I enjoyed yesterday. I took the day very slowly. Jacqueline and I went to the Welney Wetland and Wildlife Trust reserve, a frequent destination for us, and took a walk around the south end of the extensive reserve. We met just one other person when doing so. It was intensely relaxing, and time in nature is always good for the soul.

I deliberately tried not to write very much during the course of the day, but I spent the afternoon letting my thoughts wander, as it was too warm to even head out for a coffee.

I reflected on the nature of money and realised that I do need to write more about this because I still do not think that we have an adequate definition of money as yet, despite the work of the likes of Christine Desan and the late David Graeber.

I also reflected on Marx's labour theory of value and conversations I had on Friday with colleagues at Sheffield on James Meadway's strange, and profoundly neoliberal, interpretation of this theory, as a result of which he thinks that no labour is of any value at all unless it is sold in a marketplace where capitalist exploitation of it can take place. Again, I need to write more about this.

Then I reflected on AI, and two things jumped out at me.

One was a comment made by Paul Krugman in a podcast he published, I think yesterday, with Heather Cox Richardson, which was recommended in a comment on this blog. His observation was that in previous bubbles, like the British canal boom of 1800, the British railway boom of the 1840s, the American railway boom of the 1860s and 1870s, the US car company-driven boom of the 1920s and the dot-com boom of the 1990s, whilst there always was, eventually, a bust, the funds that had reached companies for investment did, in each case, leave physical infrastructure that proved to be of long-term benefit.

The canals lasted in industrial use for 150 years. Many of the railway lines built during these booms are still in use. Cars have developed further, but they became a mass means of transport as a result of investment in the 1920s. The legacy of the dot-com boom was not the technology created for that platform at that time, but the investment in fibre cabling, which has taken 20 years to realise its potential and now drives broadband.

His concern, and I think it was a reasonable one, was that there is no evidence at all that what is now happening as a result of the current AI boom will create anything of lasting value. We do not know whether the hardware being built in the form of data centres will prove sustainable. Already, 20% of all electricity in Ireland is being used to power data centres. This makes no sense, and replication on this scale appears impossible.

Likewise, when we look at the software and related IT, the potential rate of advance in technology in this sector is so great, if it lives up to its promise, that everything being created now will be of little use in only two or three years' time.

His point was straightforward. When this crash happens, as we know it will, the cost will be almost entirely financial, and there will be no investment legacy to enjoy.

Then Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson made points curiously echoed by Camilla Cavendish, in the Financial Times, which I also read yesterday.

Everywhere, it seems, people are resenting AI. They hate the way it is disrupting job markets. They hate the uncertainty it is creating. They think it is going too fast. They think it is concentrating wealth in a dangerous fashion. They believe it will destabilise society. They cannot understand where this might end.

This is not the sentiment of older generations toward new technologies, as is usually found. It is, in fact, most especially heard amongst the young, who have been exposed to this technology and can see its consequences for them, most of which are adverse.

In that context, Camilla Cavendish, an independent peer appointed by David Cameron for her services to him as a political adviser, posed what I think might be a very realistic question. She asked when we might see the AI Luddites appear.

Her belief is that sometime soon we will not only see environmental protesters outside AI data centres, but also people intent on causing damage with the aim of preventing their operation because they fear the impact on their lives. She seems to think this likely, saying: 

Voters won't wait forever for someone to slow things down: they may take things into their own hands. The 21st-century Luddites will be the middle classes and the working classes. And it won't be possible to shoot them all.

This is not the sort of revolutionary call to arms that is normally heard in the pages of the Financial Times, so it did, unsurprisingly, grab my attention. The obvious question to ask is whether Camilla Cavendish might be both right and wrong?

Is she right that the objections to AI that she, Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson all foresee will turn to violent opposition? Is it possible that the world's people might, when they realise the potential for some deeply unsavoury people to control their lives, object, including violently? To believe that is possible would seem, to me, to be entirely reasonable.

Might a state, believing itself to have the duty to uphold supposed market power, in that situation attempt to shoot people, as Camilla Cavendish obviously thinks possible? Again, I think it is entirely reasonable to think so.

Will it, however, be unable to shoot them all? That ultimately is the big question because all conflict is eventually won by attrition. Either, as in the case of the Manchester mill owners who bought off Ned Ludd and his opponents, wealth is used to buy submission, or those objecting win by sheer weight of numbers, whatever the cost to some along the way. Tyranny, if that is where AI is headed, cannot presume that it will win in the end.

I have no answer to these questions. But the risks that they seek to appraise are, without doubt, real.

I both like the potential of AI to transform some necessary tasks in society and to free people from drudgery, if that is its potential. That we could use AI to create better lives on the basis of shared wealth is, I think, indisputable.

That much of this industry does, however, appear to be controlled by people who have no such objective also appears to be true. Is it quite reasonable, as a result, to live in fear of where their ambitions might lead us?

That is what I spent the end of my day thinking about, and this morning I still felt those thoughts worth sharing.

What do you think?

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