What happens when a world-changing technological breakthrough meets a tectonic political realignment?
We’re both in the early stages of an economic and cultural (counter) revolution and also approaching the Singularity. What could possibly go wrong?
It is hard to imagine anything that would ‘change everything’ as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence. The advantages gained from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialisation. The greatest benefit of the arrival of AI is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AI to tell us who we are. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.
(Tech-industry oracle) Kevin Kelly to YourStory, 13/11/17
So, this [musical chairs] is a good metaphor for our societies because elite aspirants typically are energetic, ambitious, well-educated, good at organizing, and therefore when they’re frustrated in getting the positions that they expect, many of them turn to trying to infect, overthrow the unjust social order as they perceive it.
Peter Turchin, to Matt Grossman, 28/6/23
There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts like Fairfax were so comfortable embracing Kendi and DiAngelo… Diversity politics has long been an elite project — a way for major corporations or government offices to whitewash themselves with a few token hires or irrelevant seminars or programs that send the signal to America’s liberals that they’re on the Right Side of History. But there’s a reason that almost every Fortune 500 company in America was blasting out diversity messaging during the summer of 2020 and not, say, putting their lobbying muscle into passing universal paid leave, guaranteed health care, or decent housing for everyone. Diversity politics has given them a way to painlessly massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure at all.
Zaid Jilani, Lean Out with Tara Henley, 16/2/25
For the older and middle-aged, they've seen the country of their youth being murdered in front of them. There is nothing basically now left of the Britain of their childhoods. The younger generations are going to be upset because they'll never get to live in the country of their ancestors. For many Reform is or was the last hope of salvaging whatever is/was left of a decent country. That now looks hopeless… What does the centre ground look like? A country that has wracked up £3trn of debt? Gets invaded every day by people in small boats? Has given up on solving crimes? Indoctrinates children at school? Sees alien cultures imposed on its people because the elite despise our history and culture? Until people start realising that it's not business as usual, nothing is ever going to change.
Reader comment on a Matt Goodwin post, 13/3/25
The anti-neoliberal counter-revolution, pending since at least 2016, is now in full swing. Both the plutocrat class and masses have turned decisively against the liberal-conscience-massaging identity politics that have been near-hegemonic for at least the last couple of decades. Not unrelatedly, those who are not part of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) – indeed, even some of us who are – now hate the PMC.
Of course, animus towards self-satisfied and self-serving elites is hardly unusual historically. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that a society is headed for trouble. As Machiavelli famously observed, it’s more useful for a prince to be feared than loved. What concerns me is that those running the joint aren’t just despised; they are increasingly mocked for their ridiculous beliefs and actions.
To quote Jack Woltz, men (and, nowadays, women) in important sense-making and/or leadership positions can’t afford being made to look ridiculous. But that’s precisely how they’ve made themselves look, perhaps no more so than during the (not-entirely-memory-holed) Covid hysteria.
It’s not just that the punters resent their insufferably self-important social betters – the academics, the journalists, the uniparty politicians and, increasingly, even the scientists – it’s that they regard them as incompetent. Or at least as being so corrupted by a PMC-and-plutocrat-favouring brand of elite politics that they are incapable of discharging their professional responsibilities in a trustworthy manner.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation
History moves in cycles, and no civilisation, at least so far, has broken free of the Circle of Life. The End Times have inevitably arrived; the Barbarians have always stormed through the city gates sooner or later.
Frustratingly, that doesn’t mean it’s straightforward to predict precisely when a civilisation will rise, peak, and then collapse in on itself. The Roman Empire lasted about 1,500 years; Hitler’s ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was done and dusted in less than 15.
But let’s take a moment to consider the arguments of those who believe Western civilisation is sailing close to the ‘catastrophic collapse’ part of the eternal cycle.
From a standing start – he’s the issue of a jobbing jazz musician – Ray Dalio got a degree from Harvard, created one the world’s largest hedge funds, and amassed a fortune of $15-$20 billion. It’s therefore reasonable to assume (a) He’s clever and (b) He’s not a wild-eyed Leftist filled with resentment towards those who’ve been more successful in life.
Here’s the tl;dr summary of Dalio’s ‘Big Cycle’ theory of history :
Stage One: The victorious power in a major war establishes a new world order
Stage Two: The new world order is consolidated
Stage Three: Peace and prosperity begin to be widely enjoyed, which results in complacency setting in
Stage Four: Excess spending and debt lead to internal conflicts and external challenges
Stage Five: Economic crises worsen, and internal and external conflicts escalate
Stage Six: A major war results in the collapse of the existing order
Dalio believes the US – and, more broadly, Western Civilisation – is now at Stage 5.5. I imagine Xi Jinping – who’s given to observing, “The East is Rising, and the West is declining” – agrees with him.
If you really want to black pill yourself, there are plenty of similarly ominous theories to choose from.
Russian-American historian and ‘complexity scientist’ Peter Turchin believes societies enter a pre-revolutionary phase once they start generating ‘surplus elites’. (As historians are obliged to regularly point out, revolutions are typically the result of intra-elite competition rather than the masses rising up. Or rather, the intra-elite competition happens first and only then do the surplus elite types encourage the masses to overthrow the incumbents and install them.)*
This may be an appropriate juncture to point out that, like Robespierre, Lenin was not a member of the proletariat. He was what Richard Hanania would label ‘elite human capital’ – the high-IQ, industrious, polyglot, bookish, part-Jewish son of a father who was a senior civil servant elevated to the lower ranks of the Russian nobility and (most unusually for the times) a well-educated, multilingual mother.
Like many before and after him, Lenin embraced radical Leftist politics at university. But like many a youthful Marxist, Lenin might have grown more pragmatic with age had not the incumbent elite hung his older brother. (At one point, Lenin’s mother purchased some land and encouraged her increasingly radical son to become a gentleman farmer. But Vladimir was set on vengeance.)
Western nations have encouraged ever greater numbers of young people to attend university during the post-war era. Just about everybody finishes high school, and about half of those school leavers now go to university.
Awkwardly, while Western societies have churned out enormous numbers of aspirational young grads in recent decades, they haven’t been quite as good at generating vast amounts of prestigious, interesting, well-paid jobs of the kind university graduates expect.
As an aside, after hearing Communist influencer Ash Sarkar use the term frequently during her recent ‘Maybe we progressives did go a little nuts with the identity politics stuff’ book tour, I realised the term ‘downwardly mobile graduate’ has entered the English language. Or at least the language commonly used by the English.
AI am become Death, destroyer of lifeworlds
When it comes to the AI-enabled tsunami of automation that is about to hit, there’s potentially good news and potentially bad news.
The bounty AI will soon deliver could be shared around relatively equally. That would solve many of the pressing issues currently confronting Western societies and, almost certainly, lessen the growing and ever more toxic divides between classes, generations and even genders.
If the recent technological breakthroughs had happened during the post-war Keynesian dispensation, I’d be optimistic about a ‘Let’s share the benefits of AI around reasonably equitably’ settlement being hammered out among the various stakeholders. (Elites and non-elites, Boomers and non-Boomers, possibly even men and women.)
That’s not how things have played out.
The world-changing AI breakthroughs happened after four decades of neoliberalism had created far more atomised, polarised and stratified societies. Humanity’s Great (Technological) Leap Forward is also happening at a time when a large proportion of the Anglosphere elite remains convinced it has earned its good fortune by being hard-working meritocratic strivers. And that if the other 80 per cent of the population aren’t doing nearly as well, that’s undoubtedly because they are ill-bred racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic bogans/gammon/rednecks.
If you thought 2020 was bad…
There are enormous potential upsides to the wave of AI-driven automation that almost everyone now believes is about to unfold. A political settlement could be forged whereby the wealthy keep much of their wealth while the common folk get something approaching effortless prosperity. This would essentially be something like a New Deal 2.0, without all the government make-work programs.
Alternatively, elites could very well decide they want to capture almost all of the gains of the AI productivity boom, much as they have captured almost all of the benefits of the productivity gains of the last 40 years.
Unless the powers-that-be immediately shutter many universities – especially the second-tier ones offering Mickey Mouse degrees that don’t reliably lead to anything other than low-status, modestly remunerated work in the retail or hospitality sectors – it would appear to be inevitable that there will soon be far more angry surplus elite types wanting to press the reset button.
Around 20-40 per cent of graduates already report being underemployed. What happens once that number exceeds 50 per cent?
ChatGPT informs me that:
Studies that examine the mismatch between available jobs and the qualifications of the labor force suggest that if we define the “surplus elite” as those whose educational attainment exceeds the market’s demand for such credentials, the numbers might work out to somewhere in the ballpark of 5–10% of the overall U.S. working-age population. This rough estimate comes from taking into account both the proportion of the population with university degrees and the fraction of those working in jobs that don’t require such credentials.
Think of the havoc that “5–10% of the overall U.S. working-age population” unleashed in the US, and to a lesser extent across the Western world, in 2020. Now think about what could happen in the coming years if that figure climbs to even 20-30 per cent of working-age populations.
On which, more next week.
*Many have pointed out, correctly, that nations such as the US and UK now tick many of the revolution-encouraging boxes – extreme wealth inequality, institutional crises of legitimacy, relative deprivation (i.e. the widespread belief that “this generation [i.e. any of the post-Boomer generations you care to mention] won’t do as well as their parents”), weak state capacity, non-responsive elites, and so on.
But Turchin is, correctly, given more respect than most other political pundits and academic theoreticians because he put forward a theory, back in 2010, that America goes a bit nuts every 50 years or so and predicted the next bout of “instability” would arrive in 2020. Like Dalio, Turchin’s politics might best be described as eclectically centrist. Like Dalio, Turchin believes that if the US doesn’t urgently address its wealth inequality issue, shit is going to get real.