Will AI Spell the End of Capitalism?Michael Timothy Bennett & Sean Welsh
16 Jan 2022
In 2018, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Feng Xiang entitled “AI Will Spell the End of Capitalism.” Professor Feng teaches law at Tsinghua University and is one of China’s most prominent legal scholars. The core of his argument is set forth in the opening paragraphs:
If AI remains under the control of market forces, it will inexorably result in a super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires who reap the wealth created by robots that displace human labor, leaving massive unemployment in their wake.
But China’s socialist market economy could provide a solution to this. If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.
There are a couple of things wrong with this. First, there is the obvious point that Marxists have been prophesying the end of capitalism since 1848. Second, Der Spiegel has run covers prophesying massive unemployment due to robots since 1964. These predictions are yet to eventuate.
Feng hopes that state-owned AI will revive the long-dead idea of socialist central planning. He is probably wrong about this because he overestimates the capabilities of AI and what it is good for. His reference to “big data analysis” indicates that he is referring to the particular class of data-hungry machine learning (ML) models popular today. These algorithms require a lot of data because they rely on mimicry rather than understanding and independent reasoning. ML does not work like human learning. Human children do not need ten thousand tagged images to tell the difference between cats and dogs, but contemporary ML does.
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Feng’s claim is simply that AI oligarchs are bad and the only credible fix is a “socialist market economy” governed by a Marxist one-party state. This is a false dichotomy; our choice is not between these two extremes. We agree that AI oligarchs are an unattractive prospect. However, there are existing remedies for cartels, monopolies, and harmful AI products in the pluralist West. Targeted regulation is a better fix for capitalism’s defects than a revolution led by an alliance of workers and peasants. As a result of Frances Haugen’s testimony, many in the US Congress are looking to clip the wings of social media. The EU has led the world in regulating AI products, introducing rights to explanations, rights to be forgotten, and rights to data privacy. The Australian government has released draft legislation to expose anonymous trolls to defamation actions by removing the “platform” shield of social media and making them “publishers” accountable for the views their users post just like traditional media. The “wild west” days of the information age are over.
But Feng offers a typically Marxist “all or nothing” argument. To fix the problems of competitive capitalism, his solution is a Marxist political monopoly based on the revolutionary expropriation of the expropriators. His argument is unconvincing because it is based on a hopelessly dated caricature of capitalism. “Laissez-faire capitalism as we have known it,” he says, “can lead nowhere but to a dictatorship of AI oligarchs who gather rents because the intellectual property they own rules over the means of production.”
The obvious problem with this argument is that laissez-faire capitalism is extinct, long since abandoned in favour of regulation, anti-trust legislation, and redistribution through the welfare state. Feng overstates the market power of the AI oligarchs, most of whom make their money selling ads in a competitive market. He says nothing about the coercive power of a political monopoly, that can silence policy competition by throwing it into the gulag.
The most sinister aspect of current AI is what a one-party state can do with it. Silicon Valley has given China the technical tools to set up the world of 1984. Now the party telescreen can monitor the likes of Winston Smith 24/7. Instead of a screen on the wall, it’s the mobile phone in your pocket connected to the Internet that can be used to track you and monitor what you click on, who and what you message, and keep you and all your fellow citizens under constant surveillance for “counter-revolutionary” views. In China, the Internet and social media have evolved to be a tyrant’s dream. Comrade political officers in technology firms monitor online posts for “objectionable” material and have unlimited powers of “moderation.”
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Forced to choose between AI oligarchs who make fortunes selling ads, regulated by elected governments that the people can replace, or a society ruled by AI platforms staffed with political officers who repress all criticism of the party line, the former is preferable.
Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/01/16/ai-and-the-end-of-capitalism/
