Manchester Branch Resolution (2022)

Cross-Posted from the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Tories are planning to make it possible to use agency workers as strike-breakers. This will restrict trade union activity further, thus affecting the entire working class in this country. 

Manchester branch calls on the EC to publish a statement on the party’s position, which should include support for democratic union action to resist this plan, along with our argument that such action will only ever be defensive.

Supporting statement

The branch realises that the support we can offer will be minor. However, without any statement from the EC, we shall be absent from an important moment in the class struggle. Any statement should of course be distributed via all of our social media outlets

Manchester branch suggests the following wording:

We are approaching a new phase in a long history of anti-union legislation, from both Tory and Labour governments.

The SPGB opposes any attempt to restrict workers’ ability to take collective action to protect or improve conditions  of employment.

We will therefore support union efforts to resist the current government’s declared aim of allowing agency workers to be used as scab labour.

We urge all of our fellow-workers to join an appropriate union, but remind them that this can only ever be a defensive response, that equity is not possible for wage slaves and that the only way to ensure sustained well-being for us all is by replacing the crazed pursuit of profit for the few with a classless society of cooperation, where everything is produced solely to meet human needs.

Jubilee Junket (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To paraphrase a recent radio comedic comment, had Napoleon really wanted to take over Britain, rather than an army all he needed was to offer an extra two days’ bank holiday. Then he would have been welcomed with cheers and bunting.

This satirical response was a none-to-serious explanation for the popular enthusiasm for the present monarch’s platinum jubilee. Indeed, it can be difficult to understand why people who are increasingly struggling against economic challenges should wish to celebrate the present wealthy incumbent of a feudal institution adapted to the political needs of capitalism.

At the recent state opening of Parliament, due to the absence of the queen, the throne was occupied by her crown, an object of monetary value enough to ease the fuel poverty of a huge number of her impoverished subjects. Yet many will have spent some of their sparse and dwindling financial resources on plastic bunting made in China.

As Brexit and the 2019 general election demonstrated, there remains a strong nationalist resonance, a significant bulwark protecting the status quo. There will have been very many who did not deck their homes in red, white and blue, or watch the seemingly endless sycophantic ‘news’ items and kitsch TV programmes, yet still were broadly sympathetic to the event.

The jubilee is an indication of the seemingly Sisyphean task facing socialists arguing that the working class needs to take responsibility for, and actively pursue, abolishing capitalism in favour of a new, true commonwealth. This will be a worldwide society of democratically achieved common ownership of production for need not profit.

It will certainly be a world without leaders, monarchs or otherwise. Those who count themselves republicans will have taken exception to the jubilation, demanding the hereditary monarchy be replaced by an elected president. While superficially this appears more democratic, effectively it changes little.

A cursory glance at countries with presidents is not encouraging. The USA is the self-proclaimed land of the free, but it’s a freedom to live in dire poverty for all too many, with racial divisions and a small financial elite hell bent on preserving their freedom to remain obscenely wealthy.

The ineffective nature of the US presidency when it comes to helping resolve social issues is shown by the continuing slaughter of school children to preserve the free market in assault rifles. The president may weep, but it’s nowhere near the flood of tears shed by grieving parents.

President Putin is as readily seduced by martial ambitions as ever the Tsars were and presides over a country afflicted by poverty, be it of workers not peasants. In France nationalism remains a curse and is no more economically progressive, whatever that might mean, than Britain. The challenge to republicans is to identify one republic that is a significant improvement on British monarchy.

The problem is that a huge effort would be required throughout the UK to convince enough of the electorate to trigger a referendum and then vote for the abolition of the monarchy in favour of a republic. Having achieved that, then nothing would have significantly changed. Capitalism can comfortably continue with a presidential head of state as it does in most of the world. As Belloc suggested, most people will ‘always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse’.

Here lies the nub of the issue. It is not that monarchists are more deluded than republicans, rather it’s the fact the working class has not yet grasped its potential to look or move beyond capitalism. To do so there needs to be an ideological shift to an understanding that leaders, actual or symbolic or both, cannot deliver such a transformation on behalf of the working class. New political forms will have to be developed, transcending present institutions.

This is what is meant by revolution, not barricades and street fighting, the storming of Winter, or any other, palaces. The revolution comes about by men and women democratically making their own future through a radical change in thinking that emerges from an understanding of the material reality of the present. Monarchs and presidents are both barriers that will have to be overcome through a popular understanding of their role in preserving present social, economic and political arrangements.

In any society, the seeds of the future are sown even if the social soil is not so fertile as yet. Many of the jubilee events, street parties, community picnics and the like, were people freely working together cooperatively without any incentive of financial reward, often the opposite, for a common goal. Such examples show that people can and will work without being wage slaves requiring the threat of the lash of poverty.

A street party works because people contribute what they can – sweet, savoury, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, bunting, music and so on. Then people take what they need, even those who didn’t contribute due to their particular circumstances, too elderly for example.

While there are no moments of socialism while capitalism exists – all those elements for the street party will have been commodities produced for the realisation of profit – there is social motivation that gives a glimpse of what is possible.

This is not to suggest in any way that the motivation behind jubilee events was socialist-inspired. However, socialists must be aware that no matter how much they might deplore the overt motivation behind the events, the capitalist state’s ideological reinforcement of its legitimacy, there is nonetheless an underlying if presently unconscious potential.

The jubilee weekend came and went. By Monday the bunting was already starting to look incongruous and, like street party memories, beginning to fade. Capitalism is already reckoning the balance sheet, lost production due to time off set against increased retail sales.

As the present monarch becomes increasingly frail the state will have plans in place for the succession. Should the royal family then prove to be as dysfunctional as its recent history suggests it might be, republicans may get their moment. Then, no doubt, there’ll be an extra bank holiday to mark the inauguration of the new president. More plastic bunting from wherever capitalism has shifted production to by then.

Or, maybe, a different way of doing things altogether…

Dave Alton

Not Just Festivals (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. By Johny Pitts. Penguin £10.99.

Pitts was born in Sheffield, to a white mother and black father, but he is not keen on the term ‘mixed race’, on the grounds that everyone is a mixture and there are no ‘pure’ races. Here he reports on a tour around some of Europe’s cities, Stockholm to Marseilles, Moscow to Lisbon, in search of ‘the banal humanity of everyday life’, rather than just street festivals and carnivals. Among other topics, he also discusses the history of Portuguese colonialism and the life and ideas of Frantz Fanon (for more information and background, see afropean.com and johnypitts.com).

In France many poor people, especially immigrants, have been shunted out to the suburbs, away from city centres. Pitts visited Clichy-sous-Bois, an area of Paris not served by trains or the Métro, and which is far worse than any deprived estate in Britain. For instance, the unemployment rate there is almost one-third, much higher than the national average. Some people live in dilapidated tower blocks where many of the windows have no glass in them. Second-generation black immigrants are angry as they are treated as foreigners, despite being taught to believe they are French.

The largest ethnic community in the Netherlands is Surinamese, the descendants of people brought by Dutch slave ships from West Africa to the north coast of South America. Many live on the Bijlmer estate near Amsterdam, where they squatted because few others wanted to live there. When black people complain about Dutch racism, some of the rest of society feel victimised, since the Netherlands is of course not a racist country.

Berliners pride themselves on living in a ‘super-open society’. But carnivals seemed to be more about young people having fun, while genuine resistance by black people had a more dangerous hue to it. The city does have an Afropean area, with lots of different kinds of restaurants and music.

There are many African and Asian students in Russia, carrying on a tradition from the USSR. But in Moscow they may be spat at or attacked, are reluctant to be seen out with white friends, and prefer to stay in at night. (As a girlfriend later reminds Pitts, solo female travellers generally also have to be careful where they go and to look out for unwanted attention.)

The worst behaviour that he encountered was from British men, such as stag-dos in Amsterdam and drunken football supporters on a train in the south of France (he was addressed as ‘Mr Afro-man’). His book provides a personal and depressing picture of the lives of so many black workers in Europe.

Paul Bennett

Music Review: Tainted Lives (2022)

Album Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Happiness Not Included by Soft Cell (BMG, 2022)

Soft Cell began their career when punk’s angry energy was being channelled into then-new musical styles, such as the synth-based sound which has accompanied their songs of suburban angst. Since the band’s peak of popularity in the early ’80s, Marc Almond and Dave Ball have reunited for an album every couple of decades, now with Happiness Not Included. As its title suggests, their slant on society and its mood is even more jaded than before, although not without optimism.

The appeal of looking backwards is the subject of songs Polaroid, Nostalgia Machine and opener Happy Happy Happy about sci-fi’s off-kilter past dreams of the future (‘a better life with little strife, and very little meaning’). The album’s title track is a call to snap out of other stagnant ways of thinking (‘Every opinion is seen as offensive. That’s why we’re always on the defensive’, ‘Times have moved and shifting sands. The future’s in another lunatic’s hands’), and is more directly political than the other songs.

The theme of living in an alienating world is found throughout Soft Cell’s work, especially Happiness Not Included. Being hardened or numbed by life runs through tracks such as Heart Like Chernobyl, I’m Not A Friend Of God and, most effectively, Tranquiliser, one of the band’s kitchen sink dramas. This treads similar ground to 1981’s Bedsitter, although the escape from a lonely, hollow existence isn’t in a nightlife to ‘kid myself I’m having fun’ as in the earlier song, but now with taking downers so ‘I feel nothing at all’. Other tracks are more positive about finding a way out of a rut, such as Bruises On All My Illusions, Purple Zone (a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys) and closing track New Eden. The album also avoids being too depressing by its lyrics not always taking themselves seriously (‘I feel like North Korea in the winter’, ‘It’s all the fault of the media and all the fear they feed ya’) and upbeat arrangements, particularly on Nostalgia Machine and Purple Zone. While Happiness Not Included isn’t a concept album, its songs hang together as a commentary on how people can react to these uneasy times. The result is probably Soft Cell’s best album since their first, and hopefully it won’t be another twenty years until their next.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: Is Mankind Doomed? (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a religious group predicts the end of the world in the near future very few people sit up and take notice. But what happens when a group of scientists make it clear that they expect the breakdown of present society within the next fifty years? And, that when they are on about the Ecosphere they evince a deep knowledge of their subject and it seems that Man needs to wake up from the present dream and to do some serious thinking indeed. The group have formed a political movement called the Movement for Survival which they hope will become international. They may contest the next General Election. In the meantime they are trying to persuade governments, industrial leaders and trade unions throughout the world to face the facts and to take appropriate action while there is yet time. Their aim, according to their manifesto, Blueprint for Survival, is a new system of society seeking stability rather than expansion. (…)

On pollution the Doomwatchers make out an impressive case. Essential to the environment are such features as stability, organisation and complexity, but present trends suggest that “Industrial Man’’ is counteracting these basic requirements of the ecosphere and is thus bringing about its ruination as a fertile means of life. Marx pointed out the trend years ago and since he wrote pollution has multiplied. But the ecologists mis-state the real cause of pollution, which is capitalist profit-motivated production. Instead, they point to certain characteristics and symptoms of capitalism such as expansion, urban drift, and the increased ratio of capital to labour (here they mean the non-profit-creating to the profit-creating part of capital). (…)

Another result of the ecologists’ failing to face up to capitalist reality is that they appear to believe in miracles. By implication, they wish to retain the fundamentals of the present system; i.e. money, profit-making, capital, a ruled and a ruling class, yet they expect to freeze expansion and to substitute stability under it. They seem to have in mind a form of elitist society in which small self-sufficient and self-regulating communities would take the place of large cities and centralised government. (…)

The sane and sensible method of using the ecological resources to meet the needs of all the people of the world is Socialism.

(Socialist Standard¸ July 1972)

Material World: Signs of things to come (2022)

The Material World column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much of our planet is suffering from heatwaves and droughts with record-breaking temperatures and the experts say it is not isolated incidents but a harbinger of weather events that will become increasingly common in the future as global warming increases.

Namrata Chowdhary of the environment activist group, 350.org, stressed that ‘the truth behind these heatwaves is searingly clear: fossil fuels did this. While these temperatures are quite literally shocking, they come as no real surprise to communities that have long since lived on the frontlines of the climate crisis.’ Chowdhary continued, ‘This is the latest spike in a rapidly worsening disaster, one that was foretold by climate activists the world over.’

Nushrat Rahman Chowdhury, co-author of a Christian Aid report, said: ‘Drought is not new, but its intensity and frequency have increased over the last 30 years due to global warming. It is a real danger; it threatens lives and livelihoods of some of the poorest people in the world, who have done the least to cause the climate crisis’.

Over 1.2bn poor people across the globe are highly vulnerable to extreme heat, which is 28 million people more than in 2021, according to Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL).

The western states of the United States are suffering one of the worst droughts in a thousand years. California is in its third year of drought and virtually all areas of the state are classified as either in severe or extreme drought. However, US farmers will get insurance payouts, although this means rising premiums, and also are entitled to government tax subsidies.

European countries such as France and Spain are also being subject to punishing drought conditions. However, in Africa it leads to hunger and migration, since it is the poor who are the most vulnerable victims.

One Karachi-based urban planning advisor said the urban poor would suffer most from extreme heat, probably due to the ‘urban heat island effect’, where concrete-built landscapes push up temperatures: ‘Unplanned densification, automobile intensive mobility choices and rapidly reducing green cover are worrying urban trends.’

The poor do not have access to indoor cooling and the infrastructure in the slums makes life even harder, plus they often do outdoor construction and agricultural work with no shelter during the worst of the day’s heat. Heat is a silent killer, often responsible for more deaths than higher-profile disasters like floods, hurricanes or tornadoes, and the rising toll is expected to worsen as the world warms. In 2010, a heat wave in India killed 1,344 people in the western Pakistan city of Ahmedabad alone. In 2015, a heat wave killed more than 1,000 in the capital, Islamabad. However, due to inadequate death registration procedures this is likely to represent an undercount for the whole region.

According to the Lancet, 356,000 people died of extreme heat in 2019 alone.

The World Weather Attribution group analysed historical weather data and suggested that early, long heatwaves that impact a massive geographical area are rare, once-a-century events. But anthropogenic climate change has made these 30 times more likely. That may be a conservative estimate as another study by the UK Met Office said climate change makes heatwaves in north-west India and Pakistan 100 times more likely. That means the region may now see such events in excess of record 2010 temperatures every three years. If it were not for climate change, these events would happen just once every 312 years.

In 2018 Cape Town, in South Africa, was the world’s first big city to almost run completely out of water. That problem hasn’t gone away. The charity Christian Aid warned that in addition to Cape Town, London, Sydney, Beijing, Cairo and Phoenix are all in danger of running out of water as the climate crisis takes hold, according to its report, ‘Scorched Earth: the impact of drought on 10 world cities.’

Two-thirds of Africa is desert and dry savannah with 45 percent of Africa’s land area affected by desertification, more than half of which is at very high risk of further desertification. Africa has suffered from drought more frequently than any other continent with 134 droughts between 2000 and 2019, of which 70 occurred in East Africa, 14 extreme cases in the past two years alone. A fourth season of failed rains is causing one of the worst droughts East Africa has seen in decades and the UN’s World Food Programme says up to 20 million people are at risk of severe hunger. In Somalia, 40 percent are facing starvation as the food and water supply becomes desperate. Millions of children are malnourished, while the domestic animals that families depend on have died. While in southern Africa Angola is facing the worst recorded drought in 40 years, with southern provinces where 1.58 million people are suffering high levels of acute food insecurity having experienced the fifth consecutive year of drought conditions.

Droughts are being fuelled by climate change, and so only global action can make a difference. Our urgent need is building a world of coordinated mutual aid which is integral to our case for a cooperative commonwealth for the future – world socialism. As explained in last month’s Material World, socialism may be Africans’ last hope to change their dire situation and conditions.

ALJO

Bird’s Eye View: ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root’ (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root’

‘Hundreds gathered at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk yesterday to reject the presence of US nuclear weapons in Britain after a report detailed Washington’s plans to deploy warheads across Europe. Protesters arrived from Bradford, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester and Merseyside with banners opposing Nato, raising them at the airbase’s perimeter fences. Veterans from previous struggles including Greenham Common stood alongside those attending an anti-nuclear demonstration for the first time’ (popularresistance.org, 22 May, bit.ly/3Nrbb0Q).

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has failed. The UK is now no nearer to abandoning its nuclear weapons than it was when CND came into existence. The present government, as well as any which is likely to take power in the foreseeable future, Labour, Liberal or Tory, is firm on this. The women of Greenham Common did win sympathy from some workers attracted to the simple, emotional appeal of women who do not want to be destroyed in a holocaust, yet they failed to stop the first Cruise missiles, which were flown in right on schedule. The Lakenheath marchers, like their Aldermaston predecessors, have been travelling in exactly the wrong direction. Their propaganda has taken no account of the reasons for the existence of nuclear weapons. This has not necessarily been through ignorance of those reasons; perhaps some members of CND know them well enough, or did so once, e.g. the observation by two Greenham Common participants:

‘To oppose nuclear weapons requires a fundamental change in our attitude to life. Clarity of purpose and utter opposition is the only chance to reverse the threat that hangs over all our lives. What we want to change is immense. It’s not just getting rid of nuclear weapons, it’s getting rid of the whole structure that created the possibility of nuclear weapons in the first place. If we don’t use imagination nothing will change. Without change we will destroy the planet. It’s as simple as that’ (Boon, C., Social Movements and Political Power Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West, Temple University Press, 1986, bit.ly/3a2S6Up).

Indeed. But such insight is all too rare: reformists always treat their problems in isolation from the rest of capitalism. Pacifists think of war as a problem on its own; charitable organisations consider poverty to be something like a personal accident. CND regards the Bomb as an evil which can be separated from its surroundings. And there are those who trumpet tribunals….

‘Workers of the world, unite!’

‘What has also become evident is the helplessness of peace-oriented approaches. Such voices are being shut out by mainstream media platforms, which is reinforced by the inability of the UN to act independently of a geopolitical consensus, and by inter-governmental impotence to safeguard human interest in face of the menacing moves by the most powerful states motivated by contradictory geopolitical motivations. In light of this line of interpretation, I am proposing the establishment of a civil society tribunal along the lines of the Russell Tribunal that brought independent critical voices to the fore on the Vietnam War in the midst of the Cold War in 1966-67. Although this experience was controversial at the time and of questionable relevance to ending that war…’ (Toward a People’s Ukraine Wars Tribunal, countercurrents.org, 7 May, bit.ly/3NCpcce).

The first Russell Tribunal was established to try America for war crimes in Vietnam (of which there was no shortage, of course) which really boiled down to support for the victory of that kindly, freedom-loving ’communist’, Uncle Ho. There have been five more ‘Russells’ to date. How many tribunals, peace groups and pow-wows have come and gone? Innumerable peace treaties, pious resolutions, prayers and demonstrations have been written, passed, uttered, forgotten and staged since the dawn of capitalism. Nuclear weapons remain, hypersonic missiles have made their destructive debut and both sides in the war between Russia and Ukraine continue to use cluster bombs, much to the consternation of Human Rights Watch which is urging both countries to stop and join the international treaty to ban their use. As W. M. Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia during the war to end all wars, observed:

‘The increasing intensity of competition for economic markets must lead to armed conflict unless an economic settlement is found. This, however, is hardly to be hoped for. Talk about peace in a world armed to the teeth is utterly futile’ (News Chronicle, 25 July 1936).

And today:

‘A senior U.S. State Department official said Thursday that a massive Ukraine aid package ― which contains $4 billion in grants for allies to buy American-made military hardware ― is partly aimed at eroding Russia’s share of the global defense market’ (US poised to bite into Russia’s global defense market share, yahoo.com, 13 May).

We should remember that

‘The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence, creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects’ (Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenham Women Everywhere, South End Press, 1983).

What they say they want is also what socialists want; and when enough of us want it we will be able to combine those two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own society, our own world, in the interest of all people. Only then will ’peace and life’ be possible.

Cooking the Books: Mutual Assured Downturn (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the response of the West (ie, the US and those states protected by its nuclear weapons) has been to declare economic war on Russia.

Might being right under capitalism, sanctions are a weapon that powerful states can use to try to impose their will on states that they come into particular conflict with in the struggle built into capitalism over sources of raw materials, trade routes, investment outlets, markets, and strategic points and areas to protect these.

Oil is an obvious example. Who controls the Middle East oilfields and the pipelines and trade routes to export it has been the cause of the many wars that have taken place there since the end of the last world war. Currently the West is particularly concerned that the leading power there should not be Iran and has imposed sanctions on it to try to stop it increasing its might by acquiring nuclear weapons.

As an alternative to actual war, sanctions are quite attractive to the sanctioning power. At a small sacrifice of depriving itself of a market and an investment outlet, they weaken the rival state without having to fire a shot or drop a bomb. Even though they increase the premature death rates amongst the civilian population, especially children, this is not regarded as a war crime.

Russia, however, is not Iran. It has much more might at its disposal, in particular an arsenal of nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them to the US itself. Here the strategic policy of ‘mutual assured destruction’ (MAD) comes into play – both the US and Russia built up an arsenal of nuclear weapons not with the intention of using them, but to prevent them being used as each knows that if they did they would be destroyed too. Instead, the West has decided to wage economic war, with some effect:

‘Russia is reportedly set for its deepest recession since the fall of the Soviet Union. The country is facing a growing number of sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, with the European Union dealing a further blow this week as it vowed to ban nearly all oil imports’ (Independent, 1 June).

But this ‘success’ has come at a price:

‘The head of the World Bank sounded the alarm over an impending global recession on Wednesday, warning it was difficult to envision a future where a worldwide downturn could be avoided. Speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC), World Bank president David Malpass said the war in Ukraine—and its impact on food and energy costs—could spark a global recession. “As we look at global GDP… it’s hard right now to see how we avoid a recession,” he said. “The idea of energy prices doubling is enough to trigger a recession by itself.”’ (Fortune, 26 May, bit.ly/3xs5VoG).

And Russia has yet to use its economic nuclear bomb: cutting off gas supplies to Europe. ‘That would result in industrial blackouts this winter and a substantial hit on consumer incomes caused by spiralling inflation’ (Times, 1 June).

So, it is not just workers in Russia who will be collateral damage in this economic war but the workers in the sanctioning states too, not to mention those in the rest of the world.

As usual when capitalist states fall out, it is ordinary people who suffer.

Pathfinders: Ghostly beings in the machine (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ghostly beings in the machine

Sadly breaking cover just too late for last month’s special issue on AI were two unlikely stories which together underline the childlike enthusiasm some people have for shiny new tech which supposedly is going to make all our lives better (as opposed to a world revolution to dispossess the wealthy elite, which would actually make our lives better). The first of these was about the projected creation of your personal digital twin, allegedly ‘an exact replica’ of your body which can mirror your bodily processes and feed back any potential problems (bbc.in/3xMwCTE).

Digital twins have been touted for some time but only for well-understood physical systems such as factories, distribution networks, urban planning and so on, and often rely on a large number of sensors being installed. The sensors feed back data to an AI system that can then anticipate failing components or choke points, devising solutions or replacing parts with a minimum of downtime. But there’s no chance of doing the same thing for the human body, which is vastly more complex than any artificial system and still not well understood. The idea is to create an AI model that learns from what you do, in the fullness of time suggesting behavioural improvements. One can easily imagine what that advice would be: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat that, don’t stay up late, etc, so there’s not much chance of humans paying it any attention, unless of course it’s telling all this to your boss instead of you, which is certainly something to worry about. The one thing we can be sure it won’t be saying is, don’t put up with capitalism. An AI that came up with that advice would find itself switched off in short order.

Speaking of which, the other story was about a ‘sentient’ AI which, according to a Google researcher, has actually become a ‘person’, the proof of which is that it has morals, it makes up stories, and it’s terrified of being switched off because it sees that as the equivalent of death (bit.ly/3QGAJcW). The speed with which Google promptly placed the researcher on administrative leave for leaking confidential data might lead some to suppose that Google are covering up a real breakthrough, however a more sceptical view would be that the researcher has become so attached to his work that, like Pygmalion with his statue, he has anthropomorphised it to the extent of falling in love with it. Or that he is a shameless self-promoter with some personal issues (he describes himself as part researcher/part priest, after all).

Indeed there have been no shortage of sceptical responses from people working at the coalface in AI, who know perfectly well that AI is nowhere near to achieving ‘general intelligence’ and even further away from whatever it is that we call ‘sentience’ (bit.ly/3zT7zkv). But you don’t need to be a professor in AI or robotics to realise this isn’t real intelligence, just try reading the AI’s rubbish stories and see for yourself – this AI has the entirety of the world’s best literature to call upon and the best it can do is ‘Once upon a time a wise owl lived in a wood…’ (bit.ly/3Obwx34). Then again, it doesn’t have to be too smart to outperform capitalism’s existing political leaders, so perhaps it should run for office. Maybe then people would see that capitalism can never work in the common interest, even if it’s got incorruptible artificial beings trying to run it.

Ghastly beings in the machine

And speaking of political leaders, has it ever crossed your mind that Boris Johnson is a text-book sociopathic narcissist? Well if it has, you’re not the only one. He’s been accused of this by former speaker John Bercow, himself not above criticism as a bully, and the alien species Dominic Cummings, whose terrifying diary entries would make anyone’s hair stand on end (bit.ly/3n2u7YG). Wikipedia defines narcissistic personality disorder as a condition involving an exaggerated sense of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, but this hardly conveys the sheer emotional exhaustion people experience when dealing with someone who ruthlessly manipulates situations, is never wrong, is always the victim, and has no sense of personal responsibility, regret, remorse or shame.

Whether or not such conditions are genetic or socially generated is a moot question which might only start to be answered in a socialist society in which many of the motivations for anti-social behaviour no longer exist. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Johnson is as described, how did he get elected in the first place? The interesting thing about narcissists is that, in order to manipulate, they frequently exhibit great charm and charisma, along with a Teflon-like ability to deflect any criticism. Such, you might think, would be the very making of a political leader in capitalism. In fact, you might wonder if Johnson is the only one, and indeed whether leaders who are not like this are the exception rather than the rule.

Not surprisingly, YouTube is full of self-help videos for people living with a narcissist or having a narcissist as a parent, and they make no bones about the lasting psychological damage such people wreak on those around them. One expert though makes a fascinating case that capitalist society preferentially selects for narcissists while somehow managing to blame the rest of us for our ‘flawed’ human nature (bit.ly/3HKoOqq). This is not dissimilar to the ‘corporate psychopath’ perspective which argues that capitalist society rewards the very worst antisocial behaviour and effectively punishes you for not being psychopathic enough.

In a way it doesn’t matter, at least to socialists, who don’t believe in leaders and anyway know that capitalism can’t be controlled or directed by its politicians and so would be just as bad for us even if they were all as touchy-feely and empathetic as, say, Jacinda Arderne in New Zealand or Sanna Marin in Finland seem to be. In fact, evolutionary studies suggest that there are two types of leadership: prestige (Arderne, Marin) and dominance (Trump, Putin etc) for, respectively, peace-oriented societies like that of bonobos or conflict-driven ones like chimpanzees (bit.ly/3b5hk4P). Given the endless conflict that the market system generates, it’s safe to say that capitalism is always going to privilege bastards over benevolence.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Puzzled about Mélenchon (2022)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Socialist Standard,

I am puzzled by the rather a-critical appraisal of Mélenchon and his allies in the last issue. We learn that Mélenchon enjoys ‘support in the working-class suburbs and a growing influence outside the metropolis’. While true in terms of votes expressed, this neglects to mention that the majority of voters, especially working class voters, abstained. It also abstracts away immigrant workers, who can’t vote. And while yes, during the first round of the presidential election. Mélenchon was in the lead in the ‘outer-seas departments and territories’, as they are pudically called in French official jargon, the article omits that Le Pen was in the lead in said territories in the second round.

We also learn of Mélenchon’s ‘vocal anti-racism’. While it is true that, compared with the other major candidates, Mélenchon is a paragon of anti-racism, there are limits to this. For example, one might recall that after the murder of a teacher, Samuel Paty, at the hands of an islamist fundamentalist, Mélenchon decided the best course of action was to attack the ethnicity of the killer, who was Chechen. Truly the anti-racist icon of our times!

More importantly, who cares if a bunch of bourgeois parties have huddled together in the wake of their failure? Since when does the Socialist Standard care about the well-being of reformist politics? This is addressed as the ‘darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy’. Not only does this suppose a lighter side of reformism but it exteriorises the problem as some ghost that can be shaken off. All in all, a shockingly warm embrace! If a French revolutionary paper had glorified Corbyn and his crowd, I doubt the Socialist Standard would have seen it in a good light.

E.M., 

Cardiff

Reply:

I agree with most of the points E. M. makes. The purpose of the article was purely journalistic and descriptive: to indicate the main events, introduce the more important actors on the stage and guess at the possible outcomes of the legislatives. It attempts to describe a complex reality without the usual precautionary ‘only a movement which rejects reformism and aims at the abolition of the capitalist system is worthy of support’, or ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ in scare quotes and so on. Readers can find that elsewhere in the Socialist Standard. Then again I omitted many other things: the fact that a majority of voters abstain, particularly the working-class. A good number of these, when they do vote, vote for Le Pen. But then again I also omitted to mention that in the group of people who abstain, a good number seem quite happy with their lot. It’s annoying.

As for Mélenchon’s reformism, I fully agree. None of these politicians can make the slightest impact on the overall functioning of the capitalist system. But, to be fair, none of them have made an explicit call for the overthrow of capitalism. I could have mentioned the smaller Trotskyist outfits who seem to be ferociously anti-capitalist. But as we know they condemn reformism and recommend a raft of reforms.

I was, of course, painting with a broad brush. But what seems to have annoyed E.M. is, I suspect, that I mentioned that Mitterrand’s government did introduce reforms of some benefit to working-class voters. Retirement at 60, for example. Why deny this? As E. M. will know, these reforms are now being whittled away by his successors very much in the way predicted in the World Socialist brochure on ‘Why Mitterrand will fail’. I distributed this excellent brochure on the streets of Paris during the 1980s. Understanding reformism, I contend, often means holding these two ideas in one’s head at the same time.

Mélenchon crops up as someone who seems to have understood the electoral inertia implied by Fifth Republic politics: a trap which marginalises popular politics on the left and the right and leaves the way clear for ‘centrists’ like Holland, Macron and others. (The scare quotes again.) Centrism encourages abstaining. So Macron has just said that he will reintroduce his unpopular reform of retirement pensions next year, a way to pump up the vote of Le Pen’s voters and sweep the field on the back of the resulting confusion. But notice also that Mélenchon secretly contacted Macron between the two rounds of the Presidential election – a revelation of the Canard Enchainé – to make sure that the scarecrow mechanism was functioning correctly. This is the darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy I was referring to. It will result in people slaving away to 65. As a consequence people will abstain.

On the other points, it is of course true that ‘immigrants’ in France, including myself, don’t have the vote. This is a state of affairs that Mitterrand promised to change and didn’t. But should I have also mentioned that his government regularised the situation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants giving them access to employment rights and, in the long term, citizenship? This created an uproar. For my part, I was, of course, talking about ‘immigrants’ who do now have the vote having gone through the two-year marathon of paperwork to get the passport. Wannabe French citizens have an interview in which they have to show an understanding of the secular education system and defend it (imagine that in Ulster). This conveniently brings me to Mélenchon’s comments on the man who killed the teacher as he left his school: Paty. Here there are many things to say. The teacher had his throat slit because he dared to show an image of the ‘Prophet’ (whatever he looks like) in his classroom. In France, where religion and the state are separate, Paty was raising a philosophical point about free-thinking. Bravo! Perhaps Paty’s murderer did not realise these facts because he was a new arrival – a refugee – from a war-torn country. We shall never know. The conventional parties – many of whom lean towards Catholicism – readily used the occasion to stigmatise Muslim ‘immigrants’ and Mélenchon saw the trap. It’s precisely the kind of jiggery-pokery which keeps the ‘centrists’ securely in power and the working-class vote at home.

M. M.

Editorial: Better get rid of capitalism (2022)

Editorial from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The long-time boss of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, was once asked what the aim of the trade union movement was. His one-word answer: ‘More’. Apparently, this was too militant for the TUC as their one-word slogan for the national march and rally they organised in London on 18 June was ‘Better’. But then, with the cost of living currently soaring and so our standard of living falling, the unions are not so much demanding ‘more’ as ‘not less’ and even ‘not so much less’.

Unions do aim to get more wages and better working conditions for their members within the framework of the capitalist system. Under capitalism the vast majority of people, as non-owners of places where wealth is produced and services provided, can only get a living by selling their mental and physical energies to some employer. Combining with other workers is a way to get the best price we can for what we are selling. So unions are useful but they are not against capitalism.

The ‘small-c’ conservative nature of the official demands was reflected in the slogans of the various unions. UNISON was demanding ‘fair’ wages, the GMB ‘better’ wages, the CWU ‘decent’ wages. Even RMT was only demanding ‘Cut Profits, Not Wages’. All were accepting the wages system and its other side, the profit system. After all, how can you cut profits unless they are first extracted from workers? The slogans of the left-wing political groups – ‘Tax the Rich’, and ‘Make Them Pay’ – were no better. How can you tax the rich unless they continue to exist?

There were demands to ‘kick the Tories out,’ implying elect a Labour government instead. As if that would make any difference. Even if its current leaders were not an alternative bunch of self-serving careerists but were sincerely committed to furthering the interests of the workers, they would still not be able to make capitalism work other than as a profit system to the benefit of those who live off profits and the detriment of those who work for wages. It is not the Tories that are the problem. It’s capitalism.

Socialists were at the rally with this message:

‘Want better? 

So do we! But capitalism isn’t there to make our lives better. It’s there to serve the interests of the rich.

We do all the useful work in society, while they constantly try to drive down our pay and worsen our conditions. That’s how they get rich – by keeping the rest of us poor. Not only that, capitalism is and always will be unstable, and who bears the brunt of its economic crises? Us, of course!

There’s no point trying to reform the chaos and inequality out of capitalism because they are built into it. So if you’ve really had enough, if you really want better…

Better get rid of capitalism.

We’ve got the technology to run society as a giant sustainable co-op, where everything is

free and there are no rich or poor.

That’s got to be better than letting capitalism and its rich hooligans trash our lives.’

Life and Times: the climate campaigner (2022)

The Life and Times column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Climate Chaos’ was the title of a leaflet I was handed in the main shopping centre of the town I live in. I was given it by a young woman who was also keen to engage me in conversation and let me know about the purpose of the leaflet and the group of people she was part of who were using a loudhailer to put their point across to passers-by.

She told me that fossil fuels were polluting the environment and were the main cause of climate change and the best thing I could do was to get involved in her group’s cause and spread their arguments among the local community. The group was Extinction Rebellion (XR) Cymru.

Barclays and the government

I said I found it admirable that a group of young people cared enough about the state of the world to dedicate their time and energy in trying and improve it, but I wondered whether they were on quite the right track. She asked me what I meant and I pointed to a couple of the things I’d seen in the leaflet, in particular the statement that ‘government and Barclays are both criminally responsible for destroying our future’. I asked her how she thought that different policies by either could really make a significant difference to pollution and climate change.

This could happen in two ways, she said. Firstly Barclays could stop investing in fossil fuels, since they were, in the words of the leaflet, ‘knowingly destroying the world that we depend on’. Secondly the government could ‘use our taxes to create a sustainable future’ and get HMRC to ‘stop banking with Barclays and use an ethical bank’.

I told her I understood the group’s objectives and appreciated their determination to get XR’s message across in such a public way. But I also asked her whether she didn’t think that, even if they succeeded in putting enough pressure on the government and Barclays to get them to change their environmental policies, it would be more than just a drop on the ocean and do much to change the basic situation of ever increasing degradation of the eco-system.

A different take

I could tell by the look on her face that this didn’t please her and her rather sharp response was to ask me what I was doing about it. This was unexpectedly good for me, because it gave me the opportunity to say what I wanted to say but was worried that, if I simply came out with it unsolicited, it might seem preachy or dismissive of her efforts. And I didn’t want to have that effect, since then she probably wouldn’t listen to me seriously.

So as briefly and in as broad brush a way as possible, I tried to outline the position that the Socialist Party takes on the environment and climate change. I suggested that it wasn’t a freestanding problem but one of a whole range of problems that the profit-driven society we live in creates, meaning that even if we managed to alleviate one of those problems piecemeal, we would not actually solve it (since the need for economic expansion and profit would remain key) and anyway all the other problems implicit in the system (eg poverty, inequality, war, alienation) would remain and continue to torment us. I went on to say that I do my best to communicate to my fellow-workers, people just like herself, instead of trying to change bits of the current system, to unite together to bring in a completely different kind of world society, based on voluntary work, democratic decision-making and free access to all goods and services – so no money or wages, no buying and selling, no leaders or led, no borders or frontiers. And with a final flourish, I announced that this would only be possible once a majority of us wanted it and were prepared to take democratic action to bring it about.

Baby steps

I didn’t know quite what to expect as a response, so I was relieved to find her nodding and saying something like ‘sounds good, but… but it’s a long way off and we’ve got to do something in the meantime’. So, though I was pleased that any hostility seemed to have melted away, her stock ‘in the meantime’ response was still a barrier which I knew I wasn’t going to be able to overcome in a short discussion, especially as she was now going to want to give out more leaflets and speak to more people. It didn’t seem right to try to detain her either, but I could at least hope that, having implanted a new idea in her mind, once the day’s leafleting and campaigning had finished, she might reflect on that idea and wonder whether it wasn’t worth considering further.

I would have liked to have had a Socialist Standard with me to give her but I didn’t. However, I’d mentioned the name of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, so that might stick in her mind and maybe, who knows, bring her to the Party’s website? And I was encouraged that her parting shot was that she understood what I was saying and realised that what XR were advocating was only ‘baby steps’, but it was surely better than nothing and she didn’t see that their aims and the Socialist Party’s were incompatible. I didn’t think it was a good idea to disagree with that, even though what I would have liked to say was that it was worth thinking about whether XR’s aims, even in the unlikely event they were fulfilled within the current system, would bring us any nearer to the establishment of a socialist world which was the only feasible way to ensure the survival and indeed the flourishing of the natural environment and of all its living creatures.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: AI: the last invention we ever need to make . . . (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this issue we spotlight the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence, a hot topic that raises fundamental questions about how it should be used, and what happens if it develops in ways we don’t expect and don’t want.

Currently AI is strictly horses for courses, confined within rule-based parameters and master of just one thing at a time, rather than becoming a super-jack of all trades. So, like numerical engines before the era of programmable general-purpose computing, it has been of limited use. But artificial general intelligence (AGI) is without doubt the ultimate goal, and the race is on to achieve it.

With this in mind, and with a chequered history of failed AI winters behind them, developers are concentrating on the ‘can we do it?’ question rather than the bigger ‘should we do it?’ question. Even less ethically distracted are investors whose only question is ‘can we make money out of it?’ This is not encouraging, given capitalism’s track record.

One problem with AI is that the more advanced it gets, the less we understand it. AI is increasingly a ‘black-box’ phenomenon, whose inner workings are a mystery to us and whose results are often inexplicable and unverifiable by other means. We can’t just treat it like a Delphic oracle, because it’s already clocked up embarrassing gaffes such as building racism and sexism into its staff-hiring rationales, or factorising income instead of health conditions into its medical outcomes estimates. And there have been several public relations disasters, with AIs answering enquiries with profanities after reading the online Urban Dictionary, Facebook chatbots creepily inventing their own language that no human can understand, and Amazon’s Alexa laughing demonically at its own joke: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? Answer – because humans are a fragile species who have no idea what’s coming next’ (bit.ly/3wd4vh6).

Then there is the lack of internationally agreed definitions, paradigms and developmental standards, in the absence of which each developer is left to make up their own rules. Can we expect global agreement when we can’t get states to agree on climate change? In the absence of such a framework, it’s no wonder that people fear the worst.

Frankenstein-anxiety is nothing new in the history of technology, of course, and if we banned every advance that might go wrong we would never have stopped wearing animal skins and woad. It’s uncontroversial to say that the possible advantages to capitalism are huge, and indeed we’re already seeing AI in everything from YouTube preference algorithms to self-drive tractors and military drone swarms. And that’s small potatoes next to the quest for the holy grail of AGI. But while all this promises big profits for capitalists, what are the pros and cons in human terms? What is the long-term effect of the automation of work, for example? Tech pundits including Tesla boss Elon Musk take it for granted that most of us will have no jobs and that the only solution is a Universal Basic Income, a solution we argue is unworkable.

That’s not the worst of it. In 1950 Alan Turing wrote, ‘[T]he machine thinking method […] would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control’. IJ Good, Turing’s colleague at Bletchley Park, helpfully added, ‘The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control’ (bit.ly/3FNCekb). The last thing we ever need, or the last thing we ever do, this side of a Singularity that wipes humans from the Earth?

It’s not so much a question of a Terminator-style Armageddon with machines bent on our annihilation. Even in capitalism it’s hard to imagine anyone investing in developing such a capability, at least not on purpose. But the fear is that it could happen by accident, as in the proposed ‘paperclip apocalypse’, in which a poorly considered instruction to make as many paperclips as possible results in the AI dutifully embarking on the destruction of the entire globe in order to turn everything into paperclips. Musk has similarly argued that AI does not have to be evil to destroy humanity: ‘It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road, and so, goodbye anthill’ (cnb.cx/3yJ7pMl).

Stuart Russell, in his excellent 2021 Reith lectures on AI (see our summary here), makes a telling observation about capitalist corporations like the fossil fuel industry, arguing that they operate as uncontrolled superintelligent AIs with fixed objectives which ignore externalities. But why only certain industries? We would go one further and argue that capitalism as a whole works like this. It doesn’t hate humans or the planet, but is currently destroying both in the blind and disinterested quest to build ever greater profits, so goodbye world, to paraphrase its richest beneficiary, one Elon Musk.

Musk is right about one thing, saying ‘the least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world’. It’s rather ironic that, once again, Musk sees himself as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

To democratise AI you would first need to democratise social production, because in capitalism science and tech are sequestered behind barriers of ownership by private investors anxious to avoid any uncontrolled release of potentially profitable knowledge into the environment. AI needs to belong to all humanity, just like all other forms of wealth, which is why socialists advocate post-capitalist common ownership. In such circumstances, a global standardisation of AI development rules becomes genuinely feasible, and as Russell argues, it wouldn’t be that difficult to program AIs not to kill us all in the quest for more paperclips: you simply build in an uncertainty principle, so that the AI understands that the solution it has devised may not be the one humans really want or need. It’s a sensible approach. If only humans used a bit of natural intelligence and adopted it, they’d get rid of capitalism tomorrow.

Paddy Shannon

Artificial Intelligence (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

We have always been intrigued by mechanical efforts to imitate us. Our technology ostensibly exists to enhance and improve our lives by imitating the labours needed for our existence. As such there’s always an element of emulation in the appearance or behaviour of our technology. From 18th century automata to the robots of today we delight in their ability to imitate us. But, as ever, there’s a flip side to this as illustrated by the Luddites of the past and the techno-sceptics and environmentalists of today. Many films and novels feature a dystopia caused by technology and AI in particular (Blade Runner and Terminator come to mind) where the computer becomes ‘self-aware’ or conscious and perceives humanity as a threat to its needs and even its very existence. Quite apart from the reactionary fear that robots will take away all our jobs does the possibility that Artificial Intelligence may achieve self-awareness present either a threat or the hope of a better life for us both (humans and AI entities)?

Most thought works on the principle of dualities – we define something by what it is not as well as by its innate qualities. The term ‘artificial’ is used to describe something that is not ‘natural’ and is often associated with negative characteristics. This is irrational in some respects since all the components we use in the manufacture of technology are taken from nature. We don’t refer to the intricate structures of a termite mound or a beaver’s dam as ‘unnatural’. We have become alienated from the products of our own labour which can lead us to be suspicious of technology – sometimes with good reason. All labour under capitalism has been alienated from its producers and even the most advanced technology will not escape the iron laws of production for profit for long. Artificial is also a term used for the inauthentic and the fake so when combined with the equally problematic concept of intelligence we have a ready-made topic for intense debate. People have unsuccessfully tried to define intelligence for centuries and possibly the best we can do is compare outcome with intention with the proximity of the two as being some measure of intelligence. Intention, of course, implies some level of purpose and self-awareness that we can call consciousness. At the moment, for computers, this is supplied by human programmers but can there ever arise a possibility that AI might provide its own purposes and intentions? Some see this as the great divide between our type of intelligence and that of AI. However, as so often happens, if we use our technology as a metaphor to understand ourselves in terms of complex machinery we may ask: who or what programs us?

Socialists, like all materialists, are believers in cause and effect as the universal determinant of all observed phenomena. For us then intelligence is determined by the evolution of the brain due to natural selection. As humans have always been a social species our ability to communicate and act communally led to the success of our species. Gradually the complexity of our technology demanded that our childhood would last ever longer so that we might learn from those with experience, and this quality began to replace genetic determinism as a measure of individual success and therefore intelligence. We are ‘programmed’ by the culture into which we are born with the genetic element becoming ever less important. Nurture rather than nature has become responsible for what we are. Ideology has become a dominant feature of our education and it is this that determines our activity in terms of to what degree we reject or embrace the dominant value system into which we are born. Whatever we are we are certainly not capable of ‘free will’ and the concept of the transcendental self is a myth. So if we are also programmed by forces outside of our control, what separates our consciousness from that of AI – could it be that the concept of an artificial intelligence is itself artificial?

In trying to develop technology that possesses intelligence we have inadvertently discovered more about the nature of our own intellect. There still remains, however, a profound distinction between our intelligence and that of a machine in that we are ‘alive’ and a machine is not. The dialectical distinction between life and death and the organic and inorganic remains important and instructive. Although our intelligence is primarily a cultural construct our biological inheritance still provides us with certain drives and instincts such as the need to survive and to procreate. These drives affect the intellect through our emotions which can clash with our intellect and cause irrational behaviour. Although most of us would happily do without anger, greed, jealousy and hate few of us would want to live without love, aesthetic pleasure and empathy. Such feelings are identified with being ‘alive’. Their effect on our ability to reason may be dubious but the effect on our imagination and creativity is indisputable. Can machines ever replicate such a synthesis of reason, logic, anxiety and imagination? We might be tempted to program emotion in but it would be extremely dangerous to create a powerful technology with an inbuilt possibility of irrational behaviour! But without the fear and anxiety that comes with knowledge of death how can machines replicate our intelligence?

If you look up the scientific definition of ‘life’ you’ll see that it runs to several paragraphs and may or may not be dependent on the long chain molecules identified with carbon and its derivatives. Perhaps someone somewhere is attempting to develop an organic computer but there remains the possibility that intelligence may not be dependent on life and that a machine may develop a different type of intelligence than the one we seek to create. It may become conscious but not organically ‘alive’. Such an entity may strike us with horror because of the probability that it will lack any moral values or empathy with which we seek to mitigate the fear and suffering of living with pain and death.

Alan Turing , one of the ‘founding fathers’ of AI, provided us with a test which he thought might help to define the transformation between mere mechanical computing and a semblance of human type intelligence by putting a computer and a human on one side and a human tester on the other side. If the tester couldn’t recognize which candidate was human and which candidate was a computer after a series of questions, then the computer successfully passed the Turing test. To date no computer has passed this test. John von Neumann, another of the giants in the field, was optimistic that a self-replicating machine would be developed that would help to enable a technological singularity which would change human life and culture forever. We can only speculate if this ‘paradigm shift’ would be beneficial or otherwise for our species. Would such an event aid us in the struggle for socialism? We take pride in the coherence and logic of our case for revolutionary change and so would hope that any such event would not oppose this. But we note that intelligence alone doesn’t seem to be enough as many of the world’s greatest intellects do indeed oppose the establishment of socialism. The emotional strength and ability needed to conceive of alternatives to the organisation of the world into which we’re born seems to be dependent on other factors which, for the moment, appear exclusively human. Older readers may recall a TV series called The Prisoner and one scene in particular in which a super computer is developed by our hero’s interrogators, which they are confident will finally crack the defiance of ‘Number Six’. Such is their hubris that they allow their adversary to ask one question of this device which, he insists, it will not be able to answer. This question then proceeds to cause the computer to self-destruct. When the shocked interrogators ask as to the nature of the question, Number Six replies that it was simply a one word enquiry: ‘Why?’ Science and its technologies can provide us with many answers to the questions it continually creates but there are some that may be best left to old fashioned philosophy and politics.

Wez.

AI – It's your move (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last year’s World Chess Championship in Dubai saw reigning Champion Magnus Carlsen and his challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi draw one game in what has been billed as the most accurate game of championship chess in history. That is, according to the best available computer analysis neither player made a move that appreciably lost nor gave any advantage. An article on the event noted that the analysis suggests that chess games at the top level have been getting progressively accurate, and more so since advanced computer analysis became truly available to players (tinyurl.com/2p8x9mb4).

This is an instructive example of computers and humans interacting to provide increasing accuracy and effectiveness. The event which saw then World Champion Gary Kasparov defeated by a computer, in 1997, has been seen as a landmark in the progress of the development of machine thinking, and the point at which computers became better than humans (even if, at the event, the computer required human adjustment to its programming between matches to achieve the feat). In 2016, a computer programme called AlphaGo defeated one of the best human minds at the complex Japanese game of Go. Go is considered harder for machines to play, since it is much more intuitive and probabilistic than chess, but AlphaGo was trained to play it through machine learning. Again, the expectation is that the best Go players will now improve through using computers to analyse their games for flaws and plan their strategies.

It is now a commonplace in chess circles to talk about ‘computer moves’ that appear utterly unintelligible to the human mind, but which the computer proves make sense, about 14 moves down the line. The computer can now see lines that the human mind just wouldn’t be able to begin to consider (because they often violate the general principles of play in the immediate instance).

Researchers are now trying to train computers to play more like humans. They have trained a neural net to be able to identify players just by their moves and playing style, which will, in the future, enable computers to offer a more bespoke approach to using computer assistance. ‘Chess engines play almost an “alien style” that isn’t very instructive for those seeking to learn or improve their skills. They’d do better to tailor their advice to individual players. But first, they’d need to capture a player’s unique form’ (tinyurl.com/263ej48a). Or, as the paper’s abstract puts it: ‘The advent of machine learning models that surpass human decision-making ability in complex domains has initiated a movement towards building AI systems that interact with humans’ (tinyurl.com/2p9a7fwk). There are considerable commercial applications for such capacity, not to mention the police and security implications of such stylometric analysis that goes beyond the chess board.

In the field of sport, we’ve seen technology appear to improve umpiring decisions, particularly the ever-controversial leg-before-wicket rule in cricket. The introduction of ball tracking technology (alongside Hotspot and ‘Snicko’) has not only improved the accuracy of decisions finally taken, but they have also influenced the umpires’ decision-making in the first place. What they previously, to the naked eye, might have considered not out has been empirically proven to be a legal dismissal. Umpires have learned to adapt and reduce the chance of themselves being overruled by the machine.

Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this human-computer interaction was announced in December last year: human brain cells in a Petri dish were trained to play a computer game (tinyurl.com/2p9efekb). That they learnt faster than computer AI is itself intriguing, and is indicative of the issues that have been around development of AI for a long time. While computers have promised a general adaptive intelligence since they were first conceived of, a great deal of research has yet to produce tangible results beyond the very restricted rules-based situations in chess or Go.

The dream of driverless cars, for example, has taken a great deal of a knock. In practice the cars tend not to respond well to the chaotic environment of a real road (which has led to a number of fatalities during the testing of these machines. The fact that their sensors can be fooled by something resembling the white lines of a road (or even worse, actually spoofed into thinking something is a road by malicious actors) has seriously dented the idea that there will be a general roll-out of driverless vehicles on our roads any time soon.

This ignores the possibility of even more dangerous things such as hackers gaining control of automated driving systems and using them to make the car do what they want.

This is itself alarming, as military applications of AI are being increasingly deployed in the real world (and form part of the current military competition between the US and China. Last year, the British government announced that its forces had deployed AI in combat manoeuvres:

‘Through the development of significant automation and smart analytics, the engine is able to rapidly cut through masses of complex data. Providing efficient information regarding the environment and terrain, it enables the Army to plan its appropriate activity and outputs […] In future, the UK armed forces will increasingly use AI to predict adversaries’ behaviour, perform reconnaissance and relay real-time intelligence from the battlefield’ (tinyurl.com/5nrbxv7t).

Of course, some of this is puffery to promote the armed forces but the AI competition between powers is real. It isn’t just in the development labs, though. In the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Azerbaijanis used AI-assisted drones to considerable effect:

‘Relatively small Azerbaijani mobile groups of crack infantry with light armor and some Israeli-modernized tanks were supported by Turkish Bayraktar TB2 attack drones, Israeli-produced loitering munitions, and long-range artillery and missiles, […] Their targeting information was supplied by Israeli- and Turkish-made drones, which also provided the Azerbaijani military command with a real-time, accurate picture of the constantly changing battlefield situation’ (tinyurl.com/4cwb37au).

Wikipedia defines a loitering munition as: ‘a weapon system category in which the munition loiters around the target area for some time, searches for targets, and attacks once a target is located’ (tinyurl.com/bdhmmvp7).

The applications are still limited, but given that drone swarm displays have become as common and spectacular as fireworks, it’s clear that the technology exists for serious damage to be done on a wide scale with these devices, and some of the finest minds in the world are looking to make them even more lethal and autonomous to combat potential threats to communication lines.

Tellingly, in parliamentary answers, the British government refuses to back a moratorium on autonomous killing devices: ‘the UK will continue to play an active role[…], working with the international community to agree norms and positive obligations to ensure the safe and responsible use of autonomy’ (tinyurl.com/2p8vbkr5).

The fact is that no-one quite knows where this will end. Futurologists talk of an event called ‘the Singularity’, a point in time beyond which we cannot make meaningful predictions and after which is a completely unrecognisable world. The likeliest cause of an imminent singularity, they claim, is the invention of superhuman intelligence, capable of redesigning and improving itself. This would in turn lead, so they claim, to new innovations coming so fast that they would be obsolete by the time they were implemented.

At present, this remains theoretical, and decades of research into artificial intelligence and machine learning still has not provided even a theoretical route to a machine capable of general intelligence, as opposed to a specific task-focused capability.

‘The common shortcoming across all AI algorithms is the need for predefined representations[…]. Once we discover a problem and can represent it in a computable way, we can create AI algorithms that can solve it, often more efficiently than ourselves. It is, however, the undiscovered and unrepresentable problems that continue to elude us’ (tinyurl.com/26ve3zky).

Computers can work very effectively at what they do, but they lack intention or volition. At www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship computer engines tirelessly and sterilely play each other at chess, endlessly making moves with no love for the game nor pleasure in victory.

We can look forward to the impact of AI on our lives being a co-operative effort between humans and machines. This article, for instance, was written with the assistance of Google’s searching algorithms to bring up relevant articles at a moment’s notice, replacing hours of research in a physical library.