(2019-09-18) Do We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Do We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism? What happens after artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics displace huge swathes of routine labor? According to Aaron Bastani, a London-based researcher, the answer would appear to be “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”. Strange as it may seem, Bastani believes that automation is driving capitalist societies headlong into a post-capitalist utopia: Think Star Trek or Ian Banks’ Culture Series.

Capitalism it would seem has given birth to a technological revolution that is accelerating the long-term collapse of prices and eventually markets.

Interestingly, a similar argument has been made by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge. In their book Reinventing Capitalism, the authors argue that technology is reshaping markets, spawning data-driven platform monopolies set to remake the nature of supply-and-demand. In their view, AI is driving a new era in automation in which the evolving precision of algorithms has begun displacing the function of price signals. Put simply, algorithms are replacing human social coordination.

the excesses of capitalism are now converging toward an unprecedented set of crises: an environmental crisis, a demographic crisis, a democracy crisis, and a crisis of socioeconomic stratification. All of which requires serious political attention. (Long Emergency)

Where premature attempts at communism produced industrial-era prison states, actual communism through automation is leading to an era of AI, bioengineering, clean energy, near-earth asteroid mining, and universal basic services

Unfortunately Bastani’s prescription for managing the transition largely echoes strategies of the past—nationalism, worker cooperatives, state ownership, and socialized banking. Rather than the technological modernization that animates much of his vision of the future, Bastani’s policies for the present simply reduce everything to the power struggles of the last century

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a tantalizing vision of the future. But what seems more likely in the near term is fully automated algorithmic governance.

Software is eating the world and this includes the world’s institutions and governments. But will we live to enjoy it? Bastani’s overarching concerns with the excesses of capitalism are entirely legitimate. Can the institutions that sustain capitalism be transformed in time to avert global catastrophe? If capitalism is allowed to continue as usual, then class polarization, demographic imbalance, and ecological destruction will lead us to collapse. What is clear is that with growing markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, enlightened policies are needed to remake energy, technology, and governance before it’s too late.