The Other Road to Singularity

In his landmark 1993 paper "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the Post-Human Era," Vernor Vinge raised four possible paths to the "intelligence explosion" that is the Singularity. The first three involved computers--1. the advent of a computer with what we would call strong "artificial intelligence"; 2. a computer network's more spontaneously developing such intelligence; 3. an integration of human and computer intelligence through advanced mind-machine interfaces (allowing, for example, a human brain with its superior pattern recognition and other abilities to access the vastly superior computational capacities and data storage of computer systems); and 4. a purely biological enhancement of human intelligence.

It is, of course, the case that we hear most about number one, somewhat less about two and three, and least of all about number four, the non-computer, biological option.

Why is that the case?

My impression is that this reflects the observable rate of progress in those areas. Where the computing sector has had "Moore's Law," and the geometrical expansion of the computing power available at any given price (and total computing power on Earth) that goes with it, the medical sector's feats have been . . . less impressive. Indeed, the contrast has been sufficiently pointed, and noted, that the term "Eroom's Law" has been coined to refer to how the development of treatments and cures has, rather than becoming quicker and cheaper in the manner of computers, become slower and more expensive instead.

Amid all that it has been far easier to picture rising computer power beating biotechnology to the finish line in the race to produce a greater-than-human intelligence for decades. In fact, even with some questioning the likelihood of Moore's Law's continuing as microchip fabrication reaches the apparent limits of the possible in silicon, and the long-awaited substitutes prove to be (like so much else these days) "behind schedule," it can still seem that way.

Why Do People Deny That Tony Blair Was a Neoliberal?

I have previously remarked that, where everyone who denied that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were neoliberals was a troll clearly acting in bad faith, I have encountered people who denied that Tony Blair was a neoliberal who seemed to only be expressing their honest opinion (even if it was totally contradicted by the facts).

Why was that the case? I think the likeliest answer is that they set the bar for not being a neoliberal so low, seeing any deviation from the austerity-deregulation-privatization-etc. agenda as disqualifying one from inclusion in such company. And as they point out, Blair did indeed increase funding for health and education, for example. Yet he did it within conditions of broader austerity, paid for the NHS with increased payroll taxes and for college by charging tuition (breaking campaign promises on this score, repeatedly), and continued the longtime, piecemeal, "backdoor" privatization of both those services (with his PFIs and his "concordat" with the private health sector and his internal markets and his "school choice" and much else). Blair did make working people some concessions, like a minimum wage and some latitude to unionize, but he drew a hard line beyond the minimums he granted, enough so for this to be a sticking point where Britain's participation in the EU's further integration was concerned (Blair regarding the neoliberal EU's courts as too dangerously leftish to be allowed to decide cases between British labor and British management). Meanwhile, whether the issue was upper-income tax levels or monetary policy or privatization, or stringency in the face of users of the social safety net, or constraints on strike action, or government passivity in the face of deindustrialization and embrace of a free-wheeling financial sector as the driver of the economy instead--or even the rhetoric in which he explained and justified it all, which could easily appear to out-Thatcher the early Thatcher--Blair consistently carried forward the model Thatcher handed down.

The result is that, a couple of tweaks apart, his neoliberal credentials are indisputable and overwhelming. More pertinent to the present, however, is what such confusion means in this moment when we are hearing so much about "the end of neoliberalism." The simple truth is that pundits have been calling neoliberalism finished over and over again for four decades now--in part because they assumed that the intellectual discrediting of the model in so many more eyes must necessarily translate to its end. Alas, things are more complicated than that--while certainly it would take more than a few Blair-like tweaks to really bring about a shift to another economic approach. It would require a whole new way of thinking about how economies achieve growth, and distribute its benefits, the way neoliberalism represented when it became a real political force back in the '70s, and no such change is even suggested by anyone remotely mainstream now.

The End of Neoliberalism? Don't Bet On it

For as long as neoliberalism has been around we have been hearing about its imminent demise--because it has been so consistently disappointing, even by its own lights. (It is worth remembering, for example, that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan promised their policies would lead to the renewal of their countries' industrial bases. They delivered accelerated deindustrialization instead.) And if the comment and analysis, especially that accorded mainstream space, overwhelmingly consisted of cheerleading for that wave, there were people, even there, who called it as any sane person had to see it. In the wake of the early, yet severe, setbacks, for example, Lester Thurow's Dangerous Currents (1983) was so named because of how policymakers were navigating economic difficulties without a viable theory--because clearly the neoliberal theories were not that. Yet neoliberalism endured, such that a decade on in his bestseller Head to Head (1992) Thurow was declaring its death yet again on the grounds that the post-World War II General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was giving way to a three-way neomercantilist competition between the U.S., Europe and Japan--and again, his call proved premature.

So did it go again in 1997, after the Asian financial crisis, and in 2000-2001 after the New Economy bubble burst and a raft of colossal financial scandals that in the U.S. had a Republican (!) President signing Sarbanes-Oxley and appointing a vigorous new SEC chief to crack down on Wall Street malfeasance. That mood didn't last, though, but soon enough when that same Republican was presiding over a still bigger financial train wreck there was more talk of "This can't go on" and "This time it's for realz!"--which in many minds was affirmed by the election of a new President--the first Northern, blue state Democrat since Kennedy, one might add--whose slogan, supposedly addressed to the change-minded, was "Yes we can." Instead what he really seemed to be saying was "Yes we can go on being neoliberal," and indeed he did for his eight years in office . . .

Of course, it was less clear than before that he was right about that--certainly where ignoring backlash was concerned, with the backlash from the right, which was to see Obama hand the office over not to his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but to Donald Trump. Since then we have seen trade war, and pandemic, and a still worse economic crisis making the phrase "worst since the '30s" appear ever-more tired without its being at all untrue, and neomercantilist maneuvers in areas like microchip-making--but that hardly signals the end, as becomes clearer if we think about what neoliberalism really means. Neoliberalism, after all, is not just the rollback of the industrial development-welfare-macroeconomic management state (hence the tax cuts and privatizations and deregulation and union-busting and the rest), but a still broader way of running an economy, easier to understand when one looks beyond the official theorizing and the intellectual history to how things actually work.

One can explain the matter this way. Where at mid-century the prevailing growth model had been a "Keynesian Fordism" that leveraged the "propensity to consume," particularly by way of manufacturing, to expand the Gross Domestic Product, neoliberalism (or "Neoliberal Financialization") leverages the "propensity to invest," and centers on finance, making for the centrality of that speculation-minded, creditism-pumped, digitally-enabled, globalized financial sector that is the hallmark of the era. And far from stepping away from that economic model, governments the world over remain strongly committed to it (hence, along with the tax cuts, etc., also the ever-looser monetary policy, the quantitative easing, and the rest, to keep the gamblers on asset values at the casino table), to the point that alternatives are not even imagined by anyone pretending to mainstream respectability. So long as that remains the case, the most that might be imagined would be Keynesian patches to a Neoliberal system--and that is indeed the most we have seen to date, with the direction of a little corporate welfare to manufacturers, a little more money for social services, rather than even the slightest hint of a New Deal era-like change in model.

Of British Middle Classness

I have been struck again and again by the long record of attempts by British politicians to persuade their public that the old class differences for which Britain has been famous, and even notorious, have been dissolved within a state of generalized classness, where everyone was somehow vaguely "middle class." Thus there was John Major's rhetoric of a "classless society," and, as if Major had somehow succeeded in bringing that about, Tony Blair's display of open contempt for class differences and class conflict as having "no relevance whatsoever to the modern world" in his 1997 General Election Manifesto while shortly after John Prescott declared that "We are all middle class now." There was also negative affirmation of such pretensions in the denial that there was such a thing as a "respectable" working class anymore, the worthy supposed to have long since been uplifted into the middle class, leaving behind only a residue of "chavs" who have only themselves to blame for their lot--while there was scarcely more acknowledgment of anything above the middle class (Blair characterizing the class conflict he was dismissing as "middle class versus working class"), with commentary about the undeniably ultra-privileged speaking of the children of privilege as merely "upper middle class."

However the British public has not been entirely persuaded by this talk--indeed, seem to have been considerably less persuaded than, for example, their American counterparts. After all, the reality of class differences is especially hard to ignore in a country where there is a monarchy and a House of Lords and knighthoods, where there are "public schools" like Eton and the cult of the "gentleman" and the intricate, ostentatious hierarchy of accents George Bernard Shaw so famously satirized to so little real-world consequence--and one must remember is the Old World with its lower physical mobility, stronger family and community ties, and associated longer memories.

Indeed, Selina Todd holds that so far as Britons are concerned, what makes the working class working class is still the fact that it must live by work, and especially work for others with their means of production, rather than live off of the work of others by way of its possession of means of production--bluntly speaking, by who has power and who does not--even if some of those workers happen to have college degrees, white collar jobs, houses and cars. This would seem reflected in nearly sixty percent of Britons identifying themselves as working class in a recent poll (with, it seems, far higher numbers doing so in regions where the prosperity of the super-rich is less in evidence and less influential, like the northeast, where nearly eighty percent regard themselves as such).

In short, in spite of the persistent efforts of conservatives and neoliberals, it would seem that in Britain the traditional conception of class endures.

The Limits of Reform in Labour Britain

In the post-World War II period Britain had a government committed to full employment and a massively expanded welfare state (with the NHS, free education up to the college level, a two-tier pension system), which also countenanced the unionization of the work force and was prepared to go so far as nationalization to achieve its economic ends. In the resulting circumstances jobs were plentiful, poverty fell, the country enjoyed a "golden age of social mobility," and there was a broad rise in living standards.

Naturally to many progressives looking back at it from the neoliberal era, and the "New Labour" party of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer it seems an enviable lot--such that, inheriting the New Labour vision in its moment of total bankruptcy, Keir Starmer evokes the memory of the era, the "spirit of '45," with a frequency matched only by his utter inability to convince.

Still, it is worth remembering that in its post-war heyday the Labour Party's record, even setting aside the extent to which the Conservative governments in power half the time halted or even rolled back many of its initiatives (particularly in areas like public housing); or for that matter, the way in which an outsized military profile and the associated balance of payments problems tied the Labour Party's own hands with regard to the realization of its own projects when it was in power; was regarded as a great letdown by many of its most ardent supporters.*

In considering this it helps to remember what Old Labour promised. The party's constitution explicitly committed it to the emancipation of the working class on the basis of collective ownership of the means of production and distribution, and many took this seriously, expecting that a Labour government, especially one with a broad mandate like the one elected in '45, would deliver a society that would really be economically, socially, politically equal, where workers would exercise greater power in society and control over their lives--or at least, go a very long way to this. However, the vision of the politically effective portion of the Labour Party was, at least where the near term was concerned, rather less far to the left, rather more technocratic and meritocratic. Their nationalizations were selective and saw nationalized businesses continuing to run on the same business-like lines as before, the scope they allowed unions was for bargaining over wages and conditions and not workers' control of industry (while much of the work force was still not represented by unions at all), their welfare state was funded by contribution rather than distribution, and they preached equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome (a social ladder still existent, if with working people given somewhat more opportunity to climb it than they had before).

Thus if there was high employment, and poverty was in decline, and workers' living standards rising, even by the differing, more modest metric the center was using to judge the country's progress, it was still not all they might have hoped for. Granted the benefits of postwar consumerism as a consolation prize of sorts as the socialist dream fell by the wayside, workers found that much enjoyment of those benefits required required overtime, second incomes and a good deal of credit, which left them more harried, more insecure, and feeling less in control of their lives than they would have hoped to be in a situation where jobs were plentiful and wages going up. And for all the meritocratic talk the record of social mobility looks less impressive on close examination. Where educational and occupational opportunity was concerned, it was far easier to give students more years in school than to really equalize the educational opportunities of the children of manual workers and the children of privilege, let alone open up access to the more prestigious, remunerative careers that young people were likely to dream of becoming someday, the volume of which did not budge so much. Especially with the economy demanding more assembly-line workers than technologists, more clerks than Chief Executive Officers, more nurses than surgeons, more schoolteachers than Oxford dons or Fleet Street journalists or barristers (never mind novelists), there was not much more room at the top, and traditional public school-and-Oxbridge privilege substantially monopolized it. The result was that in the end not very many moved up, not many of those who did move up moved very far up, and even those who made headway tended to do so only after great exertions and even sacrifices, at the end of which they may have been unsure the game was worth the candle--while more often than not alert to the difference there would have been in the prospects of talent being recognized and duly rewarded, or simple "return on effort," had they been born in a higher social station.

These disappointments and frustrations were by no means slight, or slight grounds for the disenchantment of many with the situation then (memorably dramatized in the writings of "angry young men" like John Osborne). Still, just as with the post-war American anxieties over a business culture turning the country's white collar-wearing workers into "organization men," those worries can seem a comparative luxury in the post-Thatcher, post-Blair world in which working people are told to not even dream of social safety nets and living wages--a reminder of just how far the expectations of what may scarcely be able to call itself a "left" anymore have fallen.

* In the thirty-four years of the 1945-1979 period the Conservatives were the party of government for seventeen years (1951-1964, 1970-1974), fully half the time, with the earlier thirteen year stretch (with its three General Election victories) arguably critical in reining in the party's grander visions.