Reclaiming History for the Left

Caroline Lucas has achieved little as an MP, though not for want of trying, but the news that she is standing down at the next election has triggered fulsome praise for the Green's only parliamentary representative, which is as good an indication as any that she hasn't rocked the political boat nor, to mix my metaphors, set an intellectual cat among the anti-intellectual pigeons of British public discourse. Predictably, her latest book, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story, has been well-received, not only by soi-disant progressives but by conservatives who find her English particularism resonant (it probably helps that she admits that leavers had the best tunes during the EU referendum). Though some liberal commentators have wheeled out the strawman of progressives being uncomfortable with national identity, this has simply served to allow them to exhibit their own patriotic instincts ahead of a new Labour government that will be swept to power on a sea of Union Jacks and England football kits. I'm not going to review the book, but I think the reception given it is a useful jumping-off point to discuss the idea that the left (however defined) can "reclaim" national history.

According to Sunder Katwala, "She suggests that an emotionally intelligent, progressive politics might focus a little less on factchecking and a bit more on how to compete to shape the myths, memories and stories that shape who we think we are to progressive ends." This is pernicious nonsense, not simply in the contempt it shows for history or the hypocrisy over "sacred facts", but in its twin delusions that progressives can succesfully compete to shape national myths and that such mythmaking can serve progressive ends. The first delusion is obvious when you consider the minimal influence progressives have over the media that construct the myths, preserve the selective memories and select the stories that collectively constitute our narrative history, and that's without noting what little sway it has is limited to "progressives" of a particularly conservative bent. This partly explains why she has recourse to the consolations of novels, but it should also be noted that fiction offers the chance to enact virtues that one might be reluctant to apply in reality. For example, as Katwala perhaps credulously puts it: "Lucas suggests the social consciences of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Nevile Shute could inspire new arguments for universal basic income." Well they didn't at the time of writing.

Tim Stanley points out that what vibrates with him in Lucas's work is its concern with manners: "Blending art with political analysis, Lucas writes far more forcibly than authors of Left and Right who think a nation is defined entirely by its constitutional order, or that if the party they happen to support isn’t in power, England is lost for good. These fashionable doomsters lose sight of what really matters, of what really shapes a tribe. I’ve read countless books about the historical precedence for Brexit and Boris Johnson, but none that convincingly explains why the English obsess about the weather, let their teeth go yellow or make love in the dark with their socks on. I care far less about Magna Carta or the strength of the Royal Navy than I do about our once-solid reputation for good manners – being eroded, alas, by iPhones and the invasion of American familarity." There is an obvious echo of George Orwell in both Lucas's approach (salutary lessons about Englishness drawn from literary classics) and in Stanley's cultural commentary (he fails to appreciate the artifice of his own prejudices - e.g. the "yellow teeth" trope originated as an American critique of NHS dentistry). The point is that Lucas and Stanley, like Orwell before them, are operating in a conservative register.

The British left has long been bedevilled by the conservative tenor of its dreams of a better society, combining a pre-industrial rural nostalgia with the sober respectability of the self-improving working class. This tends to be heightened whenever there is the threat from the radical left, and the reaction invariably emphasises an aesthetic and moral critique over a material analysis, hence the prominence of the literary Fabians in the early decades of the twentieth century, the instrumental revival of Orwell in the 1980s and 90s, and more recently initiatives such as Blue Labour and the commentary of John Cruddas that sought to mount an emotional defence of a working class culture that rejected continental theory (and the EU). A good example from 2017 was Julian Coman's eulogy for Robert Blatchford's Merrie England: "Labour needs to return to 'its roots in a kind of moral and civic critique of the excesses of capitalism'. This was the core thrust of Merrie England, and the original spirit of a Labour party that had its roots in religion, not Marxism. But during the 20th century, the “ethical tradition” faded as the parliamentary party became more pragmatic and managerial, while the left pursued the more confrontational Marxist route of class struggle".

Progressives will struggle to compete in the shaping of national myths not only because of the asymmetry of power in the media but because their own historical ignorance tends to result in them believing that there is a radical kernel within the conservative nut. A good example of that this week was George Monbiot evoking the Norman Yoke, apparently unaware that Hereward the Wake and his ilk were originally popularised as part of a Victorian anti-Catholic campaign and more recently in the service of Euroscepticism. The problem with reclaiming history, like reclaiming symbols such as the flag, is that it concedes the struggle at the outset. You might as well try to reclaim the monarchy or the House of Lords. Where the left has advanced in the war of position is in presenting an alternative history, and we know the left has been successful here simply because of the scale of the reaction against it since its breakthrough in academia in the 1960s. In many ways this has been an over-reaction, ignoring that most history courses at British universities remain conservative and that the comment pages of newspapers are full of rightwing historians complaining about being silenced.

As ever, the right has sought to hijack the left's techniques and language, hence initiatives such as the History Reclaimed group, which seeks to turn back the "woke" tide and thereby resist the demands for a full accounting of colonialism and reparations for slavery. This is arguably a more accurate and therefore honest use of the word "reclaim" than is found among progressives, making it clear that the right once monopolised narrative history and is determined that it should do so again. Is this a fight worth having from the perspective of the left? The second delusion of progressives bothered by the conservative near-monopoly on popular history is that winning the fight will somehow lead to progressive political outcomes, but this runs dangerously close to making history a fetish with magical properties. Just as putting a million people on the streets to demonstrate against the Iraq War did not stop that war, so religiously attending the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival to hear Billy Bragg sing A New England isn't going to result in the abolition of anti-union laws.

Computer Says No

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a misleading term because we don't have a full understanding of human intelligence yet, so the comparison is necessarily imprecise.  The Turing Test, aka the imitation game, isn't simply about a machine mimicing human responses - which is easy enough to do - but about our ability to reliably identify the expressions of human intelligence in comparison to software-generated text. The uncertainty as to whether it is a human or a machine on the other side of the screen reflects our inability to infallibly spot the human as much as our inability to unmask a computer-generated mimic. This uncertainty is obvious when we consider bureaucracy. Long before the possibility of LLMs, it was common for people to complain that interacting with commercial organisations or the state was like dealing with a machine. Bureaucratic procedures seemed designed to excise all humanity from what were notionally social interactions. As a result, bureaucracy was routinely derided as stupid, even though the manifestations of this stupidity were deliberately designed and presumably satisfactory to the designers.

The Large Language Model (LLM) approach to AI assumes that human-like intelligence can be derived from enough text. But there is a problem with this that is becoming increasingly apparent. Improving the model means expanding the corpus, but that in turn means more rubbish, which humanity routinely produces in text form. Many think that we may already have reached a limit and that futher expansion of LLMs will result not simply in diminishing returns but the passing of an inflexion point after which the models become dumber and dumber. The underlying issue here is not that factual errors in the corpus can give rise to "hallucinations" but that text is not a uniform expression of a general human intelligence. Rather text is a highly formalised set of what we might call genres. These are broader than knowledge domains, e.g. technical dialects, and reflect more generic purposes for which text is used, such as education or reportage. For example, the text produced by bureaucracy has well-known characteristics. It can be ambiguous, sometimes impenetrable and even downright nonsensical, but these are not necessarily failings from the perspective of the authors.

Henry Mance in the Financial Times recently noted how the problem of contamination is increasingly framed as one of reputation: "[the cognitive scientist] Gary Marcus suggests performance may get worse: LLMs produce untrustworthy output, which is then sucked back into other LLMs. The models become permanently contaminated. Scientific journals’ peer-review processes will be overwhelmed, “leading to a precipitous drop in reputation”, Marcus wrote recently." Reputation is an interesting word to choose in this context. It doesn't just suggest predictability or reliability - the idea that you will get the "right" answer. It also suggests that the answer is definitionally true because it is the answer given by authority. But this is a mundane truth rather than ex cathedra. According to Mance, "AI will become embedded in lots of behind-the-scenes tools that we take for granted." Again, the phrase "taking for granted" suggests that AI will advance to the point where its output is accepted as authoritative even if trivial. This doesn't assume that the AI will never be wrong, that it will be infallible, but that the rate of error will be low enough to be tolerable, much as bureaucratic mistakes are.

The future of AI may turn out to be restricted language models rather than the largest possible. Much of what is described as "AI training" is actually human intervention to limit the interpretative scope of the software: to rein it in. This will help address the contamination issue, essentially through brute force quality control, but it will also allow the AI to operate within a narrower semantic field where the epistemological rules are rigorously observed. In other words, just like a bureaucracy. This is intelligence in a very narrow, dry and unimaginative form. And that points to a rather depressing future. While there may be exciting applications of the technology in sexy areas like medical scanning and diagnosis, the big returns have always been anticipated in administrative and service functions, hence the predictions for "lost" jobs tend to focus on accountancy, customer support and the like. AI will probably thrive best in areas where rigidity of thought and a strictly bounded intelligence, even an unyielding monomania, is prized. 

Technological development reflects above all the appetite and capability of the socio-economic environment to exploit new techniques (or old ones rediscovered). And that in turn may be determined by the longevity and ubiquity of previous technologies. Famously, the Chinese writing system - tens of thousands of morphemes - led to the dominance of woodblock printing and the relative underutilisation of movable type until the mid-19th century. But the latter technology produced a revolution when combined with the Latin alphabet in 15th century Europe. To give a contemporary example, modern software is riddled with skeuomorphs, from calendar apps that mimic desk diaries to the shutter-click sound of a smartphone camera app. The visual and aural prompts are intuitive only to the extent that we have been trained to recognise their forbears. If camera apps mimiced the "poof" of a flashlight powder explosion, rather than a click, we'd still understand it perfectly well, despite few of us ever directly experiencing a magnesium flare.

We may not be able to create a genuine artificial intelligence - i.e. artificial in the sense that it convincingly mimics the human sort - because we cannot escape the constraints that we place on human intelligence. The great myth, shared by liberals and libertarians (though not echt conservatives), is that human genius is unbounded. In reality, it is inescapably situated in history and society. In theory, globalisation and modern mass media should mean that new ideas spread rapidly and pervasively, but you'd have to be naive to imagine that there are no technologies underappreciated or lying dormant in the modern world. AI hasn't come to the fore because it is our shining hope (though it's worth noting that it has quickly acquired the near horizon of expectation characteristic of fusion power), but because it seems already familiar, all too familiar, in its combination of impressive authority and crass stupidity. AI will advance largely through the realms of business administration and public services, and so it will inevitably inherit the cultures (i.e. the vocabulary and semantics) of those realms. AI will not be a Culture Mind, of the sort imagined by Iain M. Banks, but a faceless version of the DHSS circa 1983.

To the Greater Glory

In an LBC interview in which Rachel Johnson sought, under the cover of reflections on Easter and the decline of Christian worship, to push a polite, middle class version of the Great Replacement Theory (here in the form of mosques springing up across Europe as churches stood empty), Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and "famous atheist" (as Fox News put it, channelling their inner Viz), described himself as a "cultural Christian", which seemed to come down to regretting Sadiq Khan celebrating Ramadan. This immediately overshadowed Johnson's agenda and even led to the Daily Telegraph's parliamentary sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, hailing a "spiritual volte face" unprecedented since Paul on the road to Damascus, illustrating once more that this class of frivolous journalism is characterised by its inability to pay attention as much as by its lack of descriptive originality. Grant appreciates that Dawkins remains an atheist, but she none the less uses the term "conversion" to describe his act of witness, so what exactly is the professor emeritus converting to?

The obvious point to make is that Dawkins hasn't really changed his tune over the years. There has been no conversion, no sudden flash of revelation. He has been a cultural Christian - relishing the form but deriding the content - in plain sight all along. His rebarbative style was always an expression of the academic top table milieu that formed him rather than some innate radicalism. He would happily call you a superstitious idiot, but he would not support Denis Diderot's contention that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Too uncultured; too much redolent of the mob. Grant's article gives us a clue as to what is really going on here when it segues via some waffle about the decline of Christianity in Scotland to a full-throated attack on the SNP's "draconian hate crime legislation", which then links to the usual defence of St Joan of Rowling. Dawkins himself has been a loud defender of the novelist (and also Kathleen Stock) against what he descibes as trans activist "bullies". 

His fundamentalist defence of biological sex is driven by the same British empiricism that motivates his atheism. That philosophical approach, dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has obvious overlaps with the evolution of political and economic Liberalism, but it also stimulated Romanticism in the cultural sphere, both as an anti-Enlightenment reaction and as a compromise between conservative and progressive impulses. What Dawkins refers to as cultural Christianity is an expression of that: a man of science among the picturesque abbey ruins contemplating the sublime. But cultural Christianity has deeper roots, going back to the English Reformation. Dawkins is very much an Englishman in this respect, the parallel Scottish Reformation with its Calvinist intolerance and strict social observances being as uncongenial to him as contemporary Islam (Scotland enters his mental space only with the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith). And we shouldn't forget that the attack upon the Roman church, and the fact that it was a top-down movement - a raison d'etat, is as much a part of the evolution of English atheism as the Enlightenment was.

Anglicanism is ridiculous as theology, the monarch as head of the church being only the most obvious of its absurdities. But as an expression of a culture dedicated to property rights, born out of the expropriation of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the resulting emergence of the political gentry and the improving tenantry, it was immensely powerful and retains a cultural clout today precisely because of its legacy property portfolio. When Dawkins lists the charms of Christianity he quickly moves on from hymns and carols to emphasise the danger of losing "our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches". He's not talking about Catholic churches or Methodist chapels here, and nor is he making a point about architectural merit. Likewise, Rachel Johnson's worry that those churches are emptying while new mosques spring up is not simply Islamophobia but a belief that "our" culture is defined by its property and more precisely by who has the right to own it. She admits her own Christianity "waxes and wanes" as if this wasn't the most Anglican statement imaginable.

Both Dawkins and Johnson are products of the English gentry so this mindset is natural to them. They cannot imagine a country in which the right sort - i.e. people like them - aren't in control. When Dawkins describes Christianity as "a fundamentally decent religion", in contrast to Islam, he isn't making a theological point but describing his comfort with an "ethos" that is congenial to him and his class, and congenial precisely because it is the historic expression of that class's social and political interests. When he expresses concern that the King as Prince of Wales was sympathetic to Islam, he doesn't stop to consider that many of the monarch's subjects are Muslims: these people are other. Likewise, his distinction between Anglicanism and fundamentalist Christianity in America centres less on any doctrinal differences, or even attitudes to such matters as evolution, female ordination or abortion, than on the expressions of class: the idea that American Christianity is fundamentally vulgar and unschooled as much as it is irrational or bigoted. 

Some of his critics have pointed out the inconsistency in Dawkins being happy with the decline of Christian worshippers but unhappy at the prospect of losing Christian buildings. But to imagine that one depends upon the other is to misunderstand this country's history. The state religion of the United Kingdom is the Church of England (the official churches of the peripheral nations are irrelevant), but the raison d'etre of that church is property, not theology, and it worships the greater glory of the English gentry, not God. In appearing to line up with the forces of conservatism, whether expressed as Islamophobia or transphobia, Dawkins is simply reaffirming his own liberal credentials as he sees them: a robust defence of empiricism, property rights and the superiority of native culture. Not only is there nothing surprising in Dawkins' latest contribution to the discourse but he has proved himself once more to be wholly consistent in his views.

Inflection Point

It's a regular feature of economic discourse in the UK for senior economists at the Bank of England to deliver lectures that are historically-informed, questioning of orthodoxy and apparently open to new ideas, from UBI to the blockchain. None of which ever seems to inform the Bank's core policies. Andy Haldane is perhaps the most high profile recent example, but you could also see the form in the recent speech of an ex-BoE economist, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Rachel Reeve's Mais lecture was trailed negatively in the conservative press - the emphasis on the praise of 1979 as an inflection point reliably winding up lefties - which meant that its reception predictably swung too far in the opposite direction, with delirious praise in the liberal media because she'd decided that Thatcherism was a failure in its own terms and auserity self-defeating, as if these were novel ideas. But she did not reject the Thatcheritie diagnosis: "Once again, we have found ourselves in a moment of political turbulence and recurrent crises with the burden falling on the shoulders of working people – with at its root, a failure to deliver the supply side reform needed to equip Britain to compete in a fast changing world." 

Though she cites many historians and economists as authorities, Reeves isn't always accurate in her thumbnail sketches. For example: "The political economist Karl Polanyi who came to Britain from Austria as fascism rose in the 1930s wrote of the tendency of market economies that become disembedded from their societies to undermine the conditions for growth and provoke powerful political counter-movements of both left and right". In fact, Polanyi's point was that capitalism - a historically contingent form of social relations - deliberately undermines society by creating fictitious commodities in land, labour and money, which produces a counter-movement that seeks to embed the market in society by means of economic regulation and social provision. Far from originating on the left or the right of the political spectrum, this counter-movement is essentially centrist, constructing a broad consensus and operating through established political structures and norms. For example, the 19th century Factory Acts or the early 20th century moves towards a welfare state. 

In citing Polanyi and Joan Robinson, Reeves is insisting that "economics is not just about quantitative models and abstract theory – it is about values, rooted in political, philosophical and moral questions, about human nature and the good society." This all sounds fine and dandy until you soberly consider the track record of the Labour right when it comes to philosophising about the good society (Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism was a long time ago), or wonder about the morality of people who take sinecures with water companies and employ confected outrage to expel or deselect fellow party members. Of course, what Reeves is really arguing for is not a humane and holistic approach to governance but the restoration of the pre-eminent role of the state. In 2017 William Davies described neoliberalism as the "‘disenchantment of politics by economics". Building on that, in 2021 Grace Blakeley noted that "The last fifty years of neoliberal hegemony has reshaped statecraft away from the governance of the market and towards governance by markets." What Starmer and Reeves intend is not a straightforward reversal of that, i.e. a return to the dirigisme of the 1960s, but a new compact with capital in which the state acts with more visible authority specifically in order to legitimise markets.

To that end it makes sense to claim that we are now in a new economic paradigm and that neoliberalism is history, a claim some on the left have been happy to echo, but is there any evidence for this? Reeves accepts neoliberalism's crude public image: "Governments and policymakers are recognising that it is no longer enough, if it ever was, for the state to simply get out of the way, to leave markets to their own devices and correct the occasional negative externality." But this is a myth: the market has always been a political construct. The idea of state and markets in opposition, or even persistent tension, is ahistorical. Starting with Adam Smith's "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange", capitalism has been presented as innate to human nature. But Polanyi's point is that it wasn't, and that this was what caused the trouble. Reeves's claim that the market "became disembedded" is a simple misrepresentation of his position, suggesting a failure of regulation as markets became more sophisticated rather than the interposing of a hitherto unknown form of social relation that dramatically disrupted society ("All that is solid melts into air"). 

According to Reeves, the new paradigm means "embracing the insights of an emergent economic consensus. The Harvard political economist Dani Rodrik speaks of a new ‘productivist paradigm’. The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has branded the Biden administration’s agenda ‘modern supply side economics’. Across the world, related ideas appear under different banners. I use the term ‘securonomics’." The idea that these developments represent a new economic consensus is dubious. The very fact that we have many labels for the same idea should be enough of a clue. This is not simultaneous emergence but a coordinated ideological campaign. It also ignores history. Governments have always had a productivist bent, notably in strategic areas such as defence, energy and agriculture (Biden has explicitly tied his industrial strategy to national security), just as they have always concerned themselves with social reproduction. The chief policy question has typically revolved around the state's role in the discretionary economy, with a subsidiary question being where the boundary exists between that and the strategic core (i.e. mandatory) economy that the state will never cede control of. 

In the UK context, this debate centres on the foundational economy, which encompasses retail (i.e. of food and the other necessities of social reproduction), care, transport and utilities (Reeves refers to it as the "everyday economy"). The topical question is which  parts should be nationalised. That Labour isn't currently demanding the renationalistion of power or water tells you that they do not intend to significantly shift the boundary between the discretionary economy of rigged markets and the mandatory economy of strategic industries. Instead, we can expect the state to take on a more robust regulatory role (Ofwat is clearly trying to work towards this new regime). We might even see investors expected to take the odd haircut. But what we won't see is any challenge to property rights. Starmer and Reeves have made it clear that social investment depends on economic growth, and that that in turn will only be delivered through private sector investment so the government must guarantee fiscal stability and protect the rights of investors.

Citing Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson doesn't completely distract from the obvious absence in the speech, namely any reference to John Maynard Keynes, and the reason for that is that his work, despite its impeccable liberal credentials as an attempt to save capitalism from itself, obviously doesn't sit well with the fiscal straightjacket that Labour has decided to wear. Interestingly, Keynes' famous antagonist, Friedrich Hayek, doesn't get a namecheck either, but he is very much there in Reeves's comments on the ability of the state to plan the economy: "It is not the crude model of the state directing industrial development and correcting externalities as seen from the centre, but instead an approach that recognises the informational and capacity constraints of government, working in genuine partnership with business to identify the barriers and opportunities they face." This is the influence of Hayek on information theory, but it is also pretty clearly a justification for allowing the private sector greater access to the NHS.

Beyond the partnership bromide, Reeves's prescription for growth is a combination of political and economic stability, increased business investment, and a somewhat nebulous unlocking of "the untapped potential throughout our economy". This includes "Acknowledging those sectors in which we enjoy – or have the potential to enjoy – comparative advantage and can compete in a global marketplace". But where do we genuinely enjoy comparative advantage? For the first two decades of this century it was in the unique combination of being inside the EU but outside the eurozone. When Peter Mandelson says rejoining the EU is not on the agenda, it's because he knows that we could not recreate that advantage through accession negotiation. The EU would demand that we give up sterling or at least level the playing field for financial services between the City of London and Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam. Unless the UK discovers another comparative advantage of a similar scale ("floating offshore wind and carbon capture and storage", which Reeves references, are unlikely to fit the bill), a return to the EU isn't going to happen except under conditions of desperation.

When she gets down to specifics, Reeves can only offer tired old forumulas. Reasserting Bank of England independence is to subscribe to the mythology of money as a commodity that Polanyi criticised. Planning (i.e. building, not directing industry) is presented as something that the UK is uniquely bad at, which offers hope of a quick fix, but planning reform is offered as a panacea in most developed economies these days, with similarly negligible results, which suggests it's anything but a quick fix. The more obvious issue is the concentration of capital in property, which leads to perverse incentives, and that won't be solved by another generation of new towns. Similarly, the suggestion that we need more labour market reform, even if under the cover of enhanced workers' rights, needs to be seen in the context of decades of labour market liberalisation, punitive benefits regimes geared to maximising employment, and an emphasis on skills training. The end result is a low-wage, low-skills economy with growing levels of inactivity and under-employment. Is more tinkering going to change that?

This week James Meadway made the point that if Reeves's lecture marks a break with neoliberalism it also marks a break with social democracy in its shift away from social reproduction (health, education etc) towards industrial productivism, but that this was happening at a time of a growing crisis in social reproduction (e.g. falling birth rates because family formation is too costly). So what fills the vacuum? The answer appears to be the transfer of the authoritarian practices exhibited under New Labour in the field of biopolitics towards the domestic economy. Less an inflection point than a swivel to a new target. The problem is that the Labour right's ideological bent, combined with the structural and cultural constraints this shift will face (it's far easier to beast the poor than SME owners), will likely see it run into the sand. Indeed, before Starmer has even entered Number 10, we are seeing shadow cabinet members eagerly returning to their favourite Aunt Sally of people on benefits who should be working. The suspicion is that the display of authority intended to restore the credibility of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn will quickly devolve into mere authoritarianism.

AI, Comparative Advantage and Natality

Beyond the banality of stochastic parrots and their "hallucinations", AI exists as a socio-political thought-exercise: a what-if. As has been the way since the emergence of sociology and its creative cousin Science Fiction, this encompasses both dystopian hell and utopian heaven. Perhaps the most obvious combination of the two is the idea that AI will take all the jobs, delivering either something akin to The Matrix, where humanity is reduced to its utility as fuel, or to a world of leisure and ease in which we can all pursue our talents and interests: "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." We have now reached the stage where official projections for growth routinely factor in AI as a magic ingredient. But beyond the glorified press releases of business consultancies predicting that AI will "impact" half of all jobs (consider what an accurate prediction of the impact of electricity would have been), there hasn't been much discussion of the mechanisms. In other words, how in practice will AI spread though the economy and how will employment patterns respond?

This is odd insofar as we have no shortage of historical data on the way previous technologies were deployed and how they reconfigured society. We all understand how the combustion engine substituted for horses and how that resulted in grooms being replaced by mechanics, and more recently we have seen how the technology of logistics has allowed employment in developed economies to shift from the primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary. The optimistic take on AI is that we'll see something similar: old jobs being replaced by new ones and aggregate wealth increasing, which translates to higher wages and greater purchasing power. If there is a fly in this ointment, it relates to the relative narrowing of wages between different parts of the world as industry reconfigures optimally. The middle class expands in the Far East while its peers in the American Mid-West stagnate, but at a global level there is aggregate growth. AI probably won't have a differential impact around geography, as raw material extraction and manufacturing does, but it will have an impact around cognitive differentials, which is why the more pessimistic prediction is for a decline in whitecollar employment.

Noah Smith is to be found on the optimistic side of the debate (as usual), but while his just-so stories of neoliberal progress can grind your teeth, he has made a useful contribution by trying to explain how the mechanism might work during the transition. He starts by outlining the negative view: "humans will have nothing left to do, and we will become obsolete like horses. Human wages will drop below subsistence level, and the only way they’ll survive is on welfare, paid by the rich people who own all the AIs that do all the valuable work. But even long before we get to that final dystopia, this line of thinking predicts that human wages will drop quite a lot, since AI will squeeze human workers into a rapidly shrinking set of useful tasks." In answering this, Smith's core point is that AI is not limitless. It will be constrained by computing power and energy - i.e. material resources. This will raise the opportunity cost of using it for low-value tasks that could be done by humans. Relative opportunity cost means that it will still make sense for humans to do jobs and be well-paid for them while AI concentrates on the really important stuff.

One of the features of economics (which proves that it is a social science rather than a hard science) is that many of its theories cannot be proven. This is not simply about the crisis of replicability, which typically affects microeconomics, but the difficulty of conducting real-world empirical trials at the macroeconomic level (hence the delusion that micro-foundations can be used to extrapolate macro policy). However, there are a few theories that are demonstrably true because the global economy provides a reliable test environment. One obvious example is the gravity theory of trade, which posits that it is cheaper to trade with near neighbours than far-off countries due to relative transportation costs. Despite the best efforts of Brexiteers to claim that technology has abolished distance, this clearly still holds true. The relevant theory for Smith's intuition about AI is comparative advantage, which is also demonstrably true for reasons to do with differential endowments - e.g. it makes more sense to grow bananas in the Caribbean and oats in Scotland than vice versa, and likewise someone with a high IQ and someone with lots of muscle power will gravitate to different jobs best suited to their abilities. So AI can concentrate on curing cancer rather than trying to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

One issue with Smith's model is that AI will produce greater rates of growth in those areas that it addresses. This is partly due to the compounding effect of the technology itself, but also because the movement of humanity into services that cannot be cheaply automated will necessarily intensify the unbalanced growth between the two sectors. William Baumol noted the effect by which low-productivity sector wages rose because of the competition for labour by high-productivity sectors. But if the AI sector isn't competing with the human sector for labour, there is no reason to think that wages will be bidded up. In other words, AI may not make humans redundant but it may lead to further wage stagnation because of that unbalanced growth. The best argument against this is that some of the fruits of AI must be recycled into wages simply to keep the system from collapsing (Smith envisages this in the perjorative terms of "welfare", i.e. UBI, though this is functionally no different to in-work benefits or a minimum wage), but that then emphasises the issue of distribution which comparative advantage does not circumvent. That gal with the high IQ is likely earning more than the guy with the muscles because there are more people with the latter than the former so basic supply and demand leads to different wages.

So perhaps the dystopia of AI is not that we all lose our jobs but that the economy becomes even more unequal in its outcomes. The jobs that AI won't do will include both grunt work and highly-valued work, but at the aggregate level of the economy we may end with many more of the former relative to the latter than was previously the case. Another way of thinking about this is to note that wages (returns to labour) have declined while asset wealth (returns to capital) has increased since the 1970s without the input of AI. We've had plenty of wage stagnation, particularly since 2008. If there is a more fundamental and powerful force at work (let's call it neoliberalism) the question then becomes how will that force accommodate AI? It's a reasonable assumption that it will reinforce or even exacerbate the existing trend towards wealth inequality and wage stagnation. In theory AI could disrupt this trend, but then any number of technological breakthroughs since the 70s that were characterised as disruptive turned out to actually reinforce neoliberal political economy (that is in the real world version, rather than the textbook fantasy, e.g. the growth of monopoly), so there's little reason to think this episode will be any different. 

The error is to assume that AI will carry all before it, reconfiguring society in its own image, hence the hysterical colouring of much commentary, but technologies are moulded by society as much as they do the moulding. Marx noted that "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist", but the reality, as Karl Polanyi countered, is that society also gave us the Factory Acts. If AI really were disruptive of the fundamentals of the economic system, the counter-movement would focus on the protection of the key factors of production, such as land, labour and capital, but to date the focus has been on the enforcement of propriety around generative deepfakes and the threat to the traditional media's interpretation of truth. If this carries an echo of the counter-movement of the nineteenth century, it is more of Christian revivalism than social progressivism. What this suggests is that AI won't be anywhere near as impactful as either the optimists or pessimists predict, but it also suggests that its greatest impact may be to exacerbate and accelerate existing trends.

One of those trends, which can be directly linked to the way that neoliberalism has expanded the logic of the market into the sphere of the family, is falling birth rates. As Steve Randy Waldman notes, natality is one area where comparative advantage has to cede to human emotion. Though much of child-rearing is handed over to specialists, most obviously teachers, it remains essentially a form of "cottage production" that struggles under the neoliberal logic of competition: "The relationship between wealth and natality is nuanced. When wealth is certain, its increase is likely pronatal, as people can bank on greater resources to cover the burdens of childrearing. But when wealth is uncertain, when it is delivered via tournaments that deliver outsize rewards to winners, then increases in 'expected' (meaning average) wealth likely translate to decreases in natality. The bigger the prize, the greater the cost of anything that will reduce your chance of winning." There should be no surprise that the current iteration of the Californian Ideology emphasises both the dramatic potential of AI and the necessity of pronatalism.

My guess is that AI won't become a general purpose technology (GPT) on a par with electricity or the Internet. This is because it will be too expensive, and that in turn is because there is no upper limit to its ambition, even if there are hard limits in the form of silicon and energy. You only need so much power and bandwith for most tasks, so GPTs like electricity and datacoms only need to be good enough. We already have good-enough AI, but it's fruits are underwhelming. Consequently, AI resources will increasingly be focused in specialist areas where its potential is greatest, e.g. more medical imaging rather than chasing the dream of fully autonomous vehicles. Noah Smith is right in his emphasis on comparative advantage, but as a neoliberal he assumes that the invisible hand of the market will optimally decide on how to allocate those scarce AI resources, rather than it being a political decision that will be taken to reinforce neoliberalism itself. Wealth inequality will continue to grow, even if AI companies replace oil corporations and technology manufacturers on the stock exchange, and the symptoms of that inequality, notably falling birth rates, will continue to elicit angst and ineffective amelioration.