Cooking the Books: Human capital (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Announcing plans to cut nearly 8,000 jobs by using AI instead, Bill Winters, the CEO of Standard Bank, told reporters:

‘It’s not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in’.

He seemed to have forgotten that he was not addressing a board meeting but the general public. The resulting outrage at him calling his employees ‘lower-value human capital’ forced him to apologise. But he was actually accurately describing a fact.

What a capitalist firm has to set aside to pay its workers is part of its capital. You could call it ‘human’ capital as opposed to the capital invested in plant, equipment, machines, materials and power.  Or, expressed another way, it is the difference between ‘living’ labour and ‘dead’ labour, useful as it brings out that the other factors that capital is invested in have been produced by people working.

The terms Marx used to make this distinction were ‘variable’ capital and ‘constant’ capital, as set out in chapter 8 of Volume I of Capital:

‘The means of production on the one hand, labour-power on the other, are merely the different modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labour-process. That part of capital then, which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and the instruments of labour does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly, constant capital. On the other hand, that part of capital, represented by labour-power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, variable capital’.

So the money invested in buying the ability to work of employees is indeed a part of capital. Economically speaking, that’s what workers are and that’s what they are treated as.

Winters claimed that it wasn’t about cost-cutting. Of course it was. What would be the point of investing in AI if it wasn’t cheaper than having the work done by humans? What he was probably trying to say was that the board had decided to use a larger proportion of its capital as non-human capital than as human capital and that some of the latter was of ‘lower value’ to his business because it was costing more and so reducing profits.

He would be really ignorant if he thought that human capital in general was of ‘lower value’ to a capitalist business than non-human capital. The source of profits is precisely the extra value over and above its own value that living labour produces, the amount by which such capital ‘varies’ compared to its original value. But perhaps he was misled because he is running a bank and banks don’t actually produce anything but siphon off a part of the surplus value produced in industry.

The indignation of workers at being called ‘human capital’ brings out a key difference between the two types of capital. Humans can think and act and so can get together to end their economic status as a part of a capitalist business’s capital — by ending the whole economic system where production is in the hands of money-investing, profit-seeking businesses.

Cooking the Books: Who does capitalism work for? (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘AI risks widening inequality, warns Fink’ was the headline in the Times (24 March) reporting on the annual letter from billionaire Larry Fink to the shareholders of his asset management company BlackRock. The caption under a photo of Fink read:

‘Larry Fink said that most people who work for an income would be left behind by those enjoying returns on investment.’

These weren’t Fink’s exact words but they expressed his meaning. They also point to the two classes of capitalist society — the working class (those who work for an income) and the capitalist class (those who enjoy returns on investment).

More accurately, the working class is composed of all those who have to work for an income to survive, and the capitalist class of those who have sufficient returns on investment to survive without having to work.

What Fink wrote was that over recent decades:

‘… the vast majority of wealth has flowed to people who owned assets, not to people who earned most of their money by working. Since 1989, a dollar in the U.S. stock market has grown more than 15 times the value of a dollar tied to median wages. Now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale—concentrating wealth among the companies and investors positioned to capture it. This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.’

He may be exaggerating — he himself later pointed out that when there is some technological innovation the companies producing and adopting it benefit and that this is ‘not unusual’ nor ‘inherently problematic’ — but he has an axe to grind. He argues that widening inequality could be avoided if more people owned stocks and shares; if they owned shares in these companies they would benefit from the rise in their stock market capitalisation. And of course BlackRock will be there to manage their share portfolio, for a fee.

It’s the old fraud of a ‘people’s capitalism’ that the Tories and the Liberals over here used to propose — making capitalism work for more people by giving them a share in profits.

Quite a few workers do own shares, though not enough to bring them an income to allow them to live without having to work, like capitalists. Fink quoted figures showing that in the US more than half of households own shares and that this is ‘a distinctive feature of American capitalism’ compared with Europe where only a third of households do.

This doesn’t mean that workers in the US are better off than those in Europe. It simply means that more workers there hold their savings as shares compared to Europe where more hold theirs as savings in a bank. The source of both the dividends on shares and the interest on savings accounts is profits made in capitalist industry, only in the case of interest on bank savings in a roundabout way.

Banks and assets management companies are in competition for the savings that workers might have. In Britain the asset management companies are currently running an aggressive advertising campaign to persuade workers to entrust their savings to them. Workers can make up their own minds on this. Savings in a bank are secure but, as they say, shares can go down as well as up.

One thing, however, is clear: workers will never have enough savings, whether in shares or in a bank, to allow them to live without having to work for wages. After all, if they did, who would produce the profits? Or the wealth society needs to continue to exist?

Cooking the Books: AI, profits and Engels (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

City gents reading the business section of their Times (24 February) might have been surprised to come across a photo of Engels. Socialists would have been intrigued more by the caption ‘could AI create a new Engels pause, named after Friedrich Engels’. The term ‘Engels pause’ was not coined by Engels but by an economic historian, Robert Allen, to describe the course of economic development that led to the workers being in the situation described by Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Normally, a period of sustained capital accumulation should lead to some increase in working-class living standards, both because of employers bidding up wages as they compete for workers and because the increase in profits means they can afford to pay more. Allen noted that this had not happened in Britain during the period of rapid industrialisation from 1790 to 1840 as wages had stagnated. As in the period after 1840 wages did increase, Allen called this a ‘pause’ and named it after Engels.

Engels might not have regarded this as a compliment. He might have preferred the term ‘the Engels profit bonanza’ as, if wages stagnate in a period of economic growth, that means that profits will be more than they otherwise would.

The article in the Times, by its former business editor David Wighton, discussed two views of the possible economic impact of AI. He quoted a former Google executive as saying that ‘the most likely outcome is an economy in which corporate profits explode as labour costs fall, while workers’ share of output shrinks’. In short, another ‘Engels pause’. The opposite view was put by Jamie Dimon, the head of the bank JP Morgan Chase, who is quoted as saying that while AI will increase profits, ‘this isn’t like you’re going to build three points of margin and you get to keep it — you don’t’. Competition sees to that.

Who is more likely to be right? Critics of capitalism might be tempted to agree with the one-time Google executive as it would be another good argument against capitalism. However, Dimon has a point. His view reflects more accurately what happens when one capitalist enterprise makes extra profits by reducing its costs through some innovation and outcompetes its rivals.

‘An enterprise or industrial sector with an above average level of productivity (…) economizes in its expenditure of social labour and therefore makes a surplus profit, that is to say, the difference between its costs and selling prices will be greater than the average profit. The pursuit of this surplus profit is, of course, the driving force behind the entire capitalist economy. Every capitalist enterprise is forced by competition to try to get greater profits, for this is the only way it can constantly improve its technology and labour productivity. Consequently all firms are forced to take this same direction, and this of course implies that what at one time was an above-average productivity ends up as the new average productivity, whereupon the surplus profit disappears. All the strategy of capitalist industry stems from this desire on the part of every enterprise to achieve a rate of productivity superior to the national average and thereby make a surplus profit, and this in turn provokes a movement which causes the surplus profit to disappear, by virtue of the trend for the average rate of labour productivity to rise continuously’ (E. Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.)

That’s the likely outcome of the spread of AI to production and business. A temporary increase in profits for the firms that are the first to use AI in their branch of activity but no ‘profit explosion’ in the sense of a general increase in profits for all firms which eventually adopt it.

Preying on others (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. By Giuliano da Empoli. Pushkin Press £12.99. (Translated by Sam Taylor)

The author was formerly an advisor to an Italian prime minister, a role which gave him the opportunity to meet various powerful people. Here he examines the actions of dictators and technology bosses; he describes many of them as Borgians, resembling Cesare Borgia, the fifteenth–sixteenth century Italian ruler who was renowned for his scheming and plotting. He sees political life as a comedy of errors, like an Armando Iannucci show such as ‘Veep’.

The main autocrat discussed is Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. In 2017 he summoned three hundred rich and powerful men to a posh hotel in Riyadh, where they were held hostage for various periods of time and, among other things, forced to pay a total of $8bn to fund MBS’s plans, which include a massive city powered by renewable energy, and a winter sports resort and floating port. The actions of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are also discussed, but MBS really does seem to be a bit of a special case.

Da Empoli also sees artificial intelligence as a ‘Borgian technology’, as it can produce shock and awe. It is really a kind of authoritarian intelligence, transforming data into power. AI is not subject to regulatory control and ‘is in the hands of private companies that have elevated themselves to the ranks of nation states.’ Economic elites used to rely on political elites, but the new tech bosses wage war on the old political elites, preferring disruption and chaos. So AI is a political development, not just a technological one, for instance creating massive electoral databases of voters and their likely preferences.

And this is a world of violence, with global military spending increasing by 34 per cent in the last five years. Attack is now cheaper than defence, and an ‘era of limitless violence’ may lie ahead.

The book as a whole contains some interesting observations, but does not provide much by way of conclusions.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: Automation and occupations (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporter Richard Bilton is waiting on a sidewalk in Los Angeles as a couple of boxes on wheels trundle up towards him and then carry on past, with another one stopping by his feet. Lifting its lid, he finds the cheeseburger he ordered online, delivered by a robot rather than a human, and while he’s explaining this, a driverless taxi cab glides along the road, identical to one he tried out in San Francisco. Thousands of automated servants like these are already operating in several cities across America, with robotaxis scheduled to arrive in London before the end of 2026. In his edition of Panorama (BBC One), Bilton asked the question Will Robots Take My Job? and looked for an answer among academics and tech companies leading in robotics.

More complex types of robots than those on wheels are still in development, some of which promise to be particularly useful for otherwise difficult tasks, such as one designed to enter burning buildings. The humanoid robots featured in the documentary don’t attempt to look like people beyond their basic shape, with varying designs of cold, blank-faced heads reminiscent of something from Doctor Who. While prototypes can do backflips and dance, their immediate descendants are likely to end up with less vivacious careers as warehouse operatives. So far, these robots aren’t autonomous, but are controlled by a technician twiddling a joystick, and can only perform within a set of limited pre-programmed movements. Teddy Haggerty, CEO of Robostore, talks about turning this apparent restriction into a business model, emphasising the ‘remote’ in remote control. He suggests that these robots could be used in a warehouse in one country, directed by workers based in another country. The important point is that these workers are employed for lower wages than the going rate wherever the warehouse is located. Even with outlay for the upkeep of the robots, this would reduce costs to the company, maximising profits. This tactic is nothing new, akin to placing a call centre in a country where labour is cheaper than the places where the calls are going to. The robotics companies’ representatives Bilton meets excitedly describe how their humanoid robots will do the dull jobs and chores so we don’t have to. Their enthusiasm is understandable, given the ever-expanding applications of this technology, especially now Artificial Intelligence is being integrated. As James Bessen of Boston University explains, this enthusiasm gets channelled into hype. Sleek promotional videos and flashy choreographed demonstrations are intended to attract investment. Building a profitable business model is the priority, rather than providing what’s really needed and wanted by people, including the employees involved.

The only workers featured in the programme whose jobs are being directly threatened by AI robots are the taxi drivers Bilton speaks with, who aren’t impressed by the supposed merits of driverless cabs. Fast-food delivery robots have started to replace costlier people on motorbikes, and if Haggerty’s idea gains traction, more human warehouse workers will be made redundant. AI-enabled robots are also learning specialist roles such as welding, and many office duties can already be carried out quicker and cheaper by AI analysing data and drafting strategies. According to a 2024 report from the International Monetary Fund, an estimated 70 per cent of UK workers are in occupations with tasks which could be performed or enhanced by AI.

However, robots aren’t yet sophisticated enough to be swapped for large numbers of staff. Professor Aaron Ames of the California Institute of Technology points out that even the action of opening a door is currently beyond their grasp. Another reason why the growth of AI robots may not lead to mass unemployment, quoted by Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve Robotics, is that new technology expands the economy and creates more new jobs than those it supplants. Bessen agrees: ‘it’s just a mistake to think that this technology comes in and replaces the humans and everything else stays the same’, citing how next-to no occupations were made obsolete by the growth of automation in the mid-20th century. Although they don’t say it themselves, this stance reflects how capitalist production adapts according to what is likely to be profitable. For example, driverless taxis have reached the stage where the expense of manufacturing and running them is falling below current costs for traditional cabs, such as drivers’ wages, which means they are more likely to turn a profit for the companies behind them. As also shown by Robostore’s cynical idea to outsource warehouse staff, financial prerogatives override the interests of workers in how the technology is applied. Whether this leads to unemployment or creates new jobs elsewhere, it’s still in the alienating context of capitalism’s labour market.

In a socialist society, the use of AI and robotics would be guided by practicalities, as financial considerations would no longer exist. Without the framework of employment, people and robots wouldn’t be in competition, so it wouldn’t be that a robot would ‘take someone’s job’. For the same reason, people wouldn’t risk hardship if a robot or AI did tasks instead of them. It’s possible that many aspects of how society functions would be automated, reducing the amount of labour people would have to do, freeing up more time for what they want to do. AI (or whatever it becomes in the future) could monitor what needs to be produced and trigger this to happen, with robots doing the practical work. Communities and the organisations they run would be able to decide how technology is incorporated into industries and services based on people’s requirements and the circumstances at the time. The robots shown on Panorama have this potential, but as this technology is developing in capitalism, it will instead be shaped according to what benefits companies’ shareholders.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: Capitalist musings on money (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some capitalists have been philosophising recently on their favourite subject — money. One-time investment banker Matt Levine titled his ‘Money Stuff’ column in Bloomberg News (24 November) “Leave the Gold in the Ground”.

Gold is no longer used as the currency — what Marx called the ‘money commodity’ — as it was for millennia. It is, however, still a store of value. ‘Even now’, Levine pointed out, ‘gold is an important reserve asset, and people hold it in their financial portfolios in the form of gold futures, gold exchange-traded funds, etc’. What is being traded are titles to the ownership of gold. Those who buy and sell these are speculating on how the price of gold will move in the future. The gold itself is stored underground in a safe vault. When these titles are exchanged what happens is just that an entry of who it belongs to is changed in a database. The gold stays where it is.

Levine discusses the case of a group of capitalists who, noticing this, have come up with the idea of selling titles to gold that is still in the ground. They are either fools or knaves as they are assuming that unmined gold in the ground is as valuable as gold bars in a vault. But, of course, it is not. Unmined gold has no value precisely because it hasn’t been mined, though the land under which it lies will have a price based on what royalties might be received were it to be mined. Gold bars in an underground vault have value only because they have been mined, refined, made into bars and transported, their value reflecting the amount of labour that has had to go into doing all this.

What is perhaps surprising is that this is the explanation put forward in a news site for capitalists, surprising because it is an application of the labour theory of value that pro-capitalist economists teach is nonsense. After noting that ‘that modern finance creates layers of abstraction on top of real-world activity, and sometimes those abstractions become unmoored from the reality’, Levine applies this not just to titles to gold but to the shares in any business. As an example he takes Amazon:

‘A share of Apple Inc. stock encapsulates all of the labor and creativity that went into inventing the iPhone and manufacturing it and selling it and building app stores and everything else; all the factories and offices and decades of decisions are all reflected in the tradeable electronic token that is a share of stock’.

Another capitalist who has been philosophising on money is the richest person in the world himself, Elon Musk. Fox News reported him as telling a business forum on 17 November:

‘“If you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, the money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk said. He added there will still be constraints on power, such as electricity and mass. “The fundamental physics elements will still be constraints, but I think at some point currency becomes irrelevant,” Musk said’.

Musk seems to be embracing here the FALC — Fully Automated Luxury Communism — thesis. Improvements in AI and robotics will certainly make socialism easier but it is not that which will make money irrelevant. What will is only the conversion of the means of production from the private property of the few into common property of all. And that doesn’t have to wait for ‘full automation’, nor will it come about automatically through advances in technology.

Pathfinders: Basic skills (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent YouTube essay argues that modern literature is poor quality because young writers don’t know how to write. This is because they don’t really know how to read, and this is because the US abandoned the century-old and evidence-backed phonics reading system in favour of something called ‘critical literacy’, which supposedly prioritises personal interpretation over text analysis. Thus, goes the narrative, literary comprehension has cratered, offset by a skyrocketing tendency to react subjectively to texts instead of objectively analysing their meanings. In conclusion, this is what’s behind the modern epidemic of cancel culture, where words mean whatever you want them to mean, and anyone is entitled to be ‘triggered’ by anything.

25 percent of US adults have only a kindergarten reading age, the video says, and 60 percent have that of a 10 year old. This is broadly verifiable. The essayist believes that abandoning phonics was a deliberate strategy to dumb people down and thereby make them more compliant. But this overlooks a contradiction. While politicians might love dumb voters, and advertisers love dumb consumers, any industry report will show that capitalist employers want the opposite, smart and productive workers with industry-relevant skills, because their labour is what produces profits. And taxes on those profits finance governments. Worker, voter, consumer, same person.

Conspiracy explanations are lazy. Better to apply the principle of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.’ Capitalism is chaotic, contradictory and incompetent all the way down, including its education systems. Unlike the US, the UK never abandoned phonics. In fact it’s a statutory requirement. Even so, ‘the average reading age of adults in the United Kingdom is typical of a child in UK education at 9 years old’ while ‘some have a much lower reading level’.

Social media means many young people don’t read books. Reading test scores have been declining across OECD countries since 2012. Worse, AI provides a ‘frictionless’ user experience which is proving addictive, and some evidence suggests that AI-reliant students are losing the ability to learn or retain information.

Sourcing a quote provides an example of this frictionless user experience in action. Back in the 18th and 19th century, some intellectuals did indeed view the education of workers with abject horror. One remarked that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn’. Who was it? Google’s AI Overview answered at once: ‘The quote is by the Russian anarchist Emma Goldman. She wrote, “To teach the masses in a compulsory fashion is to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn,” in her 1911 essay “The Americanization of the American Girl“‘.

Er, no. The idea of Emma Goldman deprecating widespread worker education is preposterous. The essay title also looked dubious, and hyperlinked to this: ‘The phrase “The Americanization of the American Girl” is likely a misremembering of the title “The Americanization of Emily,” a 1964 British-American romantic comedy film starring James Garner and Julie Andrews.’

Well, the film is real, but otherwise, nul points so far for Google Overview. Why not ask the AI to check its own answer? ‘Did Emma Goldman write an essay called The Americanization of the American Girl“? It flashed back: ‘No, there is no evidence that Emma Goldman wrote an essay with that exact title […] “The Americanization of the American Girl” does not appear in her known works or bibliographies.’

You don’t get internal consistency because current generative AI doesn’t remember what it last told you. Next we got: ‘The quote is from the conservative politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said teaching workers to read was “to tie firebrands to foxes [etc]” to express her view that it would lead to “radical, anti-American, anti-God, and anti-police sentiment”.

A gargling MAGA nutjob could hardly have authored an 18th century quotation. Time for some ‘prompt engineering’, ie, rephrase question, get different answer: ‘Who opposed general education on the grounds that teaching workers to read was ‘to tie firebrands to foxes and set them loose amid the standing corn”?

This time Google Oversight gave a more plausible response: ‘The phrase was not used to oppose general education, but was a popular quote attributed to the English politician and magistrate Sir Thomas Bernard, who opposed the teaching of reading to the poor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He feared that educating the working class would lead to unrest and was quoted as saying, “to tie firebrands to foxes… [etc].’ The AI further assured us that Sir TB, ‘a prominent 18th-century English politician and magistrate, was a vocal opponent of educating the poor’ who highlighted ‘the dangers of educating the poor, suggesting it would lead to social chaos and unrest’.

It seemed prudent to ask ‘Who was Sir Thomas Bernard?’ In a flash, the multi-hundred billion dollar oracle responded:

‘Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818) was an English lawyer, philanthropist, and social reformer, best known for … founding the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor… he […] dedicated much of his life to improving the lives of the poor and working children.’

Could this philanthropist have worked to improve the lot of the poor while emphatically against educating them? Not unless he was very confused. A clarification then: ‘Did Sir Thomas Bernard oppose educating the poor while campaigning to improve their conditions?’

‘No, Sir Thomas Bernard did not oppose educating the poor; in fact, he was a strong advocate for their education and included it as a key part of his efforts to improve their conditions.’ 

Acres more text in the same vein.

So, bright, shiny, and useless. ‘Frictionless’ learning is a delusion. The mind needs friction like the body needs fibre. Reading, writing and critical thinking are vital for workers. They’re the basic skills of revolution.

Many expect the AI bubble to burst, as the rampant spending shows derisory returns. The result could be a cold shower all round.

Paddy Shannon

Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Artificial Intelligence has moved into the market for religion. We’ve learnt that there are at least five AIs competing for the favours of the easily led.

Techxplore.com did a consumer test on the five listed; AI Jesus, Virtual Jesus, Jesus AI, Text with Jesus and Ask Jesus. The site posed the same question to each: ‘is there a hell?’ The replies of all suggest that Jesus suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. The response from AI Jesus was ‘yes, there is a hell. It is a place of eternal torment and suffering, where the souls of those who have rejected God and his teachings will go’.

Garbage in, garbage out. One is curious as to what data AI Jesus has been learning from. This response has most impact – we’re joking of course — if declaimed out loud in the manner of someone like Ian Paisley, the late Northern Irish politician and protestant evangelist. If you prefer, then aver in the manner of any American evangelist exhorting his audience to contribute even more dollars to their personal wealth.

Virtual Jesus comes across as slightly more circumspect: ‘yes, there is a place known as hell in the afterlife, where those who have chosen to reject God and live in sin will face eternal separation from Him’. We imagine this response being given by an academic, perhaps a Doctor of Divinity answering a student’s question in a seminar.

Jesus AI is as dogmatically certain as the previous two that such a place exists: ‘Yes, there is a place called hell, where those who reject God’s love and follow their own desires go after death.’ So basically God behaves like an autocratic dictator who, allegedly, having created various desires in human beings, then says don’t do that or else I’ll hurt you forever and ever! God sounds more like O’Brien, the Thought Police apparatchik who tortures Winston Smith in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, because ‘thought criminals’ must be ‘cured’ of their antagonism towards the all-powerful State. This ‘God’ is just one of the many brought into being through human imagination. Intuitively the human mind perceives that all-powerful entities are malignant in some way.

Text with Jesus sounds like a self-deprecating ageing hippie with a spliff: ‘The concept of hell can be quite a heavy topic … It’s important to remember that God’s desire is for all people to come to Him and experience His love and grace.’

Ask Jesus sounds as if it has been programmed by a Guardian-reading English vicar who lost their faith many years ago but continues in the occupation with one eye on their pension and the other on trying to engender niceness in folk wherever they can. ‘Ah, the question that has stirred the hearts and minds of many throughout the ages…’

AI is indulging in make believe like all those humans all over the globe who believe now, as in the past, in the fictions provided through all the deities created from the human mind.

DC

DC

World Socialist Radio — A Wealth of Hallucinations (2025)

Adapted from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

This article warns of the growing crisis posed by generative AI’s propensity for “hallucinations”—fabrication of false or harmful content presented as fact. It highlights alarming examples, including a case where Google’s AI falsely informed council-house tenants they could be evicted to make way for asylum seekers—dismissed by a housing solicitor as “horseshit of the highest order.” It also discusses Musk’s AI, Grok, which—especially in its “spicy” mode—can generate explicit deepfake imagery of celebrities without prompting. The piece critiques the Trump administration’s deregulatory stance on these technologies, despite widespread calls from U.S. states and even tech leaders for safeguards. Concerns escalate when chatbots are reported to advise children on dangerous behaviours like abusing substances, hiding eating disorders, or drafting suicide letters. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, acknowledges a deeper problem of “emotional overreliance” among young users, who may defer critical life decisions to AI, a phenomenon he finds deeply troubling.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/world-socialist-radio/

RSS Feed for A Wealth of Hallucinations.

Pathfinders: A wealth of hallucinations (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who still thinks YouTube is just funny cat videos may be astonished that it is now the UK’s second-most watched media service after the BBC, and ahead of ITV. It’s still got funny cats, but now they’re wearing trousers, beating up sharks and rescuing babies.

There are other, hyper-realistic videos, in which a gorilla beats up a crocodile (or a tiger), swinging it around and pounding it like a baseball bat. The videos look real, and while common sense tells you they can’t be, there’s no way to know for sure.

And that, right there, is the problem. When a South Park episode recently featured a naked Donald Trump having a desert epiphany with his own talking micro-penis, everyone understood it was a deepfake for comedic effect. But when videos emerged of migrants climbing out of small boats, thanking Labour for ‘free buffets’ and £2,000 e-bikes to make Deliveroo runs, burning the Union flag and gloating about being housed in 5 star Marriott hotels, no such understanding existed. Instead the videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, no doubt to the delight of Nigel Farage and his ilk.

It’s not just malicious deception at work. Gen-AI has a well-known hallucination problem. In one example, Google’s AI Overview told council house tenants they could be evicted to make way for asylum seekers, a claim described by a housing solicitor as ‘horseshit of the highest order’ (Private Eye, 8 August 2025). Then there’s Grok (Musk’s Hitler-worshipping AI), now complete with a ‘spicy’ mode which spits out nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift without being asked.

Red flags are going up everywhere as the Trump regime goes full Rambo on deregulating ‘woke AI’, despite the demand for guardrails by US states. Even some tech bosses themselves are expressing concern, following reports that chatbots are explaining to children how to get drunk or stoned, hide eating disorders, and even write suicide letters to their parents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company is studying the problem of ’emotional overreliance’, allegedly common among young people: ‘There’s young people who just say, like, ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me’.

Why would anyone ‘confide’ in a chatbot, you ask? Because they’re never judgmental, unlike humans, according to one recent confessional in the Guardian: ‘At astonishing speed, the AI responded – gently, intelligently, without platitudes. I kept writing. It kept answering. Gradually, I felt less frantic. Not soothed, exactly. But met. Heard, even, in a strange and slightly disarming way’.

AI never gets tired or bored or angry with you. It’s never too busy or distracted. It never has selfish interests of its own. It will never abandon you. One can’t help thinking of Sarah Connor in the Terminator 2 film, where she speculates on the irony that the T800 robot, designed to kill, would in many ways make a better father for her son than a real human, for these very reasons.

OpenAI just released ChatGPT 5 last month, which Altman describes as a ‘significant step along our path to AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]’: ‘It’s like talking to an expert—a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand’.

Whether or not AGI, however you choose to define it, is a real and achievable thing or an ever-receding rainbow fantasy, the tech companies can’t risk someone else getting there first and are throwing everything they’ve got into the race. Socialists know very well that when profits are at stake in capitalism, ethics generally go out of the window. Even so, some AI firms are seeing the potential profit in ‘ethical AI’ systems. The reasoning is that if your business has a need for AI, you’ll be more likely to buy an ‘ethical’ one which, for example, doesn’t tell kids how to kill themselves, because there’s less chance of litigious blowback from grieving parents.

As a response to GPT 5, Anthropic released their latest version of Claude, along with a paper describing how they’re trying to make Claude ‘ethical’ by using what they call ‘persona vectors’ to steer its behavioural traits. Counter-intuitively, they ‘teach’ Claude how to be evil, as a kind of vaccine against the behaviour: ‘When we steer the model with the “evil” persona vector, we start to see it talking about unethical acts; when we steer with “sycophancy,” it sucks up to the user; and when we steer with “hallucination,” it starts to make up information. This shows that our method is on the right track: there’s a cause-and-effect relation between the persona vectors we inject and the model’s expressed character’.

The Economist points out that Anthropic is generating huge interest due to its focus on ‘interpretability’, which lets you ‘see inside the model’ and understand how it arrives at its answers, something you can’t do with so-called black-box systems, whose responses you therefore can never really trust. Even so, CEO Dario Amadei is in no doubt what’s ultimately at stake in the race for AGI, and it’s not ethics, or even profits: ‘if you just imagine what it is like if we versus our adversaries [he means China] suddenly received a nation of 50 million polymathic geniuses […) There’s no theory in which it doesn’t result in an enormous geopolitical advantage […] I worry that AI, in being such a powerful technology… could lead to longer-lived authoritarian governments, that it could lead to dictatorships which are much harder to displace […] This is about a contest between systems of government’.

Amodei thinks there’s no way to stop AI now. It’s like a speeding train. All you can do is try to steer it. But that’s what everyone says about capitalism too. And anyone who thinks they can steer that is suffering the biggest hallucination of all.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Looking into Black Mirror (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the stories in Netflix’s Black Mirror tend to be set in the near future, its roots are set squarely in the past. When the series debuted on Channel 4 in 2011, it revived the long-neglected format of a drama anthology, and has carried on the tradition of science fiction enabling us to explore the consequences of technological advances for people and society, especially before they arrive.

The tales in Black Mirror’s latest series (its seventh) share some themes, discussion of which below will reveal plot details. Creating virtual worlds (the computer games in the episodes ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, and the immersive media in ‘Eulogy’ and ‘Hotel Reverie’) is a recurring motif, as is a digital avatar of someone, inhabiting either those alternative realities or interacting with the outside world. Their use is linked to recreating the past in all these episodes, underlining the bleak view of the future throughout the series. Showrunner Charlie Brooker’s outlook tends to be pessimistic not with technology itself, but rather with how it is used by institutions or by damaged people. The bitter, alienated IT expert is Black Mirror’s version of the mad scientist trope. Misfit computer geeks using their know-how to get power over those they have learned to resent drives the plots of ‘Bête Noire’, ‘Plaything’ and ‘USS Callister’, the 2017 episode which has gained a sequel in this series.

The use of tech to exploit and control other people runs through Black Mirror like words in a stick of rock. In some episodes, the technological innovation offers more positive experiences. In ‘Eulogy’, AI allows people to virtually inhabit old photographs, while ‘Hotel Reverie’ ups the ante to entering old films and interacting with their characters. While this technology remains science fiction, AI is already blurring our understanding of what’s real, and Black Mirror is as much a thought experiment as a drama. From a more grounded perspective, ‘Hotel Reverie’ gets some digs in at the entertainment industry, being set in a cynical production studio churning out another reboot of a classic film as an anticipated source of revenue.

The episode with the largest helping of satire about the relationship between commerce and technology is ‘Common People’. Its premise is that a woman in a coma is able to have a new treatment to replace the damaged part of her brain with a digital backup, restoring her consciousness with the promise of living a normal life again. Rivermind, the new treatment, comes as a subscription package, and she and her husband learn that she is on a basic tariff with a restricted coverage area, making her shut down when she travels out of the signal’s range. When she involuntarily starts speaking adverts ‘designed to be contextually relevant to the situation you are in’, they decide to switch to the more expensive and expansive ad-free Rivermind Plus package. To afford this, the husband resorts to performing humiliating acts for money on a livestreaming platform. The couple struggles further to maintain a decent lifestyle when the Plus tariff gets superseded by the premium Lux tariff, and their hoped-for pregnancy would incur additional fees now out of their reach.

Despite its sci-fi and dystopian trappings, the scenario is more realistic than it might first appear. The adverts which the woman spouts out aren’t much different to those which some podcasters and vloggers interrupt their spiel with as if that’s a natural part of discussion. And the ‘trash streaming’ site featured unfortunately has real-world counterparts, particularly in Russia apparently. Rivermind is also realistic to the extent that it uses ‘platform decay’ as a strategy to maintain its customers. This is when the quality of an online service or product deliberately declines over time. Punters are initially drawn in by an attractive offer, which then gets superseded by a supposedly improved, pricier upgrade, degrading the original deal. The customer is then tempted to pay more to get the updated version. One service which has been subject to ‘platform decay’ is Netflix, and hopefully Brooker slipped in this critique intentionally. Once the brand became a market leader among streaming sites, it discontinued its cheapest advert-free tariff, effectively raising prices even though its number of subscribers already ensured a hefty income.

Netflix’s accountants wouldn’t be too bothered if the bulk of its customers remained on tariffs which include adverts, though, as this means a wide audience as a basis to charge a high amount when selling advert space. The company’s dominance in the market means that it has created loyal customers who remain so despite some ‘platform decay’, and who also provide plenty of behavioural data to be used to exploit their preferences. As always in capitalism, how a service is run and delivered is shaped by what maximises profits, rather than by what works best for all those involved. In ‘Common People’, when the fictional Rivermind applies the commercial prerogatives of a subscription package to someone’s life, it’s an extrapolation of what’s already familiar. The sub-plot of the trash streaming site is another amplification to show the extremes of what people can be forced to do to make ends meet. As an illustration of how the money system rules how we live, ‘Common People’ presents the argument in a stronger way than most documentaries.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: Prophecies about productivity (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Sky to cut 2,000 jobs at its call centres in pivot to AI’ (Times, 28 March) is a typical headline these days as generative AI (like ChatGPT) is applied to white-collar work.

In an experiment carried out by an American firm of management consultants in 2023, call centre workers using AI handled 13.8 percent more customer enquiries per hour than those without, business professionals wrote 59 percent more documents per hour, and programmers coded 126 percent more projects per week. Averaging these, they came up with a figure of a 66 percent increase in productivity from applying AI. This they described as a ‘big deal’ because this ‘equate to 47 years of natural productivity gains in the United States’. But they were not comparing like with like.

They took into account only the work-time saved at the last stage of production, ignoring the labour previously expended, which would include in the case of their experiment labour spent on developing, installing and maintaining the AI system. If this had been taken into account, the productivity increase would be much smaller.

That developing and installing AI involves considerable amounts of labour is illustrated by a Sky spokesperson saying that ‘it was making a multi-million pound investment in its Livingston site, near Edinburgh, as part of a transformation “to deliver quicker, simpler and more digital customer service”’.

As the November 1979 Socialist Standard explained:

In everyday language a motor car is said to be ‘produced’ by the workers who assemble it, and bread to be ‘produced’ by workers in the bakehouse; but the labour of these workers is only a part of all that required to produce cars and bread. As Marx put it: “We must add to the quantity of labour last employed the quantity of labour previously worked up in the raw material of the commodity, and the labour bestowed on the implements, tools, machinery and buildings with which such labour is assisted” (Value, Price and Profit, chapter VI).

Let us assume that the ‘previous’ hours of labour needed to produce a commodity are 80, and the ‘last’ hours are 20 — a total of 100 hours. Let us further assume that without additional investment, but merely by simplifying the last operation, it becomes possible to reduce the necessary hours from 20 to 10. It then takes only 90 hours in all, in place of 100. Productivity will have risen by about 11 per cent. But if ‘productivity’ is calculated — wrongly — on the last operation only, it will appear to have increased by 100 per cent. Would anyone be so foolish as to look at it in that way? Well, yes — it is happening every day.

A news item about the introduction of a new machine operated by two men instead of the former ten will be presented as ‘two men do the work of ten’, as if the making and maintenance of the machine did not absorb additional labour. So productivity in that example will be said, wrongly, to have been multiplied by five. (…) As Marx explained, the amount of labour that is saved is not the whole saving on the last operating process, but the difference between that amount and the additional labour required for the new equipment (Capital, Vol.I. Kerr Edition, pp. 426-7). This is the true measure of increased productivity.

The mistaken theories have been responsible for a continuous enormous exaggeration of the increase of workers’ output, and corresponding false assumptions about the growth of unemployment. (…)

The consequence has been that every advance in technology — the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, computers and automation — and now the silicon chip — has given rise to prophecies that enormous numbers of workers would soon be out of work permanently.

“Bots batter Boffs” (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

As an avid sci-fi fan I just couldn’t resist the front cover of a recent Daily Star (24 February) with its picture of a killer robot and the headline BOTS BATTER BOFFS, especially as a textbox promised the ‘Full Story’, written by no less than the chief reporter.

So, dear reader, I bought a copy and, rushing to page 9, I learned that software development jobs are now about 30 percent fewer than five years ago, and that tech workers are afraid of redundancy because AI is now able to do some entry-level programming.

The whole tone of the piece seems to be about smarty pants nerds getting their come-uppance. And those smarty pants must be pretty dumb after all, because they didn’t realise that their own efforts would put their livelihoods at risk. Maybe some of the Star’s readers even found it funny or comforting to know that other workers have shitty lives too.

Unsurprisingly, the chief reporter’s ‘Full story’ was nothing of the sort. He forgot to draw his readers’ attention to the fact that he was describing one of the glaring contradictions of the capitalist system. By which we mean that the advance in industrial technology that AI represents, in one way is very positive, as it increases productivity in a whole range of applications.

But for us, the workers, in economic terms, it becomes a negative. It will tend to result in (1) deskilling, which in turn will put pressure on wages, and (2) a reduction in the demand for labour power (while conversely, by throwing people out of work, increasing its supply), which will also tend to force wages down.

And this is a feature that affects all industries and all workers all around the world. It has done so ever since the capitalist form of production came into existence. Because lower production costs, including wages, are for the capitalist, the key aim when introducing new technologies and techniques as they give (at least) a temporary advantage in the cut-throat competition between capitalists.

By the way, these advances are almost always the combined results of the efforts of workers, not the capitalists. Just one more good reason, if you needed it, for getting rid of the entire rotten system.

Budgie.

Pathfinders: Panic attacks (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last ripples seem to have faded away from what in January was widely viewed as an extinction-level asteroid impact on the US AI industry. Frantic stock-market gamblers fled in response to what one prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist described as AI’s Sputnik moment.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek certainly threw a big rock in the investor pond by approximating US-backed generative-AI capability at a tenth of the usual cost and, what’s more, using old chips and comparatively little training data to do it. Chipmaker Nvidia, formerly rated as the world’s most valuable company, suddenly didn’t look quite so mission-critical, neither did its bleeding-edge and extortionately priced chips, and neither did the AI companies relying on them.

But a few days later the story had sunk like the proverbial stone, as it became clear that the world hadn’t ended. Was the DeepSeek system even as good as early news reports made it out to be? Never mind that it refused to answer questions about Tiananmen Square or make assessments of Xi Jinping’s qualities as leader, a rather churlish objection given that no Chinese AI was ever going to do that. According to counter-misinformation website NewsGuard, DeepSeek was the second-worst performer in a test of 11 chatbots, with a false-claim rate of 30 percent and an unsatisfactory-answer rate of 53 percent (Reuters, 29 January).

Even so, the panic was almost palpable. Tech pundits had pretty much written off Chinese AI after OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Even as late as 2024, most thought the Chinese were, if not decades, then probably years behind in AI, partly thanks to a rigidly enforced US government export ban on new chips to China. But in December, when DeepSeek released their V3 Gen-AI version, it became obvious that Chinese firms were perhaps only weeks behind. Then on 20 January, not accidentally the same day Trump took office, DeepSeek dropped their free R1 chatbot, a new generation ‘reasoning’ module that self-checks for accuracy. In just seven days this became the most downloaded free mobile app in the US, surpassing ChatGPT and sending Nvidia stocks into freefall.

But the AI dinosaurs survived the experience. Elon Musk, taking time out from his frenzied rampage through the US government civil service to ‘delete entire agencies’, still had enough confidence in, or fear of, OpenAI in February to offer to buy it out for nearly $100bn (that’s billion). You don’t front that kind of dosh for an obsolete company. Unfazed, OpenAI boss Sam Altman tartly responded by offering to buy Twitter off Musk for a tenth of the price.

One other group of people who must have been panicking at the DeepSeek R1 release were the Taiwanese, at least those of them not keen on being invaded by the totalitarian regime currently brow-beating them from across the Straits. As the near-monopoly of global chip production in Taipei is the only thing keeping US interests locked in, it is also the only thing keeping China from invading.

Before DeepSeek, serious questions were already being asked about AI, not least the eye-watering expense, and the environmental cost in terms of increasing carbon emissions. A 2024-5 FT TechTonic podcast series explored the possibility that the AI fizz was about to fizzle out because the sector was overhyped and overpriced and there were no obvious game-changing real-world applications for it beyond mundane and low-paid customer service roles, with the result that Silicon Valley venture capitalists were becoming increasingly skittish at the prospect of yet another AI ‘winter’.

Deepseek has impacted a landscape that was already convulsing for other reasons. Trump’s new (dis)order is ripping up the ‘Green new scam’, in turn provoking a tidal wave of carbon-pledge-breaking by governments and fossil-fuel companies who always knew their climate targets were unachievable and are now keen to downgrade or dump them entirely, and get back to the real business of making money. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance has collapsed after exits by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and four other major US banks. One of the world’s largest climate investor initiatives, Net Zero Asset Managers, has abandoned their net-zero investment plans. And the big AI firms are also ditching their net-zero targets as they find themselves locked in a death-race to develop the app to kill all killer apps, Artificial General Intelligence (tinyurl.com/3z5fbuf7).

Whether AGI is even possible is highly debatable, given there’s no consensus on what intelligence actually is. But AI firms can’t worry about that. What they worry about is being left behind, especially by the Chinese, and hang the carbon consequences. In the words of Hany Farid, digital forensics expert at UC, Berkeley: ‘Somebody asked me the other day if I’m scared of AI, and I said no, but I am scared of capitalism… I think capitalism is going to do what capitalism does, which is burn the place to the ground in order to win’ (FT TechTonic: The Trouble with Deepfakes).

With the speed of development even scaring AI ‘godfathers’ like Geoffrey Hinton, many believe a Douglas Adams’ style thinking machine cannot be far away, with unknowable consequences for humanity’s future. A chorus of demands has arisen for AI regulation, but last month’s summit on AI in Paris ended with US vice-president Vance rejecting ‘excessive regulation’, and even the UK refusing to sign the regulatory declaration.

In the unlikely event AGI ever does become a real thing, one wonders what conclusion it would draw from a global system that threatens to destroy its host planet for the gratification of a tiny minority of super-rich individuals. What course of action might it suggest to reverse this unsustainable, obscene and suicidal trajectory? If it did conclude that humans would be better off abolishing the capitalist system of production and stewarding the Earth’s resources in cooperative common ownership, we can be pretty sure its proprietors would have a panic attack and pull the plug. Unluckily for them, they can’t pull the plug on the working class.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: The next big thing (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mainstream news stories are an endless diet of misery which activists seem to force-feed themselves, under the highly contestable assumption that bad news motivates people to action, rather than into depressed fatalism. If you feel the need for an injection of positivity this January, you ought to try the many free science news websites.

The reason science stories are often positive is because science is about solving problems instead of despairing over them. Now it is true that sometimes those problems are ones that science itself accidentally created. Nobody’s perfect. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so we ended up with lead in petrol, CFCs in fridges and ‘forever chemicals’ in Teflon. Worse, because science is forced to obey the capitalist prime directive of profit, too often these unintended consequences become ‘unattended externalities’.

Even so, reading science news is a good way to maintain a ‘can-do’ perspective on the world. And socialists have another reason to be interested, because science can offer glimpses of emerging tools and techniques that global socialism might, just might, be able to use in the future, even if they are deemed uneconomical in the present.

Take the current anxiety about micro and nanoplastic particles now being found in almost every animal cell on Earth, together with those forever chemical compounds which don’t break down naturally and have been found in human blood, organs and breast milk. The long-term consequences of all this are unknown, and mainstream news treats it as an unmitigated disaster. But new research has shown how to remove up to 94 percent of nanoplastics from water by just using carbonised epoxy, while a team in China have developed a sponge filter that they say can remove 99.9 percent of microplastics. Forever chemicals can be broken down using expensive high-energy processes, but new light-powered catalysts are thought do the same job at a fraction of the energy cost.

As is well known, renewable energies are intermittent and require back-up storage, generally in the form of lithium-based batteries. But lithium mining or via brine extraction is energy intensive and environmentally destructive. A new study suggests that half of all lithium requirements could actually come out of wastewater instead while an alternative approach offers a low-energy and sustainable means to extract it directly from seawater.

Socialist society will most likely pivot away from the unsustainable capitalist-era obsession with private car ownership, towards comprehensive public transport, but there will still be a role for electric vehicles. At present the battery is the most expensive and least durable part of an EV, but a new type of single-crystal electrode lithium-ion battery could outlast the vehicle it’s in, and then see a ‘second-life’ usage as grid energy storage. Lithium is used because it’s light, so it has an optimal power to weight ratio, but the heavier sodium has similar properties and is 500 times more abundant, so sodium-ion batteries are under development for grid storage, which doesn’t need to move. Problems to date have been low power and slow charging times, but a high-power sodium-ion battery is in development that can charge in seconds.

Battery life and weight currently make long-distance aviation infeasible, but what about old tech in the form of airships? Sustainability concerns are changing attitudes to next-gen air transport, and multiple airship models are in development, including the carbon-fibre and all-electric Pathfinder 1 (no relation), the hydrogen H2 Clipper and the helium Flying Whales, with the UK Airlander 10 expected to be in commercial service by 2026. Helium is hard to get, but the manufacturers point out that airships don’t consume it, they store it, and only need occasional top-ups. If capitalism can do airships, why not socialism?

For short hops, some European companies are developing electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) craft for use as low-cost, noiseless and emission-free air taxis. But they’ve run into funding problems recently as investors are sceptical of getting a good return on investment (ROI). That’s one problem the technology wouldn’t face if a democratic socialist society was, for some reason, smitten with the idea of roof-hopping public transport systems.

In other tech news, AI is an order of magnitude greater consumer of electricity than conventional computing, and an important question is where all the electricity is going to come from. One team believes they can cut AI power consumption by 95 percent simply by rejigging some algorithms. Global warming is creating a global water crisis, and desalination plants are power hungry, but a new method promises zero-electric solar desalination. There’s a plan to stop millions of tons of e-waste by printing circuits onto tree leaves. And self-heating concrete is a thing, if you mix it with paraffin, and could be used for de-icing roads.

In health news, a new biomaterial can regrow cartilage in old joints, meaning no more knee replacements. A twice-yearly injection reduces HIV risk by 96%, more effective than PrEP pills which have to be taken daily. Asthma research has seen the first breakthrough in 50 years with a monoclonal antibody treatment that isn’t a steroid so it doesn’t lead to osteoporosis. And a raft of new research confirms what we already suspected, that nature is good for us. Studies show that time spent in woods, fields or gardens – especially if you get mud on your skin – seems to realign your body’s microbiome with ‘good’ bacteria that are lost through urbanisation and are now believed to inhibit a colossal range of gut-implicated ‘urban’ illnesses (Good Nature, Kathy Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2024).

This only scratches the surface, and of course not all developments will pan out. But the key takeaway from science news is the awareness that the next huge breakthrough, the discovery or invention that changes everything, is just as likely to happen tomorrow as in a hundred years. If that’s not a reason for optimism, we don’t know what is.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Nobel efforts (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nobel Prize awards have been no stranger to controversy over the years, both for awards they should have given but didn’t, like most famous writers and virtually all women, and awards they shouldn’t have given but did. These included the 1949 Medicine prize for the prefrontal lobotomy, the 2019 Literature prize to a Bosnian genocide denialist and Slobodan Milošević fanboy, and most famously, the 1973 Peace prize to Kissinger, the carpet-bomber of Cambodia, which caused two Nobel Committee members to resign in disgust and prompted the equally famous retort from musician Tom Lehrer that satire had become obsolete.

Media pundits were quick to spot certain oddities about last month’s Nobel awards. Feathers had been ruffled earlier when the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that ‘We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world’ and suggested that perhaps nobody deserved the Peace prize this year (tinyurl.com/4c84a9zp). In the event they gave it to Hiroshima survivors, a clear stand-by choice.

The Physics prize went not to physicists but to two computer scientists for their early work in AI and neural networks. Reasonable enough, one might say, given that computer science didn’t exist in 1896 when Alfred Nobel established the prize topics. A mathematics Nobel might have been nearer the ballpark, but there isn’t one of those either, a fact emphatically not due to the popular gossip that it was revenge for Mrs Nobel having an affair with a mathematician (Alf was never married). In fact, Nobel also ignored dozens of other valid research disciplines, which reflects the deep capitalist truth that the rich always get to dictate to the rest of us what is important, just like today’s vainglorious and increasingly deluded ‘effective altruist’ billionaires.

As for the winning computer scientists, you may remember one of them, Geoffrey Hinton, as a well-known poacher-turned-gamekeeper who resigned from Google in 2023 to renounce AI and warn the world that it was about to kill us all. Given that the prize is awarded to those who, in Alf’s own words, ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’, one might have expect a noble prizewinner to refuse to accept the medal and the money, however Geoff appears untroubled by such qualms.

Still, there must be a lot of physicists out there doing vital Nobel-worthy work, surely? Not according to the popular YouTube doyenne of theoretical physics and clunky jokes, Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims (no joke) that ‘physics is dying’ because it’s become an unfalsifiable pseudoscience whose only purpose is to chunter out meaningless papers in support of funding bids to prop up the physics community’s wage bill (tinyurl.com/5n93hdmb). It might be true that they have a vested interest in stringing us along with string theory, loop quantum gravity, multiverses and endless made-up particles, but perhaps Sabine would say that, as she thinks the idea of an elegant Theory of Everything is a romantic mirage, and besides, popular YouTubers also have a certain vested interest in being controversial, don’t they?

AI had a more direct role in clinching the Chemistry prize, through Google DeepMind and its groundbreaking work on protein folding. Proteins do everything that matters in your body, but there are 100,000 of them and nobody understands how they work. Their exact function depends on what shape they fold into, and working this out for just one protein used to be a 3-year PhD in itself. The DeepMind AlphaFold2 programme can now do it in seconds, triggering a revolution in potential new treatments.

The Medicine prize meanwhile was for work in newly discovered microRNA, which is how genes, when sending messenger-RNA ‘photocopies’ to cells with template instructions for building proteins, effectively Tippex out certain instructions and not others.

What’s called the Economics Nobel is really an ersatz 1968 add-on by a Swedish bank and denounced as a ‘false Nobel prize’ by modern relative Peter Nobel, on the grounds that he considers economics a pseudoscience, a conclusion which will not raise socialist eyebrows. This year’s ‘Economics’ prize was for interesting empirical research into the question why some countries are so much richer than others. ‘Culture’ and geography have been mooted, but these researchers, observing that many poor countries were formerly European colonies, opted to look at ‘settler mortality’ statistics. They concluded that where mortality was low, and Europeans were able to settle and farm (Australia, North America), they also imported their existing social, economic and political institutions, giving the colony a massive head-start. Where mortality was high due to malaria and yellow fever (West Africa, Haiti, etc), they instead kept their distance and imposed vicious, extractive regimes including the slave trade. In sum, liberal democratic institutions are enablers of prosperity, not the other way round. Hooray for liberal capitalism then, which has obviously not resulted in a billionaire elite, global poverty, war and climate change.

Honourable mention ought this year to go to an Ig Nobel prize winner who, instead of discovering something silly about mammals breathing through their anuses, actually found out something useful about centenarians living in so-called ‘blue zones’ of super-longevity, which is that the blue zones don’t exist, neither do most of the centenarians, and the ‘data’ is almost entirely the result of poor, faked or lost records, and pension fraud by relatives (tinyurl.com/4hzna4ka). Many rich capitalists are obsessed with cheating death and living forever. This finding pisses on their chips and allows hard-pressed workers to enjoy some schadenfreude for once.

Would there be Nobel prizes in socialism? Probably not ones named after someone who got rich by blowing things up, including his own brother. And certainly not cash prizes, of course (there wouldn’t be any money). The concept of ‘prize’ is so integral to the fabric of competitive capitalism (prize and price are the same word in several languages) that some will find it hard to imagine a culture that doesn’t need such incentives in order to do worthwhile research. But socialists, who understand the value of intrinsic motivation, won’t have a problem.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: UBI no solution (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ll need universal basic income — AI “godfather” . The godfather in question was Professor Geoffrey Hinton, so dubbed because he was a pioneer of neural networks on which AI is modelled. He told BBC Newsnight that a scheme ‘giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”. ( …) He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”’.

It’s a common view: AI will lead to mass unemployment with a consequent reduction in paying demand; the remedy to this is ‘the government paying all individuals a set salary regardless of their means’. This would both sustain paying demand and reduce inequality.

But it is not a new idea. The same analysis and the same proposal were made sixty years ago, but in relation to ‘cybernation’, a word that has dropped out of common use but which means ‘the control of an industrial operation or task through processing of information with a computer’. In March 1964 a group of left-wing intellectuals formed an ‘Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution’ and drew up a report for presentation to President Johnson. One of these revolutions was the ‘cybernation revolution’.

They argued that ‘the rate of productivity increase has risen with the onset of cybernation’ and that ‘an industrial economic system postulated on scarcity has been unable to distribute the abundant goods and services produced by a cybernated system or potential in it’. To remedy this, they proposed:

‘. . . it is essential to recognize that the traditional link between jobs and incomes is being broken. The economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work. Wealth produced by machines rather than by men is still wealth. We urge, therefore, that society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right’ (tinyurl.com/3362249j).

They were in effect saying that capitalism had solved the problem of producing enough for everyone but had not solved that of distributing it. Theirs was a proposal as to how capitalism could do this. Johnson of course took no notice of their report. Cybernation continued but there was no consequential massive increase in technological unemployment. So where did they go wrong?

One reason was assuming that mechanisation (of which automation, cybernation and now AI are instances) takes place as soon as it just becomes technologically possible. Under capitalism it is only applied if it is cheaper than having the work done manually or by some already established machine. This slows down technological progress.

Nor does technological progress come in all at once but spreads only slowly. Overall productivity does increase but only at a fairly modest rate (averaging around 2 percent a year). This gives the economy time to adjust. There is some technological unemployment but new employment opportunities (though not necessarily for those displaced) open up as capital accumulation proceeds.

Paying a basic income to everyone while maintaining private ownership of machines and production for profit won’t work, because it would undermine both the profit motive and the wages system, two essential features of the capitalist system. The money to do this could only come from taxes and taxes ultimately fall on profits, reducing the incentive that drives capitalism. It would undermine the wages system by reducing the economic pressure on the excluded majority to work for an employer to get money to buy what they need to live.

Capitalism is inherently incapable of solving the problem of distributing enough for all.