The following is an edited transcript of a video essay. A link to the video is given at the end of this post.
An emerging technology threatens the very existence of humanity. Is that something we should try and prevent, or do we see it as an investment opportunity? Welcome to late-stage capitalism’s little brother, postapocalyptic capitalism.
Recent AI security incidents have raised legitimate concerns about the safety of the latest frontier models, and those concerns are shared by the leaders of AI companies.
They acknowledge that there is a potential humanity threatening level of threat from their own products. Sci-fi movies like the Terminator franchise and 12 Monkeys operate on the principle that if only people had known, they would try and stop these humanity threatening events from taking place in the first place. In both movies, the warning comes from the future, and they try and prevent this emerging technology from gaining any traction before it causes any real danger to humanity.
But in the real world, even though there is an acknowledgement of the dangers of AI, the solution isn’t to try and prevent it. It is to carry on and accept the risk.
It’s like Sarah Connor deciding to invest in the company that’s going to become Skynet rather than trying to stop it. That’s the reality of where we’re at right now. So, how have we reached a situation where the threat to humanity is seen as secondary to the investment opportunity?
Whether you believe in the validity of their argument or not, what a lot of AI bosses argue is that this change is inevitable and therefore it might as well be them because they will be more responsible and more moral in their implementation of this technology. In other words, they cannot imagine a situation where there is not a competition between companies to develop this technology. They cannot imagine a world without that commercial competition as the primary driver of the economy. And the more cautious they are with their efforts to develop this technology, the greater the likelihood that they will lose this race.
And that brings us to a phrase that sits at the heart of this outlook. That phrase is, “It is harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world.”
It’s a fundamentally pessimistic view of the world that says there is no alternative to our current system. And therefore, the best you can do is optimize it for your own personal gain. There is a phrase falsely attributed to Karl Marx that says, “The last capitalist we hang will be the one that sold us the rope.” There’s no record that he did actually say this, but it does highlight an underlying truth. Marx thought that capitalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction and that capitalists would contribute to the destruction in order to enrich themselves while they can.
The problem is it’s not just that last capitalist selling the rope that cannot imagine an alternative. Right now, it feels as if most people cannot imagine an alternative to capitalism. And with that lack of an imagination, they are more willing to accept the risk around potentially humanity or world ending impacts than they are to talk about alternatives to our current economic and political system.
The cultural theorist Mark Fischer in his book capitalist realism argued that capitalism was seen as an inescapable reality. His argument was not that people necessarily liked the system. Many people could see the flaws and felt quite alienated by it, but more that they could not actually see any kind of viable alternative to it. Such was the ideological capture that capitalist culture has had on our society.
The phrase capital realism sums up this concept very neatly. If you’ve ever argued with friends or relatives or colleagues about the need for a more eco society, you’ve probably at least once, probably many times, been told that you’re naive and that you just need to be a lot more realistic about the way the world is.
The American Marxist Frederick Jameson saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as one of the triggers for this wave of late-stage capitalism where nothing else can be imagined. He believed that the Soviet Union, whether people liked it or not, gave them an alternative reference point where there was an alternative that could at least be imagined, even if it wasn’t the alternative that they wanted or desired. Although Jameson coined the phrase, “It is harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world.” He took that phrase from a misremembered critique of the work of J. Ballard.
Bruce Franklin argued that Ballard’s apocalyptic visions both at an ecological and personal level were reflective of a deep anxiety about the way the world was moving and Ballard’s inability to imagine anything beyond the end of the current cultural and societal world that he was part of and had been raised in. It was a misremembering of elements of this essay that gave Franklin this now famous phrase.
Slavo Zizek has also picked up on this phrase and written about it. Zizek uses the five stages of grief as his anchor to understand this process. And there’s a certain optimism in taking that approach. Once you have passed through the denial, the anger, the bargaining with ethical capitalism and the depression, that is not the end of this the process. The fifth stage of grief is acceptance. And acceptance does not mean agreement. It means acceptance that capitalism will play itself out and will collapse and there will be alternatives that happen after the collapse of capitalism.
But crucially, capitalism must collapse or be very close to collapse before people can imagine those alternatives. The big question is, are we there yet? I think we’re close because AI is not going to be constrained in any meaningful way by legislation or by governments.
And while the ability of it to destroy the world, I personally think is overstated, the real potential impacts are significant enough that they will lead to a crisis of confidence in our own current system. A falling birth rate, an aging population, and increasing automation, which could reduce the number of jobs available to those of working age are all massive strains on our current system.
Less people working means lower consumer demand and also means a lower income tax base for government spending. So, demographics combined with technological innovation is potentially leading us to an inflection point. And beyond that inflection point is not the end of the world. It’s the start of a new world. That is the way it’s been throughout history. Countries, empires, civilizations rise and fall. And it’s never been the end of humanity. It’s never been the end of history. We are not at the end of history now, but we might very well be close to the end of our current system. Or at the very least, a major overhaul of it. Capitalism has always been very good at adapting when it really needs to in order to survive.
The Soviet Union acted as an alternative until its collapse. And perhaps what we are now seeing is the emergence of China not just as an economic powerhouse but also as a potential alternative model just like the Soviet Union. It may not be perfect, and it may be something that people really don’t want but it is a vision of an alternative state capitalism where capitalism is run at the pleasure of the state rather than undermining it.
That’s assuming, of course, AI doesn’t try and turn itself into Skynet and attempt to kill us all. If it does, it’s unlikely to be the end of humanity. If history is anything to go by, it will be the end of the age of AI, perhaps the end of the age of silicon, and we can then find new and inventive ways to destroy humanity and each other.
