The phrase “socialism or barbarism” – which I paraphrase as “AI or barbarism” – is a deliberate provocation. I do not mean AI at any price.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that the machine on your desk can answer your emails, write music, design advertisements, create videos and even perform parts of the job for which you spent years preparing. Now imagine millions of people waking up to the same discovery. This is no longer science fiction. AI (artificial intelligence) has already entered our lives. The question is no longer whether it will change society. The question is whether we will control the change, or whether the change will control us.

The slogan “socialism or barbarism” has a long history in socialist thought, associated particularly with Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg and the critique of capitalism, while barbarism means society in ruins. I thought about it because, when I was living in London, I visited the house in Soho where Karl Marx lived. There is a blue plaque at 28 Dean Street. Marx lived there with his family in considerable poverty while working on Das Kapital. Today, the building is associated with the high-end Quo Vadis restaurant, where I had dinner. There is something almost surreal about it. A man who spent his life thinking about poverty and inequality lived in a cramped room, while the world outside was preparing for a very different future.

The world has progressed enormously in two hundred years. Medicine is better, life expectancy is higher and technology has transformed life. Yet poverty remains, the environment is under enormous pressure, and wealth has become concentrated in astonishingly few people. I often describe it simply: the money keeps moving towards the same 5,000 pairs of hands.

Bill Gates has correctly identified the turbulence. But I think he is asking the second question before asking the first. And the first question is: Who owns the AI revolution?

Electricity once transformed civilization. It changed industry, cities, communication and everything people did. AI may be an even greater revolution. Bill Gates, who wrote enthusiastically about the possibilities of AI, is now warning that society is not prepared for what is coming. He even proposed taxing AI tokens and robots and........

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