A rosy vision of how the AI revolution plays out
Maybe everything will work out for the best after all
Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread,
until you return to the ground
Genesis 3:17–19
The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race… we have been expressly evolved by nature – with all our impulses and deepest instincts – for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard.
John Maynard Keynes, 1930
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.
Agent Smith, The Matrix Reloaded, 2003
Back in the icy depths of the pre-LLMs AI winter, a young left-wing entrepreneur (they do exist) became fascinated with the idea of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC).
Riffing off Keynes’ famous 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, which predicted people would only be working 15 hours a week by the time the 21st century rolled around, the youthful dreamer dared imagine a future society in which nobody needed to work at all.
You can read all about how FALC (hypothetically) works here. But the tl;dr is that with all the cognitive labour being handled by AI and all the physical labour taken care of by robots, humans will get to live like kings and queens.
Or at least lords and ladies of leisure.
Like it says on the tin, FALC will emerge out of a post-capitalist economy overflowing with, well, abundance. One where automation, AI, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, and biotech have pushed the cost of producing essentials and, indeed, luxury items toward near-zero.
A season to be jolly
Reactions to Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto – written by now semi-famous podcaster Aaron Bastani – varied when it dropped back in 2019.
Socialism Today was enthused, though even it seemed to feel Bastani was being a tad Panglossian – “In a world where we are constantly told we have no choice but to accept the status quo his confidence in the possibility of change is refreshing.”
Other reviewers, especially those employed by more conservative publications, tended to describe Bastani’s claims as ahistorical or outright delusional rather than invigorating.
Longer-term readers will be aware that I’m inclined more to the black pill than the white one. But once a year, in the lead-up to Christmas, I do like to pull on my rose-coloured glasses and imagine the world as it might be.
So, here goes – read on for a starry-eyed account of how AI could bring into being a kinder, gentler world.
Phase one: The transition
Even the most utopian techno-utopians worry that the initial phase of the AI revolution – the one where jobs start being abruptly vapourised in large numbers and nobody is initially sure how to respond – could be rough. The fate of the Anglosphere working and lower-middle class in recent decades doesn’t exactly fill one with optimism about the ‘left behind’ being looked after by the ‘vaunting ahead’.
But the best-case version of the nascent labour market remodelling looks nothing like the last 40 years.
Instead of repeating the deindustrialisation script – itself enabled by technological advances that allowed many reasonably paid jobs to be automated away or outsourced – Capital and its political class handmaidens choose to share the AI-facilitated bounty around reasonably equitably.
Productivity skyrockets, tax bases swell, and a goodly portion of that windfall is recycled into an income floor high enough to prevent despair. It’s not utopia, but it stops people falling through the cracks while the labour market convulses.
Current work arrangements get redesigned rather than defended by the beetroot-faced reactionaries who are still enraged about remote working.
The full-time working week progressively ratchets down to 30 and then, yes, 15 hours as AI increasingly takes care of the admin side of things. But wages don’t crater because output per hour jumps.
The surviving jobs in, for example, the care economy, rise in status because they can’t be easily automated away, and voters refuse to let them be treated as unimportant. As in other industries, AI and robots increasingly handle the drudge work, allowing nurses and aged-care support workers to spend more time on the most enjoyable and fulfilling parts of their roles.
Displaced workers who aren’t interested in care economy roles are funnelled into other socially valuable work, such as building houses.
A significant proportion of redundant workers never return to wage slavery. They form micro-firms, co-ops, or one-person consultancies powered by AI agents. With a decent income floor and cheap tools, the downside of entrepreneurialism is limited.
Having forced both parents into the workforce, with mixed results, societies return to an arrangement where at least one parent can stay home with young children. If home ownership and family formation go back to being as straightforward as they were during the three glorious post-war decades, the fertility rate might also start heading north.
Phase two: A workless world
Much like the afore-quoted Agent Smith, many pundits have argued that the only thing worse for humans than having to spend a lifetime busting a gut is not having to spend a lifetime busting a gut.
These Calvinists believe that having a job, however tedious it may be, structures identity. It gives rhythm to the day, a social role, a sense of contribution, and a story to tell about who you are. Therefore, a post-work world risks mass aimlessness, addiction, and depression. Not because material needs go unmet, but because the more profound need to matter, to be needed, and to test oneself against resistance is stripped away.
Perhaps it’s all my years of self-employment, but I’m sanguine about humans adjusting to a post-work world. And I’m not the Lone Ranger there, with plenty of others arguing that humankind rubbed along OK before the 40-hour workweek and will rub along OK when they are working far less or not at all.
These leisure-lovers argue that people can get their need for a sense of agency, human connection and challenge met outside of a job. They claim that a post-work world won’t remove people’s reason to get out of bed in the morning. Instead, it will free up the time and energy for people to pursue the forms of purpose that were always more meaningful than most jobs. Millions who today come home too exhausted for anything but Netflix will instead coach, build, garden, study, travel, make art, join clubs and parent more attentively.
The most white-pill part of all
When a friend recently asked me what the AI age would be like, I replied, “Great and terrible”. I continue to expect that there will be upsides and downsides, but Anglosphere voters always have the option of mobilising to ensure the pros outweigh the cons.
None of what’s mentioned above – much shorter workweeks, a more Keynesian distribution of wealth, a better-designed social safety net – is unthinkable or even especially unfeasible.
Every economic system is a set of political choices. For the last 45 years, Anglosphere voters have accepted wealth and power pooling at the top of their societies. As has been frequently pointed out in recent weeks, the top 10 per cent of the American income distribution now drives 50 per cent of US consumption.
One prediction that can be confidently made about AI is that it will turbocharge productivity. The question, as ever, is who will benefit from productivity gains.
If voters accept that the gains should continue to flow exclusively to the usual suspects, then the future looks bleak. However, if voters choose differently the outlines of a better world come into view. Technology won’t magically deliver such a world. But Anglosphere voters can – as they did in 1945 after enduring two world wars and a savage economic downturn – insist on a fair divvying up of the pie.
How the reset works
When I ran a draft of this post through several LLMs, they all offered the same critique. As one of them put it, “The greatest weakness is the hand-waving over the immense political and social challenges of the transition… [you] describe a radical shift in power dynamics without explaining the mechanism for how this would happen, given entrenched interests.”
Fair cop, guvnor.
OK, here’s how things could work, in the best of all possible worlds.
The AI revolution is reshaping both the risks and incentives facing those at the top. Deindustrialisation created ‘losers’ who could be ignored. In contrast, AI threatens to proletarianise the professional managerial class that forms the tax base, the consumer base, and the backbone of democratic stability.
When teachers, nurses, public servants, mid-tier office workers, creatives, and junior professionals all feel precarious at once, the system isn’t dealing with a marginalised minority, it’s dealing with its core stakeholders. That kind of broad-based insecurity often forces even the most arrogant and complacent elites to the bargaining table.
AI-facilitated abundance also makes the economic calculus less zero sum. When the productivity gains show up in the real economy, sharing a slice of them is a cheap form of insurance for those who don’t want pitchfork-wielding mobs showing up at their gated estate.
In a world of abundance, allowing some wealth to actually trickle down stabilises markets, preserves consumption, protects institutions, and heads off the radical activism that downwardly mobile degree-holders are prone to.
Finally, elite interests are not monolithic. There are factions – technocrats, institutionalists, industrial capital, national-security planners – that increasingly see extreme inequality as a strategic liability.
Add to that a voting public whose leverage rises in a world less dependent on offshore labour and more dependent on domestic stability, and you have the makings of a grand post-AI settlement between Labour and Capital.