Your editorials and articles about AI, including Rafael Behr’s piece (Keir Starmer is right to gamble on an AI revolution, but it might not pay out in time, 15 January), are thoughtful contributions to the debate about this fifth Industrial Revolution. Much of it has considered how democracies might govern AI. Little, however, has been written about the elephant in the room: how labour markets transformed by AI will affect democratic governance itself.
Since the second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, the prevailing national political superstructure of industrial capitalism in the global north, apart from the interlude of European fascism, has been various forms of parliamentary democracy. Those structures developed, in large part, because organised labour could bargain with capital for a share of the wealth that human labour creates, and built political parties to represent working people’s interests. Indeed, labour-relations systems, based on freedom of association and collective bargaining, have been pillars of functioning democracies.
However, rather than creating more productive jobs, as some envisage, the AI revolution could entail a transformative reduction in work and employment that would remove capital’s reliance on human labour to produce surplus value and profit. If that leads to the demise of workers’ organisations and to further hollowing-out of the economic base of social democratic political parties, crucial questions arise. How will capital be kept under control and held to account? What will prevent the Musks of the world from achieving complete state capture? What mechanisms will be left to ensure some semblance of redistribution of the wealth created in AI value chains? And how far can incomes fall before levels of demand become unsustainably low?
Simon Steyne
Former senior adviser on fundamental rights at work, International Labour Organization
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