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Herbert Spencer: When we concluded Part One, Mr. Marx had made what he considers his decisive argument: that artificial intelligence differs from all previous labor-displacing technologies because it is designed to replace human judgment rather than merely human muscle, and that therefore the historical pattern of displacement followed by absorption does not apply. I want to address this argument with the seriousness it deserves, which means I want to address it with a paradox. Mr. Marx is correct that artificial intelligence replaces human judgment. He is incorrect about what follows from this. Every previous technology that replaced a human function created a new human function that the technology could not perform. The power loom replaced the weaver’s hands and created the factory manager, the quality inspector, the machine maintenance engineer, and the sales force that sold cloth to a market that had never before been able to afford it. Mr. Marx would have us believe that when a technology replaces human judgment, it replaces all human judgment, which would require the technology to be omniscient. It is not omniscient. It is, in fact, a very sophisticated pattern-matching system that is extraordinarily good at doing things it has been trained to do and extraordinarily unreliable at doing things it has not. The human judgment it does not replace will generate the industries that employ the workers it displaces. This is the pattern. It has not changed.
Karl Marx: I want to address the 1890s depression, because Spencer has not mentioned it and its omission is instructive. Between 1873 and 1896, a period your era calls the Long Depression, the industrialized world experienced sustained deflation, wage stagnation, and unemployment that the evolutionary optimism of the 1860s had declared impossible. This was not a brief transition. It was twenty-three years. The machinery did not pause during those twenty-three years. It continued to improve. It continued to displace workers. The new industries that Spencer assures us always absorb the displaced did eventually appear, but they appeared after two decades of suffering that Spencer’s framework had no mechanism for predicting and no remedy for addressing. I raise this not to suggest that technological progress should be halted. I raise it because the distance between Spencer’s pattern and the actual historical experience of the people living through it is not a footnote. It is the entire moral question.
Herbert Spencer: The Long Depression is an interesting choice of evidence because it ended. It ended, as I would predict, through the emergence of new industries, specifically the electrical industry, the chemical industry, the bicycle industry, and the early automobile industry, all of which emerged in the 1880s and 1890s and collectively absorbed more workers than the agricultural and craft industries that had contracted. The depression was real. The recovery was also real. What Mr. Marx consistently does is treat the trough as the destination and ignore the subsequent trajectory, which is a peculiar analytical habit for a man who claims to be doing historical materialism. Looking at one half of a historical cycle and calling it a refutation of the other half is not science. It is melancholy.
Karl Marx: What Spencer consistently does is treat the peak as the destination and ignore the trough through which the workers actually lived. I want to be precise about what the electrical industry absorbed in the 1890s. It absorbed skilled workers, educated workers, workers with access to training and geographic mobility. It did not absorb the displaced agricultural laborers of the Midlands, the redundant handloom weavers of Lancashire, the out-of-work miners of South Wales, who had none of those things and whose children inherited their poverty rather than their prosperity. The recovery happened. It happened for some people. Spencer presents this as a vindication of the system. I present it as a description of how the system selects its survivors and discards the rest, and then calls the discarding evolution.
Herbert Spencer: You have now made an argument that I want to take seriously because it is the strongest version of your position and because it moves the debate to the place where it actually matters. You are saying that even granting that new industries emerge, they do not emerge for the specific workers displaced, and that the cost of the transition is borne entirely by the generation that experiences the displacement rather than by the generations that inherit the prosperity. This is historically accurate. The weavers of 1820 did not become the electrical engineers of 1890. Their grandchildren did. And I will not pretend this is not a morally serious observation, because it is. My response is this: the alternative you have historically proposed, which is collective ownership of the means of production and centrally planned allocation of labor, produced in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1933 the forcible collectivization of agriculture, the destruction of the kulak class, and a famine that killed between five and seven million people in Ukraine alone. I am asking whether that transition was preferable and if not, what transition you are actually proposing.
Karl Marx: Do not use the Soviet Union against me. I have asked you not to use the Soviet Union against me. I wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875 that a revolutionary state retaining the state apparatus was not socialism but a transitional deformation that must wither away. What the Soviet Union built was a state that claimed the name and retained the apparatus indefinitely, which is precisely the deformation I warned against. This is not my program. This is a betrayal of my analysis executed by men who found the analysis useful for the seizure of power and inconvenient thereafter. I will not accept responsibility for it any more than Spencer will accept responsibility for the American robber barons who cited survival of the fittest to justify the Standard Oil monopoly, the Carnegie Steel company’s Homestead massacre, and the systematic destruction of every labor organization that attempted to give workers a voice in the industries your evolutionary philosophy told them they should be grateful to work in.
Herbert Spencer: I did not endorse the robber barons. I explicitly criticized Carnegie and Rockefeller in The Man Versus the State for using state mechanisms, tariffs, regulatory capture, legislative favoritism, to eliminate competition that the market would otherwise have provided. What they practiced was not my philosophy. It was the corruption of my philosophy by men who found one half of it convenient and discarded the other. I note that this is precisely the defense you have just made of yourself in relation to Stalin, which suggests that both of us have followers we would prefer not to have and predecessors we would prefer not to be held accountable for, and that perhaps the appropriate response is to judge the arguments on their merits rather than by the company they subsequently kept.
Karl Marx: That is the most reasonable thing you have said in two days and I want to note it before you ruin it.
Herbert Spencer: I ruin nothing. I merely continue. The artificial intelligence question requires us to address something your fragment on machines, for all its prescience, does not address. You predict that capital will embed the general intellect in machines and capture its output. You are correct that this is the tendency. You do not address the question of what happens to the cost of goods and services when the labor required to produce them approaches zero. If artificial intelligence reduces the cost of medical diagnosis, legal advice, educational instruction, and financial planning to near zero, the workers displaced from those professions will live in a world where the goods and services they consume cost a fraction of what they currently cost. The displacement is real. The purchasing power calculation is not as simple as your model suggests.
Karl Marx: The purchasing power calculation is exactly as complicated as I suggest because the goods whose cost approaches zero are the goods produced by the displaced workers, and the goods whose cost does not approach zero are the goods owned by the people who own the land, the housing, the physical infrastructure that the displaced workers still require in order to live. Artificial intelligence will make legal advice cheap. It will not make rent cheap. It will make medical diagnosis cheap. It will not make food cheap, because food requires land, and land is owned by the same class that will own the artificial intelligence. The worker displaced by an AI lawyer will find that his legal costs have fallen and his rent has not, because the thing that makes him poor is not the price of legal advice. It is his relationship to the ownership of productive assets. Cheap services do not address this. They decorate it.
Herbert Spencer: RENT IS CHEAP WHERE HOUSING IS ABUNDANT AND HOUSING IS ABUNDANT WHERE CONSTRUCTION IS PERMITTED AND CONSTRUCTION IS PERMITTED WHERE GOVERNMENTS DO NOT RESTRICT IT WHICH IS THE ACTUAL PROBLEM WHICH IS THE STATE DOING WHAT THE STATE ALWAYS DOES!
Karl Marx: THE STATE THAT RESTRICTED CONSTRUCTION WAS RUN BY THE PROPERTY-OWNING CLASS WHICH IS THE CLASS YOUR PHILOSOPHY TOLD US WAS THE NATURAL OUTCOME OF COMPETITION WHICH IS THE CLASS THAT USED YOUR PHILOSOPHY TO JUSTIFY OWNING EVERYTHING!
Herbert Spencer: I TOLD THEM NOT TO USE THE STATE! I SAID IT IN PRINT! REPEATEDLY!
Karl Marx: THEY USED IT ANYWAY! BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT CAPITAL DOES! I ALSO SAID THAT IN PRINT! REPEATEDLY!
Herbert Spencer: YOUR PRINT KILLED MILLIONS!
Karl Marx: YOUR PRINT JUSTIFIED THE ONES WHO KILLED THEM!
Herbert Spencer: DETERMINIST!
Karl Marx: APOLOGIST!
Herbert Spencer: UTOPIAN!
Karl Marx: FOSSIL!
Herbert Spencer: BANKRUPT!
Karl Marx: HYPOCHONDRIAC!
Herbert Spencer: SPONGE!
Karl Marx: RELIC!
Herbert Spencer: Please like this video and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. Mr. Marx, who has spent two episodes explaining the mechanism by which capital exploits labor, received his living expenses, his research costs, and the leisure time required to write Das Kapital entirely from the generosity of Friedrich Engels, who owned a textile mill in Manchester and whose workers Mr. Marx considered to be victims of the precise exploitation he was documenting. Mr. Marx applied for a position as a railway clerk in 1862 in order to supplement this income and was rejected on the grounds that his handwriting was illegible. The man who redesigned the global economy could not get a clerical job. I do not say this to wound. I say it because the gap between Mr. Marx’s theoretical command of labor and his practical relationship to it is, in evolutionary terms, a data point.
Karl Marx: Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. Like this video. And take a moment to appreciate what you have witnessed, which is Herbert Spencer, a man who spent the last three decades of his life composing his own autobiography while telling his physician he was dying, explaining to the world why the strong survive and the weak do not, apparently unaware that a man who takes to his bed for thirty years and then writes a book about himself to ensure his own legacy has failed to embody the philosophy he published. Spencer’s reputation was the most celebrated in England in 1870 and was essentially finished by 1895, in his own lifetime, displaced by newer intellectual fashions in a process that I can only describe as the survival of the fittest. He did not adapt. He did not generate new industries of thought. He became obsolete. I do not raise this to be cruel. I raise it because he is a data point in his own theory and the data point does not flatter him.
