The automation ultimatum: Why politicians are talking people, not policies

Ever felt like right-wing politicians in most countries tend to be targeting left-wing politicians more than actually the left-wing politics? Well, that’s because that’s exactly what has been happening. And that’s not without a reason.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we? About 100 years ago, right-wing politicians could still target left-wing politics for a simple reason – at that time, there were as many problems with left-wing politics as there were with right-wing politics. Take Eastern Europe, for example. Communist governments left most of it in shambles, with poverty spreading like wildfire as a result of their policies.

But here’s the kicker – and you might notice me not saying communism here – the policies of communists in Eastern Europe were notably not the pure communism that originated from Marxist beliefs. Nope, they were mixed with authoritarian policies. It’s like they took the communist cookbook and decided to throw in a few pages from “Dictatorship for Dummies”. For this reason, it’s nowadays argued that communism was not a left-wing ideology, but rather a syncretic one – a type of politics where the lines between left-wing and right-wing blur like a toddler’s finger painting.

Fast forward about 100 years, and this mixture of left-wing and right-wing ideologies is still hanging around in most of our world like that one party guest who doesn’t realize it’s time to leave. Let’s take the right-wing side of things here – capitalism is nowhere implemented in the way it was thought of. After all, an important part of capitalism is for market forces to run freely. The most notable part of this being that when there’s no demand for something, the companies supplying it are left by their own, many would collapse. It’s like economic natural selection.

But instead of this happening, we’ve got socialist safety nets in place that save these companies from collapse. Sometimes it’s a good thing, but far too often it’s like giving a participation trophy to a company that forgot how to compete. Still, the reason why they’re there is because we need them. Otherwise, certain companies would monopolize industries and jack up their prices, leading to the exact same problems as the previous communist examples – widespread poverty. It’s like we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, or in this case, between unfettered capitalism and authoritarian communism.

Clearly with this mixed capitalist-socialist economic system, we’re able to continue, right? No, we can’t. That’s where the problem of right-wing politicians, but more importantly their friends the company owners, are at. As with the rise of large language models, something was made very clear to the world, although many people put on blinders, which is the fact that we could in fact automate many of our jobs. Yes, we could… for a long time already.

Let’s talk numbers for a second. Based on the information from McKinsey & Company from 2020, about half our workforce could be automated using technologies that were already demonstrated at that time. And 4 years later, there are estimates that go up to 90% of our jobs being replaceable. Not because the folks at McKinsey & Company suddenly got really pessimistic, but rather because these new estimates take into account the fact that many jobs don’t need any automation at all – the entire jobs are redundant already.

Here’s a fun fact that’ll make you question everything: A lot of jobs were arbitrarily created to put especially disabled people to work. Why? Because too many across the world are not accepting of them receiving the money to survive without needing to do something in return that is deemed acceptable. Can you imagine treating others the way we wish to be treated ourselves? That’s the problem with these arbitrary jobs already, the fact that it shows only discrimination over the fact that they’re different. It’s like we’re living in a world where your worth is determined by how well you can pretend to be busy.

But regardless of whether it’s 50% or 90% or somewhere in between, whatever percentage of our work could be automated, it would always lead to a problem. We have an economic system where people have to work to survive. Automation would put a lot of pressure on this system, leading to a certain collapse. Yes, we would need something else. And that’s where the problem of right-wing politics are at, as there’s no ideology that fits right-wing beliefs that could ever resolve this problem. No matter how you twist or turn it, acceptance of automation would require the acceptance of socialism. Which is exactly why automation is not embraced, but pushed away like a vegetable on a child’s plate.

But this pushing away of automation can only happen for a certain amount of time, as eventually people would realize it, and the fight against this modern way of slavery would start. It’s like trying to hold back a tsunami with a sand castle – eventually, reality is going to come crashing down.

So, what do we do? We need to have some serious conversations about the future of work, the distribution of wealth, and how we define the value of a human being. Do we continue to measure worth by productivity, or do we start valuing things like creativity, empathy, and human connection? Do we cling to our current system until it breaks, or do we start planning for a world where traditional work isn’t the center of our lives?

These are the questions we need to be asking, and they’re the questions that many right-wing politicians are desperately trying to avoid by focusing on personal attacks rather than policy discussions. But sooner or later, we’re going to have to face the music. And when we do, we might just find that the solutions look a lot more “left” than some people are comfortable with.

But hey, who knows? Maybe by the time we figure it out, we’ll have AI politicians debating each other while we humans kick back and enjoy the show. Now wouldn’t that be something?

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