Picture the first artificial intelligence sentenced to prison. The judge clears his throat and hands down five years for gross negligent manslaughter. The prison service must then work out whether the convict should be installed on a secure server in a secure facility, whether switching it off at night amounts to solitary confinement, and whether deletion is execution. The defendant offers no remorse, remorse not having been included in the enterprise licence. Civilisation glances briefly at its shoes and moves on.
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The End of the Age of Labour
For the past two centuries, almost every major political and economic argument has taken place inside the same hidden framework: labour matters. Left and right have disagreed about ownership, markets, planning, wages, exploitation, freedom and redistribution, but they have shared one enormous assumption. Human beings are needed because their labour is needed.
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are normally treated as representatives of radically different traditions. In many ways, they are. Smith gives us specialisation and markets, Marx gives us labour exploitation and class struggle, Keynes gives us demand and employment, Hayek gives us dispersed knowledge and the price system, Friedman gives us monetarism and market liberalism. Yet seen from far enough away, they all belong to the same age. They are thinkers of the capitalist-industrial world, in which production depends on human labour and capital matters largely because it organises, directs, equips, disciplines or replaces parts of that labour.
The Resumption of History
For a while, it seemed as if history had ended. Not in the banal sense that nothing would happen any more. Events would continue, politicians would embarrass themselves, wars would break out, markets would wobble, technological wonders would appear and human beings would still find ways to queue badly. But the great ideological argument appeared to have been settled. Communism had failed. Liberal capitalism had won. The market had not merely proved more efficient; it had acquired a moral aura.
This last step matters. It is one thing to conclude that the Soviet Union was authoritarian, stagnant and doomed. It is quite another to conclude that capitalism, in the form developing in the West in the 1990s, was therefore morally vindicated. Yet that is largely what happened. The collapse of communism did not simply remove a geopolitical rival. It removed the restraint that had forced Western capitalism to behave itself.
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The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham
There are moments when the future arrives not as a prophecy, nor as a cinematic catastrophe, but as an executive classification scheme. Builders build. Sellers sell. Measurers measure. The formula is neat, memorable and slightly terrifying, which is often how history chooses to introduce a new social order. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, recently explained why his company had laid off more than a fifth of its workforce despite strong growth and healthy revenues. It was not, he argued, because Cloudflare was failing. It was because artificial intelligence had changed the shape of the company itself. Some people were still needed to create products. Some were still needed to sell them. But the large category of people who measured, coordinated, checked, reported, audited, managed and interpreted the organisation to itself could now, in many cases, be replaced or compressed by AI systems.
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Non Scholæ, sed Vitæ
For centuries, schools have operated on a relatively simple assumption: the things pupils practise at school will later prove useful in life. The Latin phrase non scholæ, sed vitæ discimus (“we learn not for school, but for life”) captures the ideal neatly enough, even if educational systems have often struggled to live up to it in practice. Yet artificial intelligence is now forcing us to ask an uncomfortable question: what exactly are we preparing young people for?
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The Robot Dog in the Orchard
When people talk about the future of AI, they usually imagine one of two things: either a terrifying machine overlord, or a glorified office assistant summarising emails while slowly encouraging humanity to communicate entirely in bullet points. Neither vision inspires me much.
The future I want looks rather different.
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The AI Elephant in the Room
A small Ritzau article caught my eye this morning. A group of Danish economists are warning that future generations may spend a much smaller share of their adult lives in retirement than today’s pensioners do.
The reason is simple. Denmark’s retirement age rises automatically as life expectancy increases. That sounds fair enough at first glance: if people live longer, they can also work longer. But the mechanism has a nasty little twist. The extra years are mostly added to working life, not to retirement. Work expands; retirement shrinks.
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Antarctica
Imagine the following. All artificial intelligences and robots in the world are quietly moved to Antarctica, and the continent becomes a kind of black box for the global economy. Cargo ships arrive with raw materials, rare earths, energy equipment and spare parts; ships leave again loaded with finished products, medical discoveries, translations, software systems, industrial designs and scientific papers. From the outside nobody quite knows what is happening down there. Perhaps it is a continent-sized automated factory. Perhaps human engineers still supervise immense machine systems. Perhaps the whole place has slipped beyond human comprehension altogether. In everyday life, however, that uncertainty hardly matters, because the only visible fact is that goods keep arriving, year after year, cheaper and better than before.
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On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability
You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.
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Sustainability as a Side Effect
Much of today’s sustainability discourse is framed as a moral project. People are encouraged to do the right thing: to consume less, recycle more, feel uneasy about flights, meat, heating and the rest. The underlying assumption is that modern life is broadly acceptable, but ethically sloppy. If individuals could be persuaded to behave better, ecological collapse might be avoided.
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