Good analysis. Public debate is going to be difficult because most Americans have no clue about the force and rapidity of the megatrends you’re pointing out. Congress is certainly clueless as well. Either that or they're ducking the issue entirely. The only social movement that I can think of at the moment that makes any sense is not to use AI as a form of protest. That of course is highly unlikely to happen because we're all are being groomed and herded toward its use, like it or not. AI is showing up in many of our Web-based resources and other digital systems including search which will soon be highly AI-dependent. There seems to be no escape or immediate solution on the horizon which means that our fundamental human agency is being slowly eroded and stripped away.
Very interesting points about Bezos and Kindle. And the Hartman quote. In this context, it also seems fair to ask why Zuckerberg is building his incredibly expensive bunker. This suggests a survivalist mentality of take the money and run while the ecology of planet Earth and the stability of longstanding economic systems get trashed. As a sidenote, I have never believed that UBI could be fairly implemented as it seems to have originated with the WEF crowd and just seems like some kind of high-end welfare system, bribe, or consolation prize for a wider swath of disadvantaged economic classes.
"But if labor is no longer the central engine of value creation, that cycle collapses. The owners of the AI models—typically large technology firms or their shareholders—will accumulate exponentially more capital, while a large proportion of the population finds itself economically redundant, ruined and marginalized."
This is just primitive accumulation in a new era. Ths is what happened with the enclosures between the 16th century and the 19th century. During this period of time, the Rates provided UBI for anyone who could not find work. Why were the Rates ended? They were ended because of the Speenhamland system:
"Under Speenhamland, society was rent by two opposing influences: the one emanating from paternalism and protecting labor from the dangers of the market system; the other organizing the elements of production, including land, under a market system, and thus divesting the common people of their former status, compelling them to gain a living by offering their labor for sale, while at the same time depriving their labor of its market value. A new class of employers was being created, but no corresponding class of employees could constitute itself. A new gigantic wave of enclosures was mobilizing the land and producing a rural proletariat, while the “maladministration of the Poor Law” precluded them from gaining a living by their labor. No wonder that the contemporaries were appalled at the seeming contradiction of an almost miraculous increase in production accompanied by a near starvation of the masses. By 1834 there was a general conviction—with many thinking people a passionately held conviction—that anything was preferable to the continuance of Speenhamland. Either machines had to be demolished, as the Luddites had tried to do, or a regular labor market had to be created. Thus was mankind forced into the paths of a utopian experiment."
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (pp. 84-85). (Function). Kindle Edition.
What we are seeing now is a continuation of enclosures. Now, it is not just land, but people's bodies, words, etc., that are being enclosed. Social media is a form of enclosure of the commons—even Substack.
The only way is through, and the only way through is the creation of real communities of flesh and blood people, not abstracted relationships through computer screens, the dominant mode of soclal interaction today. If one wishes to build a new mode of production, what could that possibly be? The challenge of the mass disruption (read primitive accumulation) that may be caused by AI is huge and will not be solved by UBI.
Silvia Frederici asks:
"tWhat do we mean by ‘anticapitalist commons’? How can we create a new mode of production no longer built on the exploitation of labor out of the commons that our struggles bring into existence? How can we prevent the commons from being co-opted and, instead of providing an alternative to capitalism, becoming platforms on which a sinking capitalist class can reconstruct its fortunes?"
Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Kairos) (p. 86). (Function). Kindle Edition.
People who have no role in capitalist value creation still can work. They just can't work in a capitalist system. They need to create a different means of production. They may have to return to subsistence farming to feed themselves and their families etc. They can still create value. They just won't be able to sell it on Amazon or trade shares of it.
And what if we choose to devalue the products of the technocrats by refusing to use them, if it comes to that? Value is only produced by human beings and can only be used by human beings. Machines themselves create no value and use no value. Their activity is meaningless without a human context to give it meaning. If AI causes the collapse of the economy by throwing millions out of work, who have no income and no means to participate in the economy, then the technocrats havw hoisted themselves on their own pitard. Who cares if there are a million robots in Tesla factories making trucks to carry goods if there is no one to buy them?
Resistence will be found in communities nearby, not flung across the world. Fairly soon the walls are going up, travel will be restricted, and we will have only our neighbors to rely on. The era of state revolutuons is over. We can only resist though developing commons together.
I just wanted to point out that human labor is the only engine of value.
If labor is no longer the engine of value, then what creates value? How is it created ? By whom and for whom? Right now, value is created by people who sell their labor principally to private capital in return for wages. How does capitalism survive if it no longer needs labor? And to whom do capitalists sell things if no one is making money? Why would a government merely print money to hand to unemployed people? That would result in spiraling inflation.
The AI acceleratonists are irresponsible and do not understand they are merely providing for their own downfall. AI needs to be strictly regulated otherwise, it will completely disrupt our society, hasten ecological collapse, and even bring about terrrible wars.
Technofeudalism if we want to call it that would just have all wealth funneled to the lords, while the peasants blithely consume what's handed to them. Sans human labor, this looks less like a feudal model and more like the Matrix. The masses become irrelevant, compartmentalized, inert organs of utility for the machine to self-perpetuate. You will own nothing, be "happy", and there's no way out. This is the technocratic socialist dystopia that seems most likely in the near term. For any utopian flip on this to occur, we'd need a serious upleveling of human consciousness to break free from the wetiko game of domination and control.
My point is that there is no wealth without labor. Machines cannot produce wealth without human labor. Wealth is sustained by growth (the logic of capital), and that requires the market state (what we live under now). Growth can only happen if there are consumers as well as producers, who are engaged in a system of exchanging labor for money (the present global system). If free labor is eliminated, the whole system begins to collapse, which, according t Heather Cox Richardson, was one of the underlying tensions as the base of the Civil War, the tension between advocates of enslaved labor and free labor. Enslavement was always at risk of economic collapse.
Good to see you and others starting to take the threat of AI as seriously as it deserves. This is an inflection point like no other humanity has ever seen. If we are to navigate through to a world that is friendly to human life we must use the utmost wisdom.
I am focusing my work now on creating positive attractor states, legal guardrails, and strategic diversions.
Precisely. “…whether we rise to this challenge depends entirely on us.” And I would argue that each one of us must be decisive in choosing which path is to be taken, recognizing that “staying in place” in cognitive and emotional dissonance is a choice. Someone once said “The next revolution will be a walk-out.” It takes courage to evacuate from a scenario that may or may not work out, but if one digs deeply into one’s own value set with radical honesty, eventually the fork in the road appears. Moving to a situation that offers a higher level of coherence takes determination and resilience, but it also brings a certain exhilaration and inspiration that is what makes the human “human”…and also affirms that the choice has moved us in the direction of growth and the embrace of change, rather than remaining in stagnation and resistance. In either case, AI will follow us…everywhere…how we use it will accelerate us in either direction of choice.
The key points of self-organizing, naturally coherent, non-hierarchical, decentralized, are markers on the trail to wholeness, accentuating and aligned with the laws of nature, which is what we are all embedded in…that fact also speaks to a “natural hierarchy” if you will, that all living beings as well as systems and entities created by them, must adhere to in order to maintain livability, much less “sustainability”, in this physical domain.
Getting with the program of the Earth itself is a wise choice to make, imho, for continuing and uninterrupted access to food, water and shelter, and if one is accustomed to an urban lifestyle, there is a transition time to be aware of…in other words, “if you are good to go, the sooner the better”
Wow! Now you're cooking! Muchas gracias, Daniel. This is the core of what I've been,seeing as a possibility, as best I can with my little, patchily-educated and despite the odds imagination. You've written a great summation of what's wrong with so much thinking about AI--due to the fact that it's been developed within a fascistic, capitalistic, heirarchical/dominance, winners and losers model. And you're holding up the fact that now we 'll have a chance to muddle our way toward something truly new. First will come the chaos present in all phase transitions (think boiling as heat transforms water into a gas) and then, perhaps, a world dedicated to that most dynamic of human capacities, the creative imagination, free from greed and hoarding. Please do publish your You Tube series and anything else that fertile imagination of yours can come up with.
I’m not sure I entirely agree that most people prosper when they are freed from the compulsion to work in order to survive. It depends entirely upon whether the work is meaningful, aligned with the person’s own values and proclivities and talents, and contributes in a palpable way to the common good.
If the idea of community wealth and wellbeing economies — and stories of people creating it (Tao social, all the drivers coops starting up, commonwealth grocers, cooperation hull, freewater, regenerative economic zones etc etc etc) catches on in the cultural consciousness, what do you reckon the futures fork looks like then?
I love the ideas you propose here and have long envisioned such a society. But, but, but, sadly, my observations of my fellow humans are that the vast majority are not ready to creatively use "leisure time" (time that is not dominated by the need to work for money). Efforts to amass power over others by whatever means possible and the tendency to fall into addictive patterns, predominate. That, plus the overwhelming power of the billionaire class, make these visions impossible in the near future. I think we need softer, more moderate approaches for now. I say this with sadness as a life-long idealist.
I've gotta ask — was AI used to compose this piece?
There are a few phrasings that seem out of phase with your usual tone.
The irony is very much alive that we seem to have to use these tools in order to help to steer them because of how quickly everything is developing around them.
Ellen - Thank you for sharing this. I hope everyone on this thread will take the time to read Stephen's Dinan's essay, which complements and adds to what Daniel has expressed in his latest.
A vision of a “Star Trek” world where knowledge, the environment and mutual respect matter far more than things. We certainly need to rethink where we are going. I teach online college classes and think some of my students are using AI in their papers. What happens if I am replaced by AI to grade them? Where is learning then?
My old band Captain Kirk and the Analog Bandits had a song entitled “Tears for the Typewriter Repairmen,” an homage lamenting their plight. We remembered them but by the time the band formed they had gone extinct.
The AI-Robot Wars: Is Dystopian Science Fiction Becoming a Reality?
“In the 80’s and 90’s, science fiction movies and literature commonly had themes of “robot wars” where humans were pitted against the dominance of a robotic society. Will this be our future? Will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of “accepting what can’t be changed” seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life --- and indeed our own biological substrate --- that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go. In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity especially in advanced Western nations that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia-inducing closed-circuit technocratic system that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite.”
Good analysis. Public debate is going to be difficult because most Americans have no clue about the force and rapidity of the megatrends you’re pointing out. Congress is certainly clueless as well. Either that or they're ducking the issue entirely. The only social movement that I can think of at the moment that makes any sense is not to use AI as a form of protest. That of course is highly unlikely to happen because we're all are being groomed and herded toward its use, like it or not. AI is showing up in many of our Web-based resources and other digital systems including search which will soon be highly AI-dependent. There seems to be no escape or immediate solution on the horizon which means that our fundamental human agency is being slowly eroded and stripped away.
Very interesting points about Bezos and Kindle. And the Hartman quote. In this context, it also seems fair to ask why Zuckerberg is building his incredibly expensive bunker. This suggests a survivalist mentality of take the money and run while the ecology of planet Earth and the stability of longstanding economic systems get trashed. As a sidenote, I have never believed that UBI could be fairly implemented as it seems to have originated with the WEF crowd and just seems like some kind of high-end welfare system, bribe, or consolation prize for a wider swath of disadvantaged economic classes.
Richard Murphy Gets ChatGPT to Describe How It Inherently Makes Shit Up
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/richard-murphy-gets-chatgpt-to-describe-how-it-inherently-makes-shit-up.html
"But if labor is no longer the central engine of value creation, that cycle collapses. The owners of the AI models—typically large technology firms or their shareholders—will accumulate exponentially more capital, while a large proportion of the population finds itself economically redundant, ruined and marginalized."
This is just primitive accumulation in a new era. Ths is what happened with the enclosures between the 16th century and the 19th century. During this period of time, the Rates provided UBI for anyone who could not find work. Why were the Rates ended? They were ended because of the Speenhamland system:
"Under Speenhamland, society was rent by two opposing influences: the one emanating from paternalism and protecting labor from the dangers of the market system; the other organizing the elements of production, including land, under a market system, and thus divesting the common people of their former status, compelling them to gain a living by offering their labor for sale, while at the same time depriving their labor of its market value. A new class of employers was being created, but no corresponding class of employees could constitute itself. A new gigantic wave of enclosures was mobilizing the land and producing a rural proletariat, while the “maladministration of the Poor Law” precluded them from gaining a living by their labor. No wonder that the contemporaries were appalled at the seeming contradiction of an almost miraculous increase in production accompanied by a near starvation of the masses. By 1834 there was a general conviction—with many thinking people a passionately held conviction—that anything was preferable to the continuance of Speenhamland. Either machines had to be demolished, as the Luddites had tried to do, or a regular labor market had to be created. Thus was mankind forced into the paths of a utopian experiment."
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (pp. 84-85). (Function). Kindle Edition.
What we are seeing now is a continuation of enclosures. Now, it is not just land, but people's bodies, words, etc., that are being enclosed. Social media is a form of enclosure of the commons—even Substack.
The only way is through, and the only way through is the creation of real communities of flesh and blood people, not abstracted relationships through computer screens, the dominant mode of soclal interaction today. If one wishes to build a new mode of production, what could that possibly be? The challenge of the mass disruption (read primitive accumulation) that may be caused by AI is huge and will not be solved by UBI.
Silvia Frederici asks:
"tWhat do we mean by ‘anticapitalist commons’? How can we create a new mode of production no longer built on the exploitation of labor out of the commons that our struggles bring into existence? How can we prevent the commons from being co-opted and, instead of providing an alternative to capitalism, becoming platforms on which a sinking capitalist class can reconstruct its fortunes?"
Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Kairos) (p. 86). (Function). Kindle Edition.
People who have no role in capitalist value creation still can work. They just can't work in a capitalist system. They need to create a different means of production. They may have to return to subsistence farming to feed themselves and their families etc. They can still create value. They just won't be able to sell it on Amazon or trade shares of it.
And what if we choose to devalue the products of the technocrats by refusing to use them, if it comes to that? Value is only produced by human beings and can only be used by human beings. Machines themselves create no value and use no value. Their activity is meaningless without a human context to give it meaning. If AI causes the collapse of the economy by throwing millions out of work, who have no income and no means to participate in the economy, then the technocrats havw hoisted themselves on their own pitard. Who cares if there are a million robots in Tesla factories making trucks to carry goods if there is no one to buy them?
Resistence will be found in communities nearby, not flung across the world. Fairly soon the walls are going up, travel will be restricted, and we will have only our neighbors to rely on. The era of state revolutuons is over. We can only resist though developing commons together.
Great comment Malcolm
I just wanted to point out that human labor is the only engine of value.
If labor is no longer the engine of value, then what creates value? How is it created ? By whom and for whom? Right now, value is created by people who sell their labor principally to private capital in return for wages. How does capitalism survive if it no longer needs labor? And to whom do capitalists sell things if no one is making money? Why would a government merely print money to hand to unemployed people? That would result in spiraling inflation.
The AI acceleratonists are irresponsible and do not understand they are merely providing for their own downfall. AI needs to be strictly regulated otherwise, it will completely disrupt our society, hasten ecological collapse, and even bring about terrrible wars.
Technofeudalism if we want to call it that would just have all wealth funneled to the lords, while the peasants blithely consume what's handed to them. Sans human labor, this looks less like a feudal model and more like the Matrix. The masses become irrelevant, compartmentalized, inert organs of utility for the machine to self-perpetuate. You will own nothing, be "happy", and there's no way out. This is the technocratic socialist dystopia that seems most likely in the near term. For any utopian flip on this to occur, we'd need a serious upleveling of human consciousness to break free from the wetiko game of domination and control.
My point is that there is no wealth without labor. Machines cannot produce wealth without human labor. Wealth is sustained by growth (the logic of capital), and that requires the market state (what we live under now). Growth can only happen if there are consumers as well as producers, who are engaged in a system of exchanging labor for money (the present global system). If free labor is eliminated, the whole system begins to collapse, which, according t Heather Cox Richardson, was one of the underlying tensions as the base of the Civil War, the tension between advocates of enslaved labor and free labor. Enslavement was always at risk of economic collapse.
Good to see you and others starting to take the threat of AI as seriously as it deserves. This is an inflection point like no other humanity has ever seen. If we are to navigate through to a world that is friendly to human life we must use the utmost wisdom.
I am focusing my work now on creating positive attractor states, legal guardrails, and strategic diversions.
A little more on this work here: https://medium.com/@tamhunt/why-im-suing-openai-to-stop-chatgpt-b3b6895ec851
And here: https://tamhunt.medium.com/positive-attractors-legal-diversions-and-strong-guardrails-a-multipronged-strategy-for-ai-safety-61a35cfcbb56
Precisely. “…whether we rise to this challenge depends entirely on us.” And I would argue that each one of us must be decisive in choosing which path is to be taken, recognizing that “staying in place” in cognitive and emotional dissonance is a choice. Someone once said “The next revolution will be a walk-out.” It takes courage to evacuate from a scenario that may or may not work out, but if one digs deeply into one’s own value set with radical honesty, eventually the fork in the road appears. Moving to a situation that offers a higher level of coherence takes determination and resilience, but it also brings a certain exhilaration and inspiration that is what makes the human “human”…and also affirms that the choice has moved us in the direction of growth and the embrace of change, rather than remaining in stagnation and resistance. In either case, AI will follow us…everywhere…how we use it will accelerate us in either direction of choice.
The key points of self-organizing, naturally coherent, non-hierarchical, decentralized, are markers on the trail to wholeness, accentuating and aligned with the laws of nature, which is what we are all embedded in…that fact also speaks to a “natural hierarchy” if you will, that all living beings as well as systems and entities created by them, must adhere to in order to maintain livability, much less “sustainability”, in this physical domain.
Getting with the program of the Earth itself is a wise choice to make, imho, for continuing and uninterrupted access to food, water and shelter, and if one is accustomed to an urban lifestyle, there is a transition time to be aware of…in other words, “if you are good to go, the sooner the better”
Wow! Now you're cooking! Muchas gracias, Daniel. This is the core of what I've been,seeing as a possibility, as best I can with my little, patchily-educated and despite the odds imagination. You've written a great summation of what's wrong with so much thinking about AI--due to the fact that it's been developed within a fascistic, capitalistic, heirarchical/dominance, winners and losers model. And you're holding up the fact that now we 'll have a chance to muddle our way toward something truly new. First will come the chaos present in all phase transitions (think boiling as heat transforms water into a gas) and then, perhaps, a world dedicated to that most dynamic of human capacities, the creative imagination, free from greed and hoarding. Please do publish your You Tube series and anything else that fertile imagination of yours can come up with.
Keep on, @Daniel Pinchbeck - Liminal News is quickly becoming one of my favorite reads.
I’m not sure I entirely agree that most people prosper when they are freed from the compulsion to work in order to survive. It depends entirely upon whether the work is meaningful, aligned with the person’s own values and proclivities and talents, and contributes in a palpable way to the common good.
If the idea of community wealth and wellbeing economies — and stories of people creating it (Tao social, all the drivers coops starting up, commonwealth grocers, cooperation hull, freewater, regenerative economic zones etc etc etc) catches on in the cultural consciousness, what do you reckon the futures fork looks like then?
I love the ideas you propose here and have long envisioned such a society. But, but, but, sadly, my observations of my fellow humans are that the vast majority are not ready to creatively use "leisure time" (time that is not dominated by the need to work for money). Efforts to amass power over others by whatever means possible and the tendency to fall into addictive patterns, predominate. That, plus the overwhelming power of the billionaire class, make these visions impossible in the near future. I think we need softer, more moderate approaches for now. I say this with sadness as a life-long idealist.
What do you think of the growing community wealth and wellbeing economy movements?
I'm not familiar with them.
I've gotta ask — was AI used to compose this piece?
There are a few phrasings that seem out of phase with your usual tone.
The irony is very much alive that we seem to have to use these tools in order to help to steer them because of how quickly everything is developing around them.
Yes for some of the research - perhaps a phrase or two carried over
https://open.substack.com/pub/stephendinan/p/its-time-to-boycott-xai-and-grok?r=nwll&utm_medium=ios
Ellen - Thank you for sharing this. I hope everyone on this thread will take the time to read Stephen's Dinan's essay, which complements and adds to what Daniel has expressed in his latest.
A vision of a “Star Trek” world where knowledge, the environment and mutual respect matter far more than things. We certainly need to rethink where we are going. I teach online college classes and think some of my students are using AI in their papers. What happens if I am replaced by AI to grade them? Where is learning then?
I’m glad to be old. To get on the other side of this mess is going to be v dangerous and massively destructive.
But why would we keep wanting to ride horses when we could have cars? We want self-driving cars and high speed trains.
My old band Captain Kirk and the Analog Bandits had a song entitled “Tears for the Typewriter Repairmen,” an homage lamenting their plight. We remembered them but by the time the band formed they had gone extinct.
See also:
The AI-Robot Wars: Is Dystopian Science Fiction Becoming a Reality?
“In the 80’s and 90’s, science fiction movies and literature commonly had themes of “robot wars” where humans were pitted against the dominance of a robotic society. Will this be our future? Will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of “accepting what can’t be changed” seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life --- and indeed our own biological substrate --- that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go. In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity especially in advanced Western nations that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia-inducing closed-circuit technocratic system that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite.”
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ai-robots-warfare