work as excessively influenced by the jargon of radical French theory, his critique of the production of automation in contemporary social life, as AI displaces labour, remains highly significant. In demonstrating that advanced automation produces an entropic violence of hyper-standardization, Stiegler’s critique arguably confronts head-on the most painfully destructive and debilitating aspects of algorithmic capitalism. We can also see that fundamental lines of difference are to be found among voices advocating the transformationalist position. This is an important point. Contrasting the contributions of Schwab and Stiegler highlights that the transformationalist position is not cut of one cloth.
Box 2.2 Transformationalists
1 Rejecting the claim of business-as-usual for the global economy, transformationalists see AI as an expression of broader digital shifts occurring in institutional life and contemporary society. Industry 4.0, big data and supercomputers are key examples.
2 There is an emphasis upon a revolutionary transformation of manufacturing and services, which demands a radical rethinking of labour market strategies.
3 Transformationalists are concerned not just with intensified economic dynamism stemming from AI, but with changes in society, culture and political life. In other words, AI transforms not only how we work but also how we live.
4 Some assessments emphasize that AI promotes productivity and economic growth, which in turn fosters innovation. Other assessments position economic growth and social equality as out of alignment, with resulting predictions of jobless futures.
5 Public policy requires far-reaching adjustments and shifts as a result of the AI revolution.
6 AI is global and transnational in scope, and its resulting opportunities and risks impact nations around the world. As such, AI requires creative responses from policy-makers and politicians about forms of effective political regulation, democratic accountability and ethical governance.
The Perspectives Compared
If this is true for grasping internal differences within the transformationalist standpoint, it is equally so for understanding the general debate between sceptics and transformationalists. Representing current lines of division in this debate between those that argue AI produces a world of massive and unending change – the transformationalists – and those who consider technological shifts as simply business as usual for the economy – the sceptics – is overly simplistic. Reductive as it may be, however, this is not to say that such exaggerated characterizations of the sceptics and their critics fail to influence broader public arguments about, and social policy shaping, AI and its consequences. Although the debate between sceptics and transformationalists cannot be said to have been particularly illuminating – the participants in these exchanges too often talk past one another – it does highlight that these broad standpoints shape many diverse arguments and opinions about AI, advanced robotics and accelerating automation. There are many different positions and interpretations of sceptical and transformationalist views of AI – with overlapping areas of consensus as well as contention – and these are vital for making sense of the consequences of AI.
Integrating the Insights
The development of a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the consequences of AI has to tread a difficult path between transformationalism and scepticism. We need to recognize that the AI revolution is already well under way, and that this is resulting in new opportunities and new burdens in equal measure. So far, the evidence indicates that – because of AI technologies and advanced automation – the proportion of workers in manufacturing will continue to decline sharply in all the industrialized countries. Whilst automated production destroys jobs within the factory, however, it may create many other jobs elsewhere in the economy. Nobel laureate economist Christopher Pissarides, for example, argues that rapidly increasing automation ‘implies faster economic growth, more consumer spending, increased labour demand, and thus greater job creation’.15 The same mix of opportunity and risk pervades other areas of economy and society impacted by AI too. It is not viable to assess such developments from either sceptical or transformationalist positions alone. What ties these socio-technological changes together is a new landscape of opportunity and risk, and the AI revolution lies at the core of them.
Nor should we take sceptical thinking at face value. Sceptics that emphasize workers’ adaptability to technological innovation as well as the importance of lifelong learning, for example, are, in effect, talking about the border between opportunity and risk. Yet it is very difficult for sceptics to grasp the wider risk landscape here since their restricted analysis of socio-technological change associated with AI precludes this. Neither is it right to assume that sceptics provide the most uncompromising or sober assessment of the negative impacts unleashed by advanced automation. The entropic violence of algorithmic capitalism that Bernard Stiegler talks about, for instance, is far more confronting and pessimistic than anything that might be found in the sceptical literature. Stiegler’s work, then, represents a kind of pessimistic utopianism. Pessimistic, because he views entropic violence as built into the very fabric of autonomization. But there is a powerfully positive utopianism at work here too, because the de-automating of society will be helped off the ground by the very algorithmic forces which are the ruin of both expertise and knowledge and which bring about hyper-standardization in the first place. But why, exactly, do the more destructive elements of autonomization spread from economy to society? And what does this consist of? Stiegler’s answers to these questions are elusive and vague. It is not at all clear what relationships exist between, say, economic and social influences, or political and administrative forces, as regards the institutional nexus of AI in the transformationalist literature. Nor are these points clarified by those writers of a sceptical persuasion.
We can, I think, clarify these issues, but only by departing from the economistic standpoints advanced by both sceptics and transformationalists. The best way of clarifying some of the institutional features of AI and its consequences is by focusing attention on the complex, contradictory institutional fields of interaction (economic, social, cultural and political) in which technological transformation is enmeshed. Many transformationalists – as we have seen – break free from some of the more confining restrictions of orthodox economic thought, most notably the tendency to exclude automated AI from the analysis of long-term economic possibilities and future scenarios. But even those more politically progressive authors associated with such an orientation, such as Stiegler, concentrate unduly on economic influences and find it difficult satisfactorily to account for interactions between fields or institutions in economic, political, cultural or public life. That is to say, existing analyses of the worldwide reach of AI tend to see one dominant institutional field (the economy, or more specifically manufacturing enterprises) as that which constitutes current technological innovation either as an unstoppable momentum of change or as contributing to the reproduction of economic order and thus the perpetuation of the status quo.
This point leads on to a quite fundamental aspect of global technological transformations, which is a phenomenon I have previously called the culture of AI.16 There can be little doubt that today’s advanced integrated automation is deeply associated with the global economy (and specifically the global economy’s supply chains), which specifies particular forms for nearly all kinds of economic activity. But it is also essential to recognize that one of the main features of the globalization of AI is the worldwide diffusion of new machine technologies, which are increasingly miniaturized, mobile and networked. The impact of truly intelligent machines and software-driven automation is not limited to the economic domain, but affects many core aspects of everyday life, social relationships and culture in the broadest sense. AI, and particularly automated technologies of communication, have dramatically redefined the context for human interaction today and powerfully shape the pattern of development in human–machine interfaces. AI also forms a central element today in human involvement with both the material and natural environments.
All of the foregoing factors are relevant when we consider the intricate connections between AI and global transformations – and here I emphasize the massive