Onwards and Upwards?

Progress, change, improvement & growth: the bedrock concepts of the capitalist system; the positive spin wrought by those engaged in the endlessly frenetic quest for ever more wealth: self-justification and enablement cast as benign public values never to be questioned, let alone challenged. That scientific, engineering and medical progress are of value to the human race is unquestionable as a broad concept, but as always, the devil is in the detail. Specific lines of progress don't necessarily result in benign improvement, although they might generate economic growth: itself by definition not necessarily benign.

For instance, the case of Thomas Midgely Jnr., I read about in today's i. Midgely was a fearsomely inventive and prolific scientist and innovator who, according to historian JR McNeill "...had more impact on the atmosphere than any other organism in Earth's history..." by virtue of being the inventor of not just leaded petrol, but CFC's too... Unfiltered scientific advance is as potentially harmful as the unfiltered psychopathy of tyrants, just less obvious. Both his storied "innovations" were developed for what were, at the time, sound reasons, with a nod to human comfort and societal progress, and more than a wink to the capitalists who would exploit them for profit.

In today's Reith lecture on Radio Four, the emphasis was on the societal and economic impact of AI in reducing the need for human input into much of the world of work. What would a brave new world of largely AI-driven production and maintenance look like and what would it mean for most of us, when the job market shrinks to a fraction of its current size, leaving only the dregs that the tech can't handle? Would it be a Universal Minimum Wage utopia or would it be the kind of dystopia that we are actually now halfway into at present? This most basic question is as old as the Industrial Revolution, and is still unaddressed - ask any economist or mainstream politician and you will get pretty much the same centuries-old  analyses.

There is no new thinking on economies that could address what would prove to be a pretty much enforced leisure-based society: the talk is always of how do we pay for it all? There's the rub: if all you can imagine is a tax and invest system based on centuries-old mercantile practice with all the rigid class and societal structures that go with it, you are missing the point. Economics is one area of human endeavour where progress, change, improvement and growth have pretty much been ignored, preferring instead to stick with more or less the same old ideas that have started to grow mould around the edges.

The system we operate globally now would still be be largely recognisable to the Venetians, despite all the changes that have occurred over the centuries since they essentially created the concept of an organised economy. If we don't address the fundamental need for new economic thought, we will end up in a society where the majority of the population are cast in the rôle of an unwilling lumpenproletariat barely scraping by, while the main economic activity will be the continuous, revolving transfer of wealth between the wealthy. Mmm... I think we might have pushed the door open on that one already...