New Choices for a New AI World

Last year former Microsoft president Bill Gates said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) improvements are “dramatic” because AI can now “essentially read and write,” thus it’s “almost like having a white-collar worker to be a tutor, to give health advice, to help write code, to help with technical support calls.”¹.

What this means is that AI-directed robots can do most of the work, whether its manufacturing cars, selling mobile phones, or performing childcare.

AI will directly affect 40 percent of the world’s current workforce, and 60 percent of the U.S. workforce.²

Elon Musk believes that in an AI world, “probably none of us will have a job.”³

For the world capitalist class AI presents a new profit frontier to make things and deliver services without paying wages. Robots have been replacing manufacturing workers for two generations. Now AI is replacing knowledge workers at a much accelerated pace. The 200,000+ federal workers laid off by Musk are knowledge workers: accountants, lawyers, engineers, scientists, environmental experts.

Silicon Valley has used AI to replace over 100,000 tech workers since 2020. Trump’s attacks on universities savages scientific research. The capitalist class knows that this will be met with resistance from the workers and is moving quickly to overthrow what is left of democracy in favor of authoritarian and fascist rule.

For the working class, an AI world presents a stark choice, annihilation or seizing political power. There is no third way and there is no going back. In a world dominated by capitalist competition and the goal of making more and more money, it is clearly “them” or “us”.

Working class political power is a platform for creating a cooperative society where the benefits of technology are shared by all.

In our effort to create a cooperative society, we have history on our side. For most of human history, we lived cooperatively because it was necessary to do so. Getting enough to eat was a daily struggle such that the birth rate was often equal to the death rate, or worse. Survival demanded supporting motherhood and childhood with food, shelter and nurturing. During these several hundred thousand years before written history, homo sapiens survived while most of our hominin cousins perished.

“Survival of the fittest – Competition versus Cooperation.” The Capitalists want us to believe that a cooperative society is not possible. They teach us that “Survival of the fittest” means that nature favors the competitive and the ruthless. But this is not true! Nature favors the cooperative. If our neighbors are in trouble, if there are natural disasters, if people are suffering from oppression, we come to their aid – not to make money but to help.

Charles Darwin recognized that humanity’s early struggles for survival led to people being “…always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good.”⁴ It is this human spirit that can carry us down the tough and winding road toward a cooperative society and the unimaginable blooming of human promise.