Do We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism?

Forecasts suggest that we are entering an era of massive automation. According to McKinsey, close to half of all work activities could be automated using existing technologies. But what happens after automation? What happens after artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics displace huge swathes of routine labor? According to Aaron Bastani, a London-based researcher, the answer would appear to be “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”. Strange as it may seem, Bastani believes that automation is driving capitalist societies headlong into a post-capitalist utopia: Think Star Trek or Ian Banks’ Culture Series.

The truth is that this is not an entirely new idea. As Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation explains: the exponential acceleration of technology promises a new era in social and economic abundance. What is perhaps more counter-intuitive, however, is Bastani’s belief that this technology-driven abundance is now making actual communism possible for the first time in history. As he frames it, we are moving toward an economy of “extreme supply” in which capitalism has reached its evolutionary conclusion.

Like Jeremy Rifkin, Bastani argues that technological innovation is driving the marginal costs of goods and services—food, healthcare, housing, software—to near zero. Just as the domestication of animals and crops produced the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 BCE), and machine technologies produced the Industrial Revolution (1800 CE), so computers are reshaping history around what Bastani calls Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). Capitalism it would seem has given birth to a technological revolution that is accelerating the long-term collapse of prices and eventually markets.

Interestingly, a similar argument has been made by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge. In their book Reinventing Capitalism, the authors argue that technology is reshaping markets, spawning data-driven platform monopolies set to remake the nature of supply-and-demand. In their view, AI is driving a new era in automation in which the evolving precision of algorithms has begun displacing the function of price signals. Put simply, algorithms are replacing human social coordination.

There is no doubt that we are facing sweeping changes in the structure of capitalist societies. Driven by social lethargy and the parasitic power of the fossil fuel industry, the world’s zombie governments now seem incapable of averting global catastrophe. Indeed, the excesses of capitalism are now converging toward an unprecedented set of crises: an environmental crisis, a demographic crisis, a democracy crisis, and a crisis of socioeconomic stratification. All of which requires serious political attention.

Enter Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Where premature attempts at communism produced industrial-era prison states, actual communism through automation is leading to an era of AI, bioengineering, clean energy, near-earth asteroid mining, and universal basic services. Like any good Silicon Valley pitch, Bastani suggests that this technological revolution is only just beginning. In fact, capitalism is just the prologue to a new stage in history. As technology undermines capitalist markets it is simultaneously opening the way to massive changes in governance and political economy. In the shift to luxury communism, we can expect limitless abundance and a classless society. Or as Marx once phrased it, “a new mode of production”. 

Unfortunately Bastani’s prescription for managing the transition largely echoes strategies of the past—nationalism, worker cooperatives, state ownership, and socialized banking. Rather than the technological modernization that animates much of his vision of the future, Bastani’s policies for the present simply reduce everything to the power struggles of the last century. And this is where the FALC “manifesto” becomes far less radical. As one reviewer puts it, “Bastani’s proposed system of hyper-politicized banking and hyper-politicized local government contracting, meant to boost worker cooperatives and other types of organizations of which he approves, is a surefire recipe for patronage, nepotism, subsidy fraud, and waste.”

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a tantalizing vision of the future. But what seems more likely in the near term is fully automated algorithmic governance. After all, automation is not reserved for the private sector alone. Advancing democracies into the era of Big Data could go a long way towards reducing systemic dysfunction within the public sector. Estonia, for example, is developing one of the most advanced digital governance systems in the world.

Using sensor technologies and the Internet-of-Things to reinforce government oversight could begin to more effectively manage the various crises we now face. The most recent advancements in AI and machine learning alone could provide revolutionary tools for reshaping public sector decision-making, forecasting, data classification, and resource management. All of which could avert disaster.

Software is eating the world and this includes the world’s institutions and governments. But will we live to enjoy it? Bastani’s overarching concerns with the excesses of capitalism are entirely legitimate. Can the institutions that sustain capitalism be transformed in time to avert global catastrophe? If capitalism is allowed to continue as usual, then class polarization, demographic imbalance, and ecological destruction will lead us to collapse. What is clear is that with growing markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, enlightened policies are needed to remake energy, technology, and governance before it’s too late.