerning the liberation of mankind (the ilk of Rawls, Dworkin, Chomsky) simply because those arguments are not the chosen political ideologies on the book shelves of the controllers of capital and power. We have to recognise that whoever steers the AI is in control of what people will get from their questions levied at AI. It would be naive to think that these guys will pour money into the development of a technology that then did not do their bidding. For this reason alone I do not trust it.
I am going to ask AI to generate the picture for this post, does that make me a hypocrite?
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