AI unemployment is unpredictable because capitalism lacks any collective economic planning.

Evidence

Contrary to what many economists believe, technology is not a neutral tool that can be abstracted from the economic context in which it arises. Within real competition, technology plays a vital role in the increase in profits. The latest innovations in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, accelerate technological unemployment, threatening to render even the most specialized workers redundant, like analysts, engineers, and professors. So far, that has not yet happened, but jobs will be lost in any case. It’s challenging to anticipate the social impact of these new technologies, and speculation is abundant. However, our critical lens provides at least one important insight. The consequences of AI are hard to predict not only because of the complexity of AI algorithms but because of the specific dynamics of our economy. Again, in our society, there is no economic plan formulated through collective decisions—whether democratic or authoritarian—but rather a myopic profusion of outcomes stemming from the individual decisions of large capital holders competing for survival and profit. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the stress-test of democracy-as-anti-capitalism: the absence of collective planning is presented as intrinsic to the system. — connects to: AI’s employment consequences are unpredictable because they depend on capitalist competition — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 248; The economy is a game whose outcome no one knows — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 931; War revealed markets cannot allocate labor efficiently without state planning. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 174