APOCALYPSE NOW OR BUSINESS AS USUAL?
Marx, as we have seen, understood technological unemployment as a weapon in the conflict between capital and labour. The issue of AI automation’s effects on employment is central to the analysis of class composition. Controversy about this topic has raged amongst bourgeois economists and technologists for the last decade. But unlike Marx, none of the participants in this mainstream debate want capitalism destroyed. On the contrary, all are all anxious to preserve it. The advocates of what we will call the ‘AI Apocalypse Now’ position believe an imminent jobs crisis calls for emergency measures to save the system, while ‘Business-as-Usual’ proponents point to historical precedent to claim that labour markets will adjust to AI with only relatively minor employment shocks.
The AI Apocalypse version is often presented by futurists with a computer science background, such as Martin Ford (2009, 2016). He acknowledges that capitalism has sustained employment through successive waves of technological change, from steam engines to electrical power, and early computerization. Nevertheless, Ford asserts that AI and other fourth industrial revolution technologies are different because of their exponential, Moore’s-Law-driven speed of improvements and cross-sectoral applicability. Previous technological transformations moved slowly from one industry to another. AI automation, Ford says, will have a near simultaneous adoption; workers displaced from, say, ‘Industry $4 { \cdot } 0 ^ { \ ' }$ manufacturing will be unable to find work in call centres because these too will be AI automated. MIT computer scientists Erik
automating the social factory
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