This post was written by @senyakk and is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written.

An AISIG colleague of mine, @ilijalichkovski, published a commentary critique of Mechanize, an AI startup manifesto, which appears to be a defense of technological acceleration due to its deterministic stance. I refer to the manifesto’s proponents as the mechanists and to my colleague, respectively, as the author.

The Mechanists advance two theses: 1m) the tech tree is discovered, not forged, and 2m) we do not control our technological trajectory. The author counters that what mechanists overlook is that determinism can still be compatible with the historical contingencies – a valuable correction to fatalism – ultimately defending the view that 1a) the course of history is conditioned by the power law, and that 2a) the outcomes of the technological tree in fact diverge and not converge.

I find the author’s arguments prone to supporting a position leaning towards a voluntaristic interpretation of history. From the premise of a power law, one could infer that the society is governed by the same power inequality, with different people’s acts having different weights. Given the indeterminacy of the future, voluntarism attributes the course of history to the will and wisdom of individuals in power, rather than to impersonal structural forces. In this essay, I will argue that automation is indeed inevitable in the history of humanity, but what curtails human agency is not this inevitability but the socio-economic inequality that conditions the application of automation technologies.

Historical Progress Footing

To understand the course of history, I’ll define history as the social process that consists of events and phenomena, connected by causal relations.

Since the time of the Enlightenment, the dominant idea in historical science was of a progressive march of human knowledge, having its own objective laws of development, a view appearing in the works of Turgot. The empirical basis by that time made it clear that society was not stuck in a loop, but instead was advancing through periods; Adam Ferguson famously categorised human history epochs into “savagery”, “barbarism”, and “civilisation”.

With this in mind, the definition can be expanded as “the objective soci...

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