Will AI Lead to Socialism?

Ravi Gupta (0:00)

Welcome to the Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and in a second, we're going to talk to Matt Bruenig, who we like to have a mix of ideologies on this podcast. We have a Honest to Goodness Socialist coming on to talk about the implications of artificial intelligence for the future of labor.

And so you're going to enjoy that. We have a spirited back and forth about what work will look like in the future. If you're interested in this massive conversation about the implications of AI for our safety and all these warnings that are coming out of these artificial intelligence companies that have come out in the past two weeks, I will be on the Majority 54 podcast today talking to Ed Elson from ProfG, where we're going to go through that debate, the safety debate. So this is more about the implication for the labor force. On Majority 54, we're going to talk about the safety debate. My book comes out in less than a week, The Invisible List, which actually is very relevant to the conversation we have today, because it's all about how to learn new skills and hobbies and passions late into life, and actually I think is apt for a world where we're uncertain about the future of employment. So it's all about how to learn things as quickly as possible and in a systematic way. And I walk you through my journey of learning and then help you go through your journey. So if you haven't pre-ordered it yet, order it wherever you get your books. If you pre-order it now, it will probably arrive on the day the book comes out on Tuesday or somewhere around there. And you can come check me out if you're in New York. I'll be having an event next Tuesday. I'll be also going to Nashville, Kansas City, Chattanooga. You can go to readinvisibilelist.com/events.

readinvisibilelist.com/events for that. Check it out. I would and I welcome any and all reviews of it once you've read it. And we'll have a lot more content coming on that front. But without further ado, let's hear from Matt Bruenig on the future of work in the age of AI.

Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Bruenig (2:04)

Oh, thanks for having me.

Ravi Gupta (2:05)

Well, our audience's first meeting, you at least in this venue, tell us a little bit about your background.

Matt Bruenig (2:10)

I am a labor lawyer by trade. I worked at the National Labor Relations Board. I've worked at a number of labor unions. But separate from that, I also am a think tank founder, I suppose. I founded People's Policy Project 2017, I think it was. And we kind of put out left-wing socialist-inflected policy that hopefully influences left members of Congress and left candidates for office.

And yeah, right for the newspapers, just kind of a general, I guess, public intellectual, as haughty as that sounds, that's probably the best way to put it all together.

Ravi Gupta (2:51)

Yeah, I was looking at your Wikipedia page today, and it had this colorful description. It says, you are a democratic socialist in the tradition of market socialism, as well as an advocate of Nordic socialism, and you've been described by Matt Iglesias as an eccentric socialist. What do you think he means by that?

Matt Bruenig (3:09)

That's a great question. I didn't know he had described me that way. Yeah, I mean, I think Matt Iglesias sees me as someone who, I don't know what he means specifically there, but I've known him for a long time, just kind of like, I'm a socialist, but I'm maybe not fully aligned all the time with whatever kind of the mood of the left in the US is. So I guess, depending on how you want to view that, do you think of socialism as like the people who are currently calling themselves that in the US? And what are they interested in at the moment?

Or is it a more kind of principled thing rooted in an intellectual tradition that goes back hundreds of years and that may reach different conclusions? So I think that is where the eccentricity comes in as sometimes a misalignment with where other contemporary socialists might be on a specific topic.

Ravi Gupta (4:00)

Well, educate us on this a little bit. What's your... I mean, this is a very big question. So maybe we could, you could maybe illustrate it by way of one particular issue.

What in the current makeup of, let's say, the DSA conversation and the sort of wave of candidates coming in, are you either aligned or misaligned with right now? And maybe another way of putting it is, what's missing in the conversation around socialism in the US? Because if I read this correctly, you seem to be drawing from sort of non-American traditions of socialism to some extent.