“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, American theorist & writer
There's been a lot to draw attention over the past week, whether the massive surge in Omicron infections, the massive expansion of the booster programme, the massive Tory vote against Boris in the House of Commons, or the overturning of a previously massive Tory majority in Shropshire North on Thursday - not to speak of preparing for Christmas.
But in this commentary we will instead concentrate on the massive economic change being driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This was the subject of the BBC's 3rd Reith lecture, given by Stuart Russell OBE, a British computer scientist known for his contributions to AI, last Wednesday.
Unfortunately, he has clearly not come across our proposals for disintermediated egalitarian capitalism set out in these commentaries, so his conclusions were not encouraging - to say the least. However, Professor Tim Evans has been discussing them with Simon Rose in this week’s The Bigger Picture, and he is rather more upbeat.
Stuart Russell sets out in his Reith lectures a scenario where machines are extremely powerful, and the wealth they generate is concentrated into very few hands. The great majority of people would live on universal basic income as they are forced out of work by a multitude of robots. Leisure and creativity are still with us, plus those carrying out roles where the human touch will always be of value: but otherwise his future is bleak for most people.
When Karl Marx set forth his radical ideas for socialism, people no doubt found the same sort of hope as was generated in the early stages of the digital revolution. However, we have seen with our own eyes that excessive intermediation has ruined those communist ideals, which have degenerated into, at best, benign dictatorships. It’s made a nonsense of this quote from the Communist Manifesto:
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”
Great play was made, in the early days of socialism, about shifting the wealth balance from capital to labour; but control remained in the hands of the few, and ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ became a ‘brave new world’ euphemism, meaning precisely the opposite.
Why should AI be any different, simply because it's operated by tech giant businesses? It makes no pretence to move wealth from capital to labour - quite the reverse, in fact, it is designed to make human labour redundant.
So economists should stop arguing about the struggle between labour and capital, and start focusing on how to democratise capital, in as disintermediated a way as possible. That's how Stuart Russell should have concluded his lecture, by supporting solutions such as ‘Shares for Data’. This would ensure:
- that all customers of AI - which will be all of us in due course - can receive the wealth returns of the technological revolution, allowing their wages to be replaced by dividends; and relegating the need for universal basic income as a safety net only; and
- allowing all AI customers to participate in the governance of the tech giants, therefore having a part in steering how they interact with humanity at large.
This means shares for all - an international transformation in personal share ownership. It will require planning and preparation for a massive convergence in securities administration and regulation: which was not much in evidence in the summary of responses to HM Treasury's prospectus review, also published last week.
The good news is that the SHARE project at Cambridge University has now Identified a research fellow who will start work in 2022, and who has already been working on the interplay between technology and democracy. I look forward to the programme gathering momentum and providing some real academic rigour behind egalitarian capitalism, and it will include analysis of inter-generational rebalancing: because humans, unlike the machines they have created, have to contend with the life cycle – we don’t live for ever.
Of course, we are all aware that the biggest challenge confronting humanity is climate change: if we don't get the answers right there, the future is indeed bleak. But in a world where wealth is inexorably - and irreversibly - shifting from labour to capital, we must take steps to democratise that capital. Luddism is simply not an alternative, and none of us want to live in a science fiction horror movie of robots in charge.
All this is quite serious for the run-up to Christmas. We will be circulating another, shorter commentary with links to programmes published over the next few days. However, I hope this response to Stuart Russell’s lecture ‘AI and the Economy’ will give some fuel for thought in those extra hours during which the pandemic has deterred us from excessive socialising.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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