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Herbert Spencer: I am Herbert Spencer, author of Principles of Biology, Principles of Psychology, Principles of Sociology, Principles of Ethics, and approximately nine hundred additional pages on subjects your era has had the remarkable luxury of reducing to a single podcast. I coined the phrase survival of the fittest, which is the most famous thing I ever said and the most consistently misunderstood, which I consider a neat illustration of my central argument about the self-correcting nature of complex systems. The misunderstanding has survived. The misunderstanders have not notably prospered. I find this clarifying.
Karl Marx: I am Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, the Grundrisse, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and a correspondence that runs to fifty volumes and which history has vindicated with a thoroughness that I find satisfying and my critics find inconvenient. I am here to argue that artificial intelligence will produce mass unemployment because I described the mechanism by which it will do so in 1857, which is the year Mr. Spencer was busy inventing a phrase he now tells us everyone misunderstands. I note this not to be ungenerous. I note it because it is relevant.
Herbert Spencer: Let me begin, as intellectual courtesy requires, by presenting my opponent’s argument in its strongest form, a practice he was rather less willing to extend to his own opponents, as anyone who has read his treatment of Malthus will confirm. Mr. Marx argues that artificial intelligence represents the final and complete expression of a tendency that has been visible since the first factory replaced the first craftsman: the substitution of fixed capital, meaning machines, for variable capital, meaning human beings, in order to eliminate the bargaining power of labor and capture the resulting surplus for the owners of the machines. He further argues that every previous technology wave absorbed displaced workers because the new technology still required human hands and human judgment to operate it, and that artificial intelligence breaks this pattern because it is specifically designed to replace human judgment itself. He would say that a machine that thinks is categorically different from a machine that weaves or smelts or calculates, because it closes the last door through which displaced workers could previously escape. I present this argument with full accuracy because I intend to dismantle it with equal precision, and shoddy demolition work reflects poorly on the structure being demolished.
Karl Marx: How generous. I will extend the same courtesy with rather less theatrical self-congratulation. Spencer argues that the history of technological disruption is a history of panic followed by adaptation, that every technology condemned as the destroyer of employment turned out instead to be its generator, and that the appropriate response to artificial intelligence is therefore patience, confidence in the adaptive capacity of complex systems, and a resistance to what he would call the recurrent hysteria of those who mistake a transition for a terminus. He would point to the power loom, the mechanical thresher, the steam engine, and the railway as sequential demonstrations that displacement is always temporary and that the new industries created by new technologies always absorb more workers than the old ones discarded. He would dress this argument in the language of evolutionary biology and call the resulting confidence scientific. I acknowledge this argument has the considerable advantage of having been correct about every previous technology. I intend to explain why it will not be correct about this one.
Herbert Spencer: The Luddites. Let us begin with the Luddites, because they are Mr. Marx’s most embarrassing predecessors and because the pattern they illustrate has not varied in the two centuries since Ned Ludd allegedly put his hammer through a stocking frame in Leicestershire. In 1811 and 1812, skilled textile workers across the English Midlands destroyed machinery they believed would render them permanently unemployable. They were serious men with genuine grievances and a coherent economic argument: the machines did the work faster, the machines did not need wages, and therefore the men were finished. Parliament took them seriously enough to make machine-breaking a capital offense. Seventeen were hanged at York in 1813. And the textile industry went on to employ more workers than it had ever employed before, at higher wages than the hand-frame operators had earned, in a manufacturing sector so large it transformed the entire social geography of England. The Luddites were not stupid. They were not hysterical. They looked at the evidence available to them and drew the logical conclusion. They were wrong. This is the pattern I am asking Mr. Marx to take seriously before he repeats it.
Karl Marx: The Luddites were wrong about the stocking frame in the specific sense that the textile industry expanded. They were not wrong that the specific skills they possessed were destroyed and that the transition from hand-frame to power-loom represented decades of immiseration for the workers caught in it. Frederick Engels documented this in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, thirty years after the Luddite risings, and what he documented was not a story of successful adaptation. It was a story of children working fourteen-hour days in conditions that produced tuberculosis and rickets and a life expectancy in Manchester of twenty-eight years for working-class men. The adaptation happened. The suffering during the adaptation was real. Spencer presents the recovery as the whole story. I am asking him to account for the chapter he has left out.
Herbert Spencer: I account for it as follows. The suffering during the Industrial Revolution was genuine, extensively documented, and morally serious. It was also the mechanism by which a society of forty million agricultural laborers earning subsistence wages became a society of forty million industrial workers earning wages that, by 1870, had doubled in real terms from where they stood in 1800. The transition involved suffering. The destination involved prosperity that the pre-industrial poor could not have imagined. You cannot have the destination without the transition, which is what the people who want to stop every transition at the point of maximum suffering consistently fail to understand. This is not callousness. This is arithmetic.
Karl Marx: It is arithmetic performed on behalf of the people who were not doing the suffering. The enclosures are your arithmetic applied to agriculture. Between 1750 and 1850, approximately four million acres of common land in England were enclosed by Parliamentary act and transferred to private ownership. The people who had farmed those commons for generations were displaced into the factory towns. This was not a natural evolutionary process. It was a legislative project executed by a Parliament composed entirely of landowners, acting in their own interest, and dressed in the language of agricultural improvement and efficient land use. The efficiency was real. The dispossession was real. And the dispossessed did not philosophically accept their role in the evolutionary process. They starved and rioted and died young in factory towns, and their grandchildren earned the doubled wages Spencer cites as vindication sixty years later. I am asking how many generations of immiseration constitute an acceptable transition period before we are permitted to say the system has failed the people it claimed to be serving.
Herbert Spencer: You are asking how long a transition is permitted to take before it is reclassified as a catastrophe, and the answer that evolutionary biology gives, which is the only honest answer available, is that the question contains a hidden assumption. It assumes that there is an authority capable of managing the transition at a speed you would find acceptable, and that preventing the transition would produce less suffering than allowing it. The enclosures dispossessed agricultural laborers. The alternative to the enclosures was not those laborers continuing to farm common land at subsistence level indefinitely. The alternative was a population growing at a rate that the unenclosed agricultural system could not feed. The dispossession was terrible. The famine it helped prevent would have been worse. These are not comfortable arithmetic problems but they are the actual arithmetic problems, and they do not improve by being avoided.
Karl Marx: You have now justified the enclosures as famine prevention, which is a novel argument that I suspect would have surprised the Parliamentary committees that debated them, since they were arguing about rent yields rather than caloric requirements. But let us come to the railway, since it is your strongest historical example and I want to address it directly. The railway boom of the 1840s employed two hundred and fifty thousand navvies at its peak and created an entirely new class of skilled workers, engine drivers, signalmen, station masters, telegraph operators, who had not existed before. I do not dispute this. The railway is the best available case for your argument. The reason it does not apply to artificial intelligence is this: the railway created employment because running a railway required human beings at every node of the system. Every station needed a stationmaster. Every train needed a driver and a fireman. Every junction needed a signalman. The employment was embedded in the physical structure of the technology. Artificial intelligence is specifically designed so that human beings are not needed at the nodes of the system. The comparison fails at the precise point where it matters most.
Herbert Spencer: THE TELEGRAPH REPLACED EVERY COURIER AND MESSENGER IN ENGLAND AND CREATED AN ENTIRELY NEW INDUSTRY OF TELEGRAPH OPERATORS WITHIN A DECADE! THE PATTERN IS THE PATTERN!
Karl Marx: THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR WAS A HUMAN BEING INTERPRETING AND ROUTING INFORMATION! THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DOES THE INTERPRETING AND THE ROUTING! THERE IS NO NODE LEFT FOR THE HUMAN BEING TO OCCUPY!
Herbert Spencer: EVERY GENERATION BELIEVES ITS TECHNOLOGY IS THE EXCEPTION!
Karl Marx: EVERY GENERATION UNTIL THE ONE THAT IS ACTUALLY RIGHT!
Herbert Spencer: We will continue this in Part Two. Like this video. Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. And consider that Mr. Marx, who has spent this entire episode explaining how capital eliminates the need for human labor, has failed to mention that his own intellectual labor was financed throughout his adult life by Friedrich Engels, who owned a cotton mill in Manchester and employed human laborers at wages Mr. Marx considered exploitative. I do not raise this to be personal. I raise it because the man who identified the contradiction of capital financed his identification of it with the proceeds of that contradiction, which I find either deeply ironic or perfectly consistent, depending on one’s theory of history.
Karl Marx: Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. Like this video. And understand that the man delivering that observation spent the last thirty years of his life writing his own autobiography while simultaneously telling everyone who would listen that he was dying, managed to outlive most of his critics by refusing on principle to do anything strenuous, and watched his theory of social evolution become so unfashionable in his own lifetime that by the time he actually died in 1903, the intellectual class that had lionized him in the 1870s had moved on entirely and was busy reading Nietzsche. The fittest, it turned out, did not include Herbert Spencer. I do not raise this to be personal. I raise it because he started it.
