Almost daily, in magazines and newspapers, one can read judgments and predictions about the consequences that Artificial Intelligence could have on today’s societies, especially the most developed ones. Thus, it has been stated that AI could mean the extinction of millions of jobs (even among the most qualified, such as lawyers), that it could revolutionize transportation and medicine, reduce travel times and extend life, produce a radical transformation in war scenarios, accelerate the departure from Earth to other planets, create food abundance – in short, the inventory is enormous: the consequences can be as magnificent as they are catastrophic. Since we don’t know, it’s well worth exercising some caution in judgment, as Alcaras and Ricci do in a recent article that nuances all these things by questioning the ordinary uses of ChatGTP.
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What has been done less is to question the possible consequences of AI in the left-wing political world, introducing existential questions in order to generate the necessary public alarm to provoke serious reflection. It is not about stopping the development of this technology (even if one wanted to, we have no idea how to achieve it in times of right-wing accelerationism, whether techno-optimist or techno-pessimist), but about becoming aware of the implications at a moment when we are on the threshold of AI changing our lives: although this is already happening, the phenomenon is still incipient and it will not be long (two or three years at most) before the political question of what to do with AI becomes the central question of collective life. While it may seem exaggerated, I prefer to contextualize the problem of the left in an apocalyptic key not for the human species, but for one of its main ideological ethnicities.
There are four existential threats I want to focus on.
The first, which is already happening before our very eyes and with major electoral consequences, refers to the evident disappearance of the factory as a fundamental space for the socialization of exploited interests, for raising awareness of exploitation, and for articulating forces to fight for socialism or some form of post-capitalism. Can anyone doubt that the formation of the working class in the 19th century occurred in factories and workshops, and that its politicization originated precisely there, and not in the solitude of remote work screens or the uberization of the economy in the 21st century? The effects are already visible: the class structure of modern capitalism is rapidly changing, reducing the working class to its minimum expression, which has resulted in the few remaining workers… no longer voting for the left (if they vote at all).
The second threat concerns the extinction of manual and routine work, through its automation and the optimizing support provided by AI. Let’s take the example of Chilean socialism: for decades, the appeal to “manual and intellectual workers,” as brilliantly conceived by Eugenio González in a break with what constitutes a social class, sounded very good, rhyming with the practical history of society. If manual workers (and not a few intellectual workers) are threatened, isn’t there a possible source of extinction for the natural audience of socialists and the left?
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The above would be nothing if we did not seriously consider the radical individuation of productive functions thanks to communications technology. There is much research on private transportation through applications and the delivery of food and goods, which highlights, whether one likes it or not, the satisfaction workers experience from controlling their personal work time, regardless of the precarization that affects them: it’s something like “I am my own boss,” even if self-exploited.
The fourth threat refers to the “people” themselves. What kind of sovereign people are we talking about? Everything indicates that it is a people fractured into millions of personalities and monads who have nothing in common or, in any case, ignore what can link them to each other. If the fracturing of the people through universal suffrage and their refuge in secret chambers and dark rooms when exercising their sovereignty was always a problem, the problem becomes a tragedy for the left when the people exist in different individual forms… and never as a people. After all, in the times of universal suffrage, there was still “people” under the assumption that the individuals who make up the electorate inhabit common spaces, form their interests and preferences with others, and relate to each other in face-to-face links: well, it is this ecosystem that risks being reduced to minimal forms.
These four threats should prompt serious political reflection on the left. Front Amplio deputy Gonzalo Winter sent a great letter to his party’s militants, addressing several of these questions. That letter should be addressed to all left-wing parties, as none of them escape the risk of extinction.
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