Peter Frase offers a variation on Robert Costanza’s AI outcomes matrix in his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. It bears a lot of similarity to Costanza’s, but his approach to explicating the possibilities he foresees offers different perspectives.
Costanza’s matrix (above) uses the axes markets vs. communities and unlimited resources vs. limited resources, yielding four possible futures. Frase’s abundance vs. scarcity axis echoes the latter; his hierarchy vs. equality axis, however, subtly varies markets vs. communities, going for a more politically nuanced scale. His more political take cuts through the economics of capitalism to get beyond its mechanics to its causes.
Moreover, Costanza’s paper is largely imagery, ultimately a tract for his own flower power ideals; Frase is more deep-dive theoretical, getting to the ideological drivers that exert pull towards the polls of the axes.
Here’s the Frase matrix:
Again, very similar in principle to Costanza’s. His outcomes, however, give us new things to think about.
Rentism
In this suggested outcome, where abundance has been achieved but class hierarchy exists, Frase reluctantly admits that capitalism is not always about profit; historically, it is easily demonstrated that it is often about something else: “Having power over others is, for many powerful people, its own reward.”
“Thus,” he continues, “they will endeavor to maintain a system where others serve them, even if such a system is, from a purely productive standpoint, totally superfluous.”
Put another way, if we achieve a society where all the work is automated and no one needs to work, there will be those who stand in the way of that benefit extending to all; the new system will be rigged in such a way that at least some people are left in thrall to the powerful.
That wouldn’t be all so difficult to achieve, Frase fears. After all, “who owns the robots owns the world,” as Harvard economist Richard Freeman said. If the AI and the robots are under the control of an elite class, Frase writes, then many if not most will still be under their thumbs, even though there is no good reason for them to be.
The glue of this unequal society, Frase asserts, will be intellectual property rights. In a society where the machines can make any other machines one might ask them to make, control over production systems relies on the ability to arrest and imprison someone for doing so. The hold of the superrich over everyone else will be rooted, not in robots themselves, but the right to use them, based on IP law.
In that scenario, say goodbye to a Star Trek future. The entire point of Trek’s “replicator” technology, which can create any material object one might need (including food and water) on demand, is that it is free to all; society thrives because the technology meets everyone’s needs and is under no one’s control. If a superrich elite seizes control of the AI-robotic means of production in our own future, we will be at their mercy.
Thus is rentism born, based on the ground-rent concept of the agricultural era, by which landowners made money from their property simply by taking half of whatever a sharecropper renting it might earn. Frase foresees, in a fully-automated future controlled by an elite, a return to that system: the superrich will lease the AIs and robots they own to those beneath them in exchange for whatever tributes please them. Since the superrich won’t really need those tributes, the economy that will persist will have no real purpose, other than to perpetuate their power.
Communism
Frase strikes a pose often difficult to achieve in a book for lay readers: he manages to convey Marxist theory accurately and at an appropriate level of detail while rising above its highly-subjective partisan legacies. He also homes in, helpfully, on several realities that expand the argument beyond its usual turgid, algorithmic form.
Work in a capitalist society, he points out, isn’t just one thing – it's not just another term for labor. In a society like ours, he writes, work is at least three things: it’s what we do to earn money to maintain our lives; it’s activity that supports society; and it’s investment of effort in things that fulfill us or that we care about, apart from money. This is a very useful distinction, as it establishes up front that when he uses the term communism, he isn’t casting work as what slaves of the state do; he has opened the term up to greater purpose.
In Frase’s formulation, communism simply means the future economy is not tied to a social pecking order. No one class is in charge, and no one class does what work there is to do. And work is not the engine of self-esteem.
The self-esteem question is a big one for Frase. Citing Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano (see above), he acknowledges that “there are those who argue that even if a fully automated future is possible, it would not be desirable. They think that the inherent meaningfulness of work is the best argument against automation. They point to studies showing that unemployment has serious negative psychological and health implications for the unemployed, as evidence of the positive value of work beyond the wage it confers.”
His answer to this pushes beyond Marx, who could not have imagined the world Vonnegut foretells, let alone the reality we are now approaching. Unemployment, he argues, is only psychologically unhealthy and physically stressful in a society that values its constituents based on their contribution; when unemployment is voluntary, those consequences disappear. He cites research by economists at Free University in Berlin which shows that this is, in fact, the case; the ill effects suffered by the unemployed arise from social stigma. They further demonstrate that those who have aged out of work and into unemployment by aging are perfectly capable of retaining dignity and meaning in their lives, as they don’t suffer that stigma.
Finally, Frase comes alongside Costanza in citing Star Trek as the perfect exemplar of a society free of class pressures, where abundant energy leads to security for all – and people are free to work or not work as they please, choosing work they enjoy and find fulfilling when they do make that choice.
Exterminism
In Frase’s version of Costanza’s “Mad Max” scenario, ironies abound: he foresees that, when push comes to shove and AI makes all things possible but resources are still disturbingly finite, the superrich will hunker down and pull up the drawbridge, then to enjoy an ironically communist lifestyle – little or no work, machines meeting their every need.
Post-scarcity, in other words, only exists for them; by hoarding vastly more than their share of what resources there are, and by controlling the AI/robotics-based machinery of society, they could create a false reality that will ultimately undermine society altogether.
“If we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker,” he writes.
The antagonism between capitalism and labor, he continues, which has kept the poor in the game – albeit in decidedly non-optimal fashion – will have vanished. Not only will the elite have their own private utopia, they will now have no use whatsoever for those who used to populate their factories, scrub their floors and collect their garbage. “The bosses may hate us, the thinking went, but they need us, and that gives us power and leverage.” No longer.
Is such an outcome sustainable?
No, Frase writes, nodding to historian E.P. Thompson, who called this result exterminism - “characteristics of a society, expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity, and its ideology – which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of the multitudes.”
Why must it come to this? Because, Frase points out, such a disenfranchised majority will surely begin building guillotines – and even if they don’t, the expense and logistics of policing and repressing them won’t be worth the trouble.
It goes without saying that this outcome is not only unsustainable, but humanity’s ultimate suicide.
Socialism
Capitalism’s history of negotiation with scarcity, Frase points out, falls far short of the claims made for it by its advocates. When supply and demand are out of whack, and some segment of the population is faced with suffering, capitalism tends not to be accommodating.
He also cites the dangers of climate change as evidence that capitalists tend to go to such extremes to preserve their holdings that they will stand by and let the world burn, rather than loosen their grip.
This being the case, Frase argues that if capitalism and the wealthy cannot be trusted to self-police, and if their efforts are building to an existential threat to us all, then government intervention to curtail their activity is inevitable; and that moment, whenever it finally arrives, presents opportunity to retune society, economically, to reduce class division and inequality.
By leaning into the state and proposing ecosocialism as an alternative to capitalism self-annihilation, Frase is of course tipping his hat to Costanza’s ecotopia. Where he moves farther out is in his assertion is that in a society where alternatives to fossil fuels energy are government-enforced, insuring that some level of scarcity must persist, the answer to equitable distribution is constraint of markets and consensus planning in place of opportunistic exploitation. Regulation, then, transcends environmental policy, and forces markets back into their original role: participants in society, rather than owners/drivers of it.
Universal Basic Income, it should go without saying, factors into Frase’s projected outcome here; but he is quick to point out that his labeling of this outcome as “socialism” is, in fact, unconventional and a mere matter of expedience. In fact, he sees both capitalism and markets as persistent in this future, but with the added innovation of managed consumption, shutting down the current capitalist pursuit of unlimited growth.
The superrich eventually fade out in this scenario; there is no means to sustain that class. There would still be some inequality, but it would be neither oppressive nor obscene; it would be a society where not everyone might get everything they want, but everyone would get everything they need.
Frase’s outcomes are broader and deeper than Costanza’s. He allows for a wider range of implementations of each scenario, expanding the conversation to accommodate a great many possible twists and nuances. But the broad strokes are the same; the AI/robot future will change the global economy for sure; capitalism as we know it is slipping away; major societal changes are inevitable; and a lot of what happens next is entirely up to us, depending on how quickly, how wisely, and how effectively we act.
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