Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

"Yes. Not me. He’s my brother. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to include it or not. It’s there because I think it’s vital. A second challenge we will face in a world with less work, alongside the distributional one mentioned before, is what we do about the growing power of the small number of large technology companies who will increasingly dominate our lives. In the 20th century, our main worry about large corporations like these tended to be concerns about their economic power, about things like profitability, market concentration, and so on. But, in the 21st century—and this is what Future Politics is all about—our concern is going to be far more with their political power, their impact on issues of liberty, democracy and social justice—and whether they are under threat. Take Facebook. Yes, in part, people are concerned about their profitability and potentially predatory behaviour. But increasingly, they are concerned about their political power—that, for example, the Russian government was said to be able to buy advertisements to influence the US Presidential election in 2016. When I use the word ‘politics’ here, though, I don’t just mean politics in the narrow sense of politicians and great chambers of state, but in a broader sense—the ways in which we all live together in society, and whether the social scaffolding that we have erected to live on together is being dismantled. “We need an institution analogous to a competition authority, but that’s responsible for policing political power rather than economic power” Future Politics is all about this threat. In the 21st century, it rightly points out that what matters is who owns and controls these increasingly capable technologies, and the political power that they wield as a result. And I don’t think any conversation about the future of work can leave out those organisations that are responsible for developing many of these technologies in the first place. So, the first challenge is the economic one, the distributional challenge. And the second one is this challenge of the political power of large technology companies, and that’s what this book is focused on. Because it’s the same technologies that displace workers from their work that also have these political consequences. Take driverless cars as an example. Looked at from an economic point of view, people might worry about the consequences for the several million truck drivers in the US. But at the same time, we might also look at it from a political point of view: what are the implications for liberty, for instance, of a car that cannot go above a certain speed, or park on a double-yellow line, under any circumstance at all. Now, you might think that’s a relatively innocuous example. But what about the automated soap dispenser that is said to be unable to recognize black hands when they are put underneath them because they’ve been trained on data sets of white people’s hands. That raises a vital issue of social justice. And we should worry if future technologies, developed in this way, are used elsewhere in the labour market: determining parole decisions, for instance, or screening job candidates. The future of work isn’t just about the economics of these technologies; it’s also about their politics, too. That’s exactly right. And that’s what I propose in my own book. We need an institution analogous to a competition authority, but that’s responsible for policing political power rather than economic power. And I suppose one of my worries—and given I am an economist myself it might sound like I’m shooting myself in the foot—is that these conversations about large technology companies tend to be dominated by economists. Yet the tools that competition authorities, and the economists that populate them, have to think about issues like pricing and profit, however insightful they may be, tell us very little about issues like liberty, democracy and social justice and whether or not those things might be under threat. So, I think we need a very different type of institution, staffed by very different types of people – training in moral philosophy, for instance, or political science – to tackle what are often political, rather than economic, problems."