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The roots of the present discontent
Two years ago, Mark Carney, the then governor of the Bank of England warned that pervasive automation and AI are responsible for the current wage stagnation that is like that of the 19th century, which gave birth to communism.
“If you substitute platforms for textile mills, machine learning for steam engines, Twitter for the telegraph, you have exactly the same dynamics as existed 150 years ago when Karl Marx was scribbling The Communist Manifesto”, Carney said.
In reality, the disruptions and the dangers are much more serious now than 170 years ago. The new computer and robot technologies are replacing both brain and brawn and many jobs will disappear forever. Furthermore, the concentration of manufacturing in China has created a great scarcity of jobs elsewhere, which has become one driver of mass migration that is leading to conflict between groups that have very different views on life and reality.
In my view, the danger is not from a communism like that of 20th Century but one that has anarchist tendencies and a desire to pull the entire system down. The reason for this difference is that a hundred years ago the revolutionary believed in science and the future, whereas the revolutionary of our times has no faith in science and has lost hopes for the future.
