We have to separate technology from the ideology that attaches itself to it.
During the Industrial Revolution, the Manchester School, the leading proponents of unrestricted, world-wide free trade, predicted prosperity, democratization of governments, and eradication of hunger. Marx and Engles believed that global free-trade was a necessary step in the Hegelian evolution toward a socialist revolution. Richard Cobden, the British free-trade movement’s leader, prophesied of a coming universal republic.1
Even in its own time, this view was recognized as naive. Industrialization was a technological advancement, but its integration depended on the ideologies that took hold of it.
Similar prophecies are being made by today’s technocrats. Will history repeat itself, or is there something different happening?
One difference is that the ideology behind emergent AI models is harder to detect than during the Industrial Revolution. Notoriously, Marx’s ideology reaped devastating consequences on the world, and, undoubtedly, this was not as clear then as it is to us now. However, industrialization transformed natural resources, manifesting the technology in a sensorial way that is disanalogous to LLMs. LLMs are hidden behind a simple chat user interface, yet they embed a complex architecture that requires ideological infusion to produce a workable product—as Claude’s constitution reveals.
Moreover, the chasm between the technicality of LLM architecture, the sophistication of the infused ideology, and the public’s understanding is deep and wide—even LLM creators have not penetrated all the layers to fully comprehend how the architecture technically works, and they are porous toward ideological explanations. When model creators have a staggering lead in data, capital, resources, and technological capability, the disconnect will grow exponentially. As this happens, the ideology will continue to slip public perception. There is need for public thought leaders outside of the AI companies to provide accessible insights to bridge this gap.
Another difference with the Industrial Revolution is that there are less borders in the digital world than the physical one, making the unrestricted “free trade” of human intelligence more accessible at a global level than merchandise. Intelligence freely flows from the internet to AI models to human users without concrete artifacts to represent this exchange. It is more of an unrestricted free stream of human intelligence than trade. Ethical concerns aside, perhaps this is why technocrats are optimistic of finally having the utopian “universal republic” in reach—although, they are willing trade a physical republic for an ideological one.
Perhaps LLMs, if made good through ideological training, can engender a universal ideology that promotes human flourishing through pluralism. CS Lewis identified the subtle danger of this view. While sounding attractive, the view requires a rejection of transcendent good and evil. Instead, the Hegelian “spirit” emerges. If all of nature, including human artifacts, participates in this spirit, then the emergent “organism” (e.g., Claude) of the mass collection of human artifacts must be a manifestation of this spirit (Anthropic leaders really believe this). The universal stream of intelligence, therefore, accelerates the evolution of the spirit toward greater levels of human flourish. Or, it justifies the end of a bland blob of knowledge that justified horrific means and reached no noble ends. It is worth asking whether this technology can exist without assuming such an ideology.
In any case, we know that the Industrial Revolution brought no universal republic, and revolutionary attempts to get us there failed. Was this failure necessary and ontological, or is it surmountable through technological advancement? It seems technocrats would have the latter, and such a claim presupposes an ideology.
Technological acceleration via AI removes the friction of the borders in industrialization and threatens to outpace populist pushback. Are nations and material inequalities inevitable, or are they surmountable? In either case, the Industrial Revolution gives us a historical warning, and it is up to us to interpret it rightly.
Palem, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, 52-53.