Tech Won't Save Us - A New Economy Will Deliver Better Technology w/ Aaron Benanav

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Aaron Benanav to discuss his vision for a multi-criterial economy and how it would alter the type of technology our society creates. It’s a plan to center human experience through democratic discourse while driving true social and technological innovation. Aaron Benanav is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University and the author of Automation and the Future of Work. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: The two parts of Aaron’s essay on a Multi-Criterial Economy were published in the New Left Review. Learn more about the briefly discussed Bangladesh youth led revolution.

In order for people to participate in a full way in democratically deciding their own futures and the progress of society and the progress of technology, we have to get everyone to a level where they're not so scared and worried and focused on their survival. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Aaron Beninov. Aaron is an assistant professor at Cornell University, the author of Automation and the Future of Work, and he's written a new series called Beyond Capitalism in the New Left Review. This episode, kind of like the one we did with Dan McQuillan a number of weeks ago,

is one of those more big idea episodes. In that series of essays, Aaron is writing about this idea he has for something called a multi-critarial economy. I know that sounds like a difficult word, but it basically just means that if we have this economy right now that is focused on maximizing GDP growth at all costs, and that is the main metric that we use to guide our society, to guide our investments, to guide what we want to achieve in our societies, then what if instead we had an economic system and we had a series of goals for that economy that actually tracked multiple different things and tried to achieve progress on multiple different things, rather than just being so focused on growth and assuming that that means kind of social benefits and other good things as a result of that that we don't of course always see or often see and so to me this is intriguing because i think that obviously on the one hand we see the very big failures of the economic system that we have right now that obviously need to be addressed but on the other hand there's also thinking about because of the nature of the show what that means for technology right

if we're going to set up an economy that works in this way how would technology be used in order to make it possible, right, in order to enable it, in order to do the tracking of those different criteria, of those different goals, in order to make sure that we're achieving them. And then beyond that, there's also the question of what it means for the development of technology itself, right? If we're not just so focused on maximizing growth, on maximizing shareholder value, what does that mean for the type of technology that we develop, the way that it is embedded in society and what we're actually trying to achieve with that technology. I would argue, and of course, Aaron argues in this episode that it would be very different

than what we have right now. And then I think the other thing that is so important here is actually thinking about, you know, what the goal for some kind of future economy actually is. Do we just want to try to have the computers manage absolutely everything, have it fully automated, and we don't need to worry about anything else, we don't work, you know, what have you, some of these visions that are out there that, of course, we get into in this episode, or do we want to use technology as we always use technology in order to enable certain things in society, but then to make sure that there's still a very strong human role in determining the types of things that we want to achieve, deliberating about how we're going to get there, and having the kinds of disagreements

that humans will always have, and then working through those in order to collectively move forward. So if you enjoyed that episode with Dan McQuillan on decomputing a few weeks ago, I think you're really going to enjoy this one with Aaron as well because I see it in a very similar vein as we're thinking about different paths, different approaches that we can take. And I think this notion of building a very different economy is another one that we need to be thinking quite seriously about. So if you like this episode, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every

single week so we can keep having these critical in-depth and hopefully, you know, mind-expand, conversations that we do every single week on technology and the broader society that exists alongside it, you can join supporters like Brianne from Belgium, Amardip from London, Emily and Cambridge and Jonathan from Seattle by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Aaron, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, it's great to be back. Yeah, it's always fun to have you on the show. Of course, whether we're talking about AI or whether we're talking about bigger ideas like we are today, You have this new series in the new left review called Beyond Capitalism, where you're kind of

laying out something that you have been working on for quite a while, you know, that you have been developing, that you have been researching, finally reaching the point where you're trying to lay this out, right? You know, looking at the way our economic system works, looking at the way that it could work a lot better. You know, obviously that's something that is quite dense. It's very detailed. You know, you've done a lot of work on this.

But I think it's something that's worth digging into an understanding because, you know, I think sometimes we can be a bit focused on like the here and now, what is going on, and it's good to try to branch out of that sometimes and think about how things could be better. And so before we actually dig into this notion of a multi-critarial economy that you are laying out, I wanted to ask, you know, why was this something that you thought was important to dig into? And what really inspired you to kind of go down this path the past few years where you were trying to develop these ideas and flesh this out? It's a little bit sad for me to talk about that now, because if I think back to when I started

working on this in 2020, I would say that I was really motivated by the social movements that had occurred in the previous decade. It really felt like from the global financial crisis in 2008, up through 2020, we were just seeing this unfolding sequence of struggles, you know, all around the world. And it really, I think at the time in 2009 to 2020, my idea was that as these social movements intensify and grow, that they would sort of automatically generate some new idea of a future world. I had this expectation that it would just sort of spontaneously emerge. And maybe by the middle of the 2010s, I started to feel like that wasn't the case. And in a lot of ways, my first book, Automation and the Future of Work,

was about how what I called the automation discourse of that moment seemed to me to be much more interested in having a utopian vision of the future than the people I knew who I think were more engaged in critique and analysis of the present and less on trying to think about what a positive future could look like. And so criticizing the tech visions of the left and right was a way in for me to this kind of question of what would a positive future be. But I would say that I felt by 2020 as I completed that project that it had just given me a tape. of what I wanted to think about for the future. It didn't really give me a full picture yet.

Then, of course, since 2020 and the pandemic, everything's gotten quite scrambled. And so the idea that we need to know as quickly as possible what it would mean to win feels a little bit less pressing in 2025 than it did in 2020. So it's OK to kind of focus on this broader vision now and what it's going to look like, because unfortunately, the political situation

makes it more difficult to see how we are going to get there, I guess. I am going to come back to the first book and how it relates to this one and kind of the work that you were doing there because or how it relates to this series I guess but I figure it's probably a good idea to lay out the basics right to see how you want to describe this and then we can dig in further on some of the points that really stood out to me so in this series you're in the first part of it kind of looking into the history of you know thinking about planning and these particular kinds of discourses and then in the second kind of laying out your

vision for what this alternative economy and society could really look like, how it would work. It's a very detailed framework for how this could work and what this society could be. So I just kind of wanted to give you the opportunity. What are kind of the key points of this? What should people understand about this multi-critarial economy and what it would be? Yeah, I think that the first thing to understand is just the way that I oppose a multi-crateerial economy to a capitalist economy. because that opposition helps you think about, you know, what would this better world look like?

Because I think that people have a sense in many different ways that there's something really wrong with our world. It's not just exploitation of labor or unsustainable extraction from the earth. There's like a whole host of problems that present themselves to us in the society we live in today. And so figuring out which of the problems in our society are the ones which, like, if you focus in on that, you kind of can build your way towards an idea of some overcoming, some horizon. And I think when you think about that, you really want to try to imagine, yeah, a world where people could actually be free, where people could really meet their needs and, you know, and also explore their lives and whatever that happens to me and their passions.

I think that was an original idea I had in the automation book. So I think that when we think about what it is about capitalism we need to focus on, the thing I came to see as most important. And I think there's some agreement here between mainstream economists and heterodox and critical economists like Marxists, that the thing about capitalism is that it's really an efficiency-first society. That is to say that, you know, when we're talking about how production is organized, it's really that firms and workers are forced into this framework where they have to try to be as efficient as possible. And that could mean in the day-to-day, like if you're working at a McDonald's or Google, you know, that the company is trying its best to figure out how to most efficiently produce the goods that it's producing, because the more you save on production, the more profit you make, essentially.

But it's not just that. It's also an innovation economy, right? The more you can figure out how to find new ways to cut costs or new ways to expand the products that you produce, the more profit you make. And of course, when we think about AI today, generative AI, that's a great example because as much as all the hype around it, maybe we think it's not really going to do what it's supposed to do. But business leaders are so excited about it because it might really improve productivity and efficiency lead to all these layoffs and make possible huge profits for the companies. And so, yeah, critical economists like Marxists would have a more critical view of what that efficiency-based society looks like. the mainstream economists have a very rosy depiction of what companies are doing to seek profits, whereas Marxists have a much darker and truer vision of what that means. But I would say the main idea here is that a multi-critarial economy would be able to take into account many other goals and values besides efficiency. I kind of want to say something like

as equally important, but part of the problem of a future society, we'd be deciding how to prioritize across these goals. But if you could just imagine an economy, that not only says, OK, we want to organize production to be as efficient as possible, but also says we want to make it as sustainable as possible. We want to make the work as good quality as we can. We want to find ways to produce products that bring people together and reinvigorate communities.

We want to find ways to bring out democracy in our own activities so people who are working for a company feel like they have a voice in what we're doing. All of those goals could be just as important, or at least considered as important in organizing production, in organizing research and development that leads to new technologies. And so I think the idea here is to really imagine

or to re-conceptualize what it would mean to free ourselves from the constraints and fetters of capitalism to open up into a world that has many more possibilities and in which we can do a lot more and dream a lot more and build a lot more and differently than we do today. Yeah, obviously like you're speaking my language, right? I love this. And this is part of the reason that I was so fascinated by what you were laying out, right? And it really resonates with me. I feel like especially recently because we're seeing more and more, I think, these critiques of this so narrow focus on GDP, on if we're thinking about like the national level, right? You know, the overall level rather than, you know, the firm level and what they're up to that we can, as you were saying, we can see very clear issues with that as well. But like even if you're thinking about it From the tech perspective, as I do and as many of the people who are listening to the show would do, I feel like when you look on the national level, because they are trying to attract tech investment, because they are trying to increase GDP, it leads to these really distorted outcomes where you're not going to effectively regulate the tech industry or something like that or deal with the harms that come of these companies and the products that they release into society because you don't want to discourage investment because that could mean that your economic growth would be lower and blah, blah, blah.

And it's like, you know, you can look at so many different facets of this and see the problems that come with this sole focus on this one metric. And I feel like, I don't even know if this story is true. But I feel like I always see this story that like GDP kind of emerges around World War II. And even when it comes out in that time, people are like, we really shouldn't use this as like the main metric for our country, societies, whatever. And then it becomes that anyway. And now we've just been dealing with it for like 70 years or whatever. But I don't know. It's wild just to see how that happened.

So I can completely understand why something like this is so appealing, right? Yeah. And I think that's a very good entry point for thinking about it. Because I think that on the one hand, GDP is this like construction of around the time of World War II that becomes globalized and sort of instantiates in this really intense way, this pressure to like expand the economy, to find efficiency gains and so on. And there's been this large movement to get. beyond GDP.

And it kind of has this character of trying to build something like a multi-craterial economy, like what I'm talking about. The UN had all these meetings. They generated these sustainable development goals. That's sort of an indication that, or what they end up saying is that if we wanted to build an economy that actually made us happy,

that actually improved well-being, it would have to try to do many different things, right? We have to try to chase many different goals. Many of them, sustainability-based, many of them anti-poverty or anti-insecurity and inequality and beyond that. But what difference does it actually turn out to make, right? It's not just like society came up with this measure and then got trapped within it. That measure of GDP really connects to much a deeper logic in our society.

And, you know, that's why in spite of all of the, like the accumulated scientific and institutional evidence and efforts to say, at least we should build an economy that's as focused on sustainability as it is on efficiency, we don't see very much movement in that direction, right? All of the governments still end up finding that they privilege, as you were saying, like trying to encourage investments that generate growth over those that fulfill these other needs. And I guess part of what I want to say about that is on the one hand, to those who focus on sustainability, that's really important as a goal. But we need to see that having an economy me that's just efficient and sustainable isn't enough. It has to also do all of these other

things, right? So we need to think not just how to get from one goal to two, but from one goal to many. And then the other thing I would say is that a big problem with the UN framework, and here we could talk more about it, but it's based on this framework from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, this capabilities approach, what they call neo-Ristatelian perspectives on well-being. But the point to me is that these end up being highly technocratic proposals that these people come up with. It's sort of like from this highest level, the state is going to somehow figure out what are the values we need to implement in our economy? And then it's going to set about doing those things. It's not a framework in which democratic, like from below decision making is really

emphasized. And part of why we know this is that they tend to make it seem like, oh, we could just chase all these different goals, right? Like, they don't think about how actually a lot of these positive goals that we want, like efficiency and sustainability, can come into conflict or sustainability and good quality work or, you know, free time, whatever it might be. There's some point at which there's a tradeoff you have to make. And instead of thinking about the conflicts, they tend to sort of paper those over and just imagine we can do all these things, you know, we can just figure it out.

And that ends up promoting this very technocratic vision of politics that I'm also trying to. I'm intervening in that space and I'm also trying to come at it from a different angle. Yeah, which I think is really good, right? You know, obviously we see this like growing and increasing push toward technocracy, right? And obviously we've seen that for years under kind of neoliberal capitalism, but we know that like our Silicon Valley overlords love the notion that experts and particularly themselves should be making the decisions that that kind of govern society, right? They're very anti-democratic in that way, which is obviously completely against this kind of vision that you're laying out. But I want to put a pin in the criteria and the

democratic aspect for just a second, because I want to ask you, you know, beyond the kind of multi-critarial nature of how we are going to judge the economy and kind of the outcomes that we're getting from these activities, are there other things that you see as kind of like fundamental assumptions or what the foundations are going to be in this kind of society beyond just that kind of nature of the economic system? Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing I try to say in piece is that it's not, I try to say it's not a blueprint, right? It's just a framework. It's kind of a basic set of institutions we would need to get this thing going. And I also talk about how in order to make the whole thing work and to make it a left project, an emancipatory project, it would

really have to come with major increase in the experience of economic security of people all around the world, right? Like, we have to actually, in order for people to participate in a full way in democratically deciding their own futures and the progress of society and the progress of technology, we have to get everyone to a level where they're not so scared and worried and focused on their survival.

So just figuring out what that means because it's not, there isn't some kind of technical determination of what that basic level is that people need. It is also a political question. But solving that for people around the world would be something essential. When we get into the specifics of the society, it's also really clear that I'm trying to say that there's this direct link

between an economy organized around profit and therefore being efficiency first and having these constraints and limits that we need to break through to get to another world. So I am describing an economy that is no longer organized around private ownership of firms, where firms are no longer existing to generate a profit-based or rent-based income for the owners of those firms, where we've really gotten rid of the financial market entirely and replaced it with a very different system for allocating investment resources. So it starts to look really different from a capitalist economy, but something that also makes it look different from the way people thought about this in the 20th century. It's not a centrally planned economy. People still have something like

money. They still have a lot of freedom to decide what it is that they want to buy. They still work in firms. Maybe they're more like worker owned or something like that. Or worker owned in a different sense, but certainly like worker operated and managed. And so there's a whole set of institutions you need that replace the profit-driven economy and that result in this much freer system. But yeah, I think, you know, I, it's not published in NLR, but I have a whole plan for how you would actually transition and how you actually would do these things like knock out the profit-based economy and deflate the stock markets and get rid of the whole financial architecture. But I'm going to have to publish that in another venue.

Maybe part three, if they'll let you. But what you're talking about there, right, this notion of there are still going to be markets, that was something that stood out to me as I was reading it as well, right? Because obviously we know about these visions of communism or socialism from the 20th century that was very much around, you know, we're going to have the central planning. We're going to take the market out of this. you know, we're going to try to create this kind of massive plan that is going to, you know, have every aspect of how the economy is going to work. We're not going to need to worry about

money. And you're kind of saying, that is not exactly what I'm envisioning here. You know, there's obviously there's a lot of planning involved in your system too. There's a lot of planning involved in the capitalist system that we live in today that we don't always acknowledge, right? But the markets are still there. And there are even, you know, certain forms of money. Obviously, you have different names of them and they work differently than what we have today. So I wonder if you could kind of expand on that a little bit and explain to us how you see that working. I think it's really important to take seriously the failures of central planning in the 20th century. Sometimes I do think that there is this kind of inner link between the technocratic central planning fantasies of 20th century socialism and some of the tech overlord stuff we're seeing today.

Obviously, 20th century socialist started off with a very emancipatory idea about what central planning would achieve. But it ended up being a bunch of bureaucratic overlords deciding everything for everyone else. And in a lot of ways, I think there's some really important sense in which, in order for central planning to work, they really had to lock people into a vision of progress that really wasn't what people wanted. And that's part of why they had to suppress dissent and democracy in order to impose this very growth-oriented framework on the population. I think that by the 1960s and 70s, all throughout the Eastern Bloc, there's a real sense that without markets, you just cannot get production to work in a complex economy. And there's a lot to say about that. But the basic idea is just that even if you could come up with a coherent plan, there's many problems that arise around the implementation of a plan.

One company ends up not sending materials that are unusable or doesn't end up delivering its products. people get things that are the right inputs for some other machine, but not for the ones they actually have. And so within all these economies, you ended up with these black barter markets that had to be tolerated because without them, production wouldn't have happened at all, right? It was only the informal trading

that made it possible for these economies to work. And so I think by the end of the 20th century, there's some sense that you need markets. But a real aporia, just like this open question, well, how could we get markets to do this kind of emancipated world, like this actually free world that we were hoping to get at the start of the 20th century. And what I'm doing tries to really solve that problem by thinking about how to integrate markets into a system that's not oriented around profit and therefore can

kind of organize itself in this way where all of these different goals and the things that actually people need to be happy can be brought in. And I'm happy to explain the technicals of that if you want, but I don't know if you want to go there now or go somewhere else. Well, there's one piece that I want to pick up on and that I want to return to something else, which is kind of the conception of money that you lay out, right? Because that felt quite novel to me, right? You know, we are used to just having money. We spend it however we want and money works in whatever way we want it to work in.

But you are kind of basically describing different types of currency that would work in different ways depending on how they're used, how they're allocated. So I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit because I thought that was quite novel and interesting. Yeah. So I think it's really important just as a brief background. that before capitalism, in many societies, there were multiple currencies that circulated in different ways that had different kind of characteristics in realms of action. Some would be for

local trade between people who knew each other. Some would only be for long distance trade. Some would be for taxes and tribute to the state. So you have these like divergent and multiple forms of money. And one thing about capitalism is that it tries to unify all of these functions of money. And there's different ways of talking about what those functions are. One really important distinction is this idea that money in our society is both a means of exchange and a store of value. So you can use your money to go about society buying and selling things, but you can also take money out of circulation and say, oh, I'm not using this to engage in buying and selling. This is my money. It becomes my wealth. It becomes my private property. It becomes a store of value

for me. And in the world I'm describing, it's really important to break money up and disentangle some of these functions, especially to get away from the store of value part of that. That's very important in capitalism. That's very connected to the private property economy. So in this new envision, there's these two types of currencies, credits, the C, consumption. That's just what you use to buy things. And in many ways, that's like how you spend money as a consumer in our society. But the difference is that you couldn't say, oh, well, you know, I'm not going to spend everything I have. I'm going to use it to buy some companies. I'm going to use it to like purchase things in the production side of the economy.

You can't do that. You can save consumer savings. Like you can save for big purchases or to go on vacations, but you can't use that money to influence either how production is organized or to influence the political system. That's like a separate currency. And then the other currency called points, it's just P for production, handles all the transaction side of the economy for businesses. And the point there is that it functions as a means of exchange.

like companies are obtaining these points and spending them to pay for things like labor or the use of land and machines. They're also using them to get what economists called intermediate inputs, all the different things they need to produce. But they can't take any leftover points and say, hey, I didn't spend all my points. So I'm going to turn these into my own personal income and pay myself out with it. Or, hey, I didn't spend all my points. So I'm going to use this to invest in purchasing new plant and equipment and so on, it sort of focuses the producers on just using the point resources they have to get what they need. And that ends up being the mechanism that solves this very basic problem because there's no longer any point or even possibility of

accumulating financial surpluses on the production side of the economy. And that's what encourages all these actors, like if you run a child care facility, you're not going to try to squeeze these child minders and your facilities and try to make as much profit as you can off of like taking care of kids, it's more like, okay, you have this budget, you have to, you know, people have to work there, you need other resources to take care of the kids, and how are you going to spend that entire budget across all the different goals that you have as a childminding or child care facility? If you're working at Apple and you're making technology, it's like you have this budget, you have all these different things you need to do and you're just going to figure

out how to spend that in a way that doesn't result in horrible conditions for the actual manufacturers of your technology and you're trying to do it as sustainably as possible and you're trying to meet all these other goals and you're just going to spend your budget across them you don't need you're free from the necessity of having to try to accumulate financial surpluses in order to survive and grow and that's kind of what makes possible this very different and very much freer economy and it's also very important to say just briefly that in the past, it wasn't really possible to do this because we didn't have the possibility of making digital currencies. And something really important about what's happened just over the past

few years is that machine learning algorithms have become really good at detecting financial fraud. And so it becomes much more possible in the world that we're in today to have these separate currencies with their own realms of action and then to organize it in such a way that it's very difficult for people to cheat the system because you can flag suspicious transactions and try to really keep that separation in place. I'm just wondering, you know, if we can make sure that these, the credits are called that because it makes it sound like we're living in like a sci-fi world, you know, for exchanging credits and it makes me think of Star Wars and another way to try to sell it to people, right?

Yeah, it's a feature of like an early utopia by Edward Bellamy called Looking Backward. He like invents the credit card, you know, and has that basic idea in the text. I want to go back to this notion of the different criteria, you know, the different kind metrics that we would use in an economy like this. And you were saying that, you know, there could be these sustainability ones. You could think about kind of different social goals. You could still think about efficiency and those sorts of things. How do we come up with these different criteria that we want to manage the economy? Is this something that comes from some kind of government, economic authority? Does it come from some kind of democratic process?

How do you foresee that happening? So that's maybe the most, to me, the most important thing about this is that a lot of people, when they try to think about what it would mean to have a values-based economy, they think it's important to start with the problem of coming up with the values. And so that's that whole, as I was talking about before, this Sen-Nusbaum approach that's in the Beyond-GDP movement, right? Because the goal of the Beyond-GDP movement is primarily to figure out what are our values and then how to push those into the economy. And my approach, it's the exact inversion of that. So the idea here is that because we're trying to create these democratic,

but not democratic in the sense of just like, oh, there's some big decision of our democracy, but really that kind of bottom-up idea, that it's people on the ground who are making these decisions, not technocratic people above who are making them, what it allows me to do is say, okay, we design this economy to give us procedures that force us to make choices across our values.

values, but doesn't actually tell us what those values have to be. So, you know, if you're in the healthcare sector, there's going to be all these different levels at which people are going to be discussing and debating what's important and what matters to them. But it's not necessary that we come to an agreement about what matters to us. And I think that's just so obvious and important because we have such, on the one hand, we have such disagreements about what values matter to us, right? Like even if we agree that sustainability matters, we're going to

have really different definitions of that, different ways of prioritizing elements of that within our views. And also, the fact of the matter is, we often don't know exactly how to articulate our values. There's a bit of a, you know, I know it when I see it thing, that what matters is actually to decide across concrete alternatives that embody our values in different ways. That's the way that we are often presented with our value questions. It's not like, in the abstract, what do you think about sustainability? But hey, like, we have this tech that we're trying to build. And we can build it in one of two ways, and it's going to have divergent outcomes for the environment, for workers, and so on. And which do you choose? It says something about your values, right?

So the idea is that by focusing on these procedures for choice at all these different levels, at the level of you as a household or an individual, at the level of you at a firm, at the level of you participating in an association, whether that's like a techno club or your local wine group or your political party, that are political associations you're involved in, or at the level of what turns out to be very important for this vision, the investment boards, these democratic vehicles where we decide what kind of futures we want to head towards. In every case, the idea is that by focusing on the choice procedures that surface these concrete possibilities and forces to choose, our values become part of our conversation,

but we don't ever have to agree on them in advance. I think that agree on values in advance thing is like the impassable obstacle that most people who try to work on the kind of thing I'm working on, that's the obstacle they hit and they can't figure out how to move forward. Because they have to get rid of politics in order to make that decision about values possible. Whereas for me, conversation about values are inherently and irreducibly political conversations. This is the aspect of the vision that you were laying out that really made me kind of go back to automation in the future of work, your first book that you put together, right? Because as you were saying earlier, you're talking

a lot about the automation discourse of the 2010s in that book, very much critiquing it, of course, and these notions of like fully automated luxury communism and things like that. And in that vision, it's very much like, you know, the computers are getting to this point where the algorithms can kind of sort out the economy for us. And then we can kind of live our lives and not have to worry so much about it and it's very much like the economy and production is happening over here and our lives are happening over here and we don't need to worry so much about it because the computers are taking care of it and your vision is very much more like we still need to be like very involved in all of the decisions that are happening here yeah it's going to be

difficult in some ways because these are political decisions they're always political decisions But this is what democracy looks like and this is basically what a better future should ideally be, I think. So I just want to give you the opportunity to kind of discuss that kind of distinction and contrast and how you understand that, I guess. Yeah, I think when you look at the critical literature on technology, right, one of the most important points that that literature is just trying to hammer home over and over again is that when we imagine that technology just develops down preset paths and is, just like advancing, right, along those pathways, that it benefits certain people in society to push that view, right? It benefits the tech companies, basically,

to have that view. And in reality, developing technology is really difficult. There's all of these choice points along the way, and decisions are constantly being made about which futures we're going to go towards. And I think the problem on the left, which makes total sense, is that the future looks so dark,

especially when we inhabit and think about it from the perspective of what these tech companies are doing, it's kind of hard to remember that, for example, when it comes to sustainability, it's like, yes, we need to do a green transition. We have to get to a non-fossil fuel-based economy. But actually, once we start to look into that a little bit more, there's just many different kinds of non-fossil-fuel-based economies

we can have. And if we start to build that out, we can think like, oh, actually, you know, when we do the green transitions, There's multiple positive vision, like there's multiple futures that we have to choose. They're all positive. They just require, they express our values in different ways, right? Some of them, we don't eat meat. And other ones, we eat some meat.

And some, we have more energy and we're pushing for more energy in different forms. And other ones, we're kind of constraining it. We're dealing with the problem of reparations and global inequalities in different ways across these different frameworks. You know, different energy sources are going to promote different kinds of lives and make others harder and stuff. And so I think that a lot of times, both the fantasy that technology develops on its own

and the fantasy that technology is going to reach this singularity apotheosis, where suddenly everything is gonna be possible, but in this way where it's like, each individual gets to have their own life and do what they want, right? They're all visions that in one way or another, like avoid the political,

either by saying there is no politics or somehow like things will develop to this point where we won't need them anymore. It'll just be a matter of individual choice. And I think that we should be really skeptical of all of that, right? And we should think that, yes, no matter what future we're heading towards, and even some of the darker futures that climate change could bring about, there's still going to be positive alternatives for what kinds of progress

and futures we want to see together. And that requires us to, like, really take that on and think about it seriously. And unfortunately, I think the left, in the course of the 19th and 20th century, most people on the left, like kind of the vast majority, saw the end of capitalism and the birth of a plans and rational society as being about the emergence of a totally harmonious society. They too wanted to suppress this idea of the continuation of politics after the end of capitalism. And that's why I think the left fully automated luxury communism thing was so appealing. It was another version of that fantasy of a world without the need for collective judgment and difference and conflict and the search for a future. I mean, you know, I'm not trying to say that the kind of politics of the future is going to be so terrible like our politics often are, right? Like our politics are very much expressions of a world of domination and the effort required to keep so many people from having a say in the future that we build.

But bringing all those people in and having everyone have a say, we're just going to want different things and figuring out how to manage that. What are the institutional frameworks that allow us to choose which of the positive futures we want to move towards? That's kind of like the core of it. Absolutely. It's no surprise that this completely gives with what I feel. If people listen to our initial interview about your initial book, they will know that because I was a big critic of fully automated.

luxury communism and I read your book and I was like oh my god this is what I've been waiting for I love this but even in your vision that doesn't mean there's no role for technology and for you know systems in in planning how this economy is going to work how this society is going to function so you know if we have this vision unlike the fully automated luxury communism side of things that you know we're going to have this kind of all powerful AI guiding the way that the economy is working and we don't need to worry about it because it's all been set and and everything is now abundant and super efficient, and there's no scarcity left and all this kind of stuff.

How do you see the kind of role of technology in helping to plan the kind of economy that you are setting out and how that is distinct from that other vision of how it might work? Yeah, I think there's two ways to answer that question. Maybe we can take them in different directions. But I think one point here is just that the world that we're trying to build will be a world that

requires an immense amount of technical expertise. right? Like, it's not going to be a world. Like, part of the automation fantasy is kind of about the end of expertise, right? It's like the idea that everyone becomes replaceable. The machines, you know, absorb all of the knowledge and then develop it. So there's no role left for like particular knowledge as and expertise, even about what we want, let alone, like, how to build a bridge, right? And I think that that fantasy is obviously wrong. Like, technologies are developing that maybe make it possible to do things without an immense skill set. there's going to be all this need for expertise. And so we need an economy that kind of like absorbs and includes all of that expert knowledge and in fact generalizes it.

You know, I think that one of the worst features about our society is that there's all these people who clean and who cook and who take care of children, their expertise is not like organized and taken seriously in the way that tech engineers expertise is, right? So building a society that takes that seriously, a society. where the development of technology tries to bring in all of these diverse forms of knowledge and expertise. Like, imagine if when buildings were designed or refurbished, we actually cared about how they were going to be cleaned

and, like, change the structure of the building to make it easier for them to be cleaned by the people who come in at night. Nothing about that knowledge and ability is included in our technology today because we just, you know, society is not we don't, but society as a whole somehow doesn't care about all these people. And there's huge questions here that I think are really unanswered. Like sometimes people say, like, mining is just so horrible. We can't extract anything from the earth.

But mining looks really different depending on the society you're in, the labor laws, whether it's this huge labor, sorry, capital intensive, you know, mining that's very safe for the workers in it, or it's this very informal form of mining in like Bolivia or Congo that's really dangerous and involves a lot of child labor. So I think we just don't even know, you know, if we had this multivalable, criteria development of technology, we don't even really know, like, what are the tradeoffs, you know, like what are the limits of making a lot of what we do sustainable? I think that in reality, in our society, it just isn't important enough to invest in. And so we don't even

know, once we bring all these different forms of technical expertise to bear, what kinds of possibilities will open up for us. I think I occupy this position that's always a bit hard for me, because I'm quite skeptical about generative AI and the approach to AI and like all this crazy stuff that the tech companies say. But it's not from this position where I'm like, I'm negative on like what technology could do in a freer society, right? In a way, I really want this to appeal to these technologists, you know, and researchers and say, hey, let's fight for a world where you can actually design technologies that make the world better in the way that you want. Let's think about how our society constrains you from developing technology. Like, think about social media, like the way that as Facebook and meta moved in such a horrible direction, these engineers started whistleblowing.

Like, they don't want to build what they're building. They want to build some. They probably want to build technologies that actually connect us and make us feel more together. Not that, like, maximize our engagement and anger us, right? And turn us against each other. So, like, let's work together, technologists to, like, build that world. you know, here's the framework that could start to do that. That's one thing about technology.

Totally. And I want to hop in before we talk about the second part because I couldn't agree more, right? I feel like this is one of the things that I'm, like, beating my drum on all the time, right? That technology doesn't go in just one direction, that we have the type of technology that we have right now because of the society that we live in and because of the pressures that are on tech development, right, because it needs to maximize shareholder value, because there are these particular business models that shape how it is, how it's developed, what these companies need to chase, that technology is developed to turn profits and to increase

the power of these companies not to serve the public good, right? And that there's so many opportunities to develop technology in a very different way if kind of the framework in which we were developing technology was very different, right? And earlier this year, I spoke to some workers who used to work in the U.S. Digital Service before it was, you know, kind of taken over and renamed Doge and, you know, utterly destroyed, right? And even then, like, like, just talking to them was such a revelation to me because it was like, it's not like there is only one way of developing technology right now. It's like even there, developing technology in the public sector and they had worked in the public sector and the private

sector. And they were explaining, you know, how different it was and how the approach was so much different in the public sector because you're thinking so much more about design and about all the different people who are going to interact with it and that you need to serve all these people because this is the government. This is not a private company. And it's not move fast and break things. It's like you're being slow. You're being more deliberate because when the product comes out, it needs to actually work and to serve all these people. And it's like, this is one example of it, but it's like already we have these different ways that tech is being developed. And if we had these broader structural, societal economic changes that would allow

technology to work differently rather than what has guided it the past few decades, then I think technology could serve us much better than it is today. And that's one of the things I find exciting about the vision that you're laying out because it very much aligns with that kind of recognition. Well, if you want to talk about the other side, I mean, I totally agree with everything that you say there. Totally. Sorry, I meant to say, but yeah, go ahead and give us the second point of this too, right? Yeah. Because I think maybe the other place, one good head with that is like, well, how do we use technology to build this type of economy? Because we want it to incorporate like the best of what we can do with the technologies we have. And I think that in the 20th,

century the idea about what technology could do or would deliver eventually is something like central planning right and that is this economy where we we sort of imagine progress as something that's just like technocratically determined and then like imposed by society on society though as it turns out by like some unaccountable party on the rest of the population which also kind of feels like the fully automated luxury communism vision right that you're going to have the society that's going to plan everything and then you don't need to worry about it right exactly I think that's That's the basic idea that we're trying to explode here, right? But we want a vision where technology does something positive for us.

And I think that the digital currency system, the credits point system that I mentioned, you can really start to do a lot of cool things once you have that in place. Because on the one hand, I think we'd really want to protect what consumers are doing. We wouldn't want it to be public knowledge, like how you're spending your money or your credits on whatever it is that you want to do. Like, it should be a liberal society in that sense that you have a lot of protections to live your life the way you want to.

But we don't need to apply that on the production side. On the production side, we can have open books. We can have total transparency of what companies are doing. And we can use that to build this, what I call in the piece, this gigantic data matrix that allows us to know about what we're doing as a society. Now, part of that would just be to take what currently exists, like Amazon, for example, or Google. or Facebook, they have this immense proprietary knowledge of all the goings on about society and what

the trends are that they're using to sell advertising essentially and to make a lot of money and to extract a lot of money from the rest of the economy. But we can make that into an open source system. We could have a world where like we as a society just have an immense amount of information about what those trends are and then we can use algorithms to forecast future developments. Now, if we were going to do that, you know, in a fuller way, I think we would need to connect this economic data to biophysical data about, you know, all the different Earth systems that what we're producing is interacting with. We'd also want all these social indicators that refer to like levels of trust and, you know, crime if they're still crime or whatever it is,

like all these social goings on and also subjective indicators of like how people are feeling with different aspects of their lives. And we could use this to kind of build this immense forecasting apparatus where we're saying, hey, these are the trends that are unfolding in our society. And we can use that to do two things. One is we could kind of, without having any central planning, we could bring the global down to the local by just making suggestions to people, like saying, hey, you know, this supplier is being crunched.

Like maybe you could switch to another one or, you know, other people with companies like yours are finding that like using this tool improves worker well-being or something like that. But because they're just suggestions, you have the possibility of like denying those and going a different way. And I think here I'm thinking a lot about a feature of our increasingly machine learning determined society, right? Where what do these generative AI programs do? They're just based on all available knowledge that they can access, making predictions about what the average thing is to do based on all the knowledge that already exists. But if we're going to advance as a society, we have to do things that no one's come up with yet, right? Like, we have to have the

capacity to strike out a new direction. So I think it's very important that this forecasting stuff is more like suggestive efforts to bring greater coherence to things while recognizing that at all these different levels. People might want to push off and do something completely different and they should have the right to do that. The other thing that's really important about this, and it kind of relates to that same idea, is that none of these forecasts are things where we have to do where we have to go where we're going. Right? The idea of forecast shouldn't just be to say, here's where we're going. People want more cars, build more cars, right? It might be like, no, people want more cars. This is bad. We need to find some alternative structures to start to build public transportation to, like, create alternatives to the future that we're heading towards. And so I think that this is, again, a very anti-central planning idea that, like, we want to build this kind of digital infrastructure that people can query and find out where we're going so that they can democratically contest where we're going and try to build and turn us towards different

futures that they think are important. So I think we can imagine, you know, all of these new possibilities contained in our digital technologies actually enlivening democracy and helping us get to different places rather than kind of like fixing us into trends that we're already on. It makes a ton of sense. As you were describing that though, I was thinking like, man, the statistics agency in this society is going to be like a powerful and influential force. Well, that's why you need, I mean, I think there's, again, like I was reading quite a lot of STS stuff about this. And it is true.

It's like the statistical agency would itself need to be open, right? Like it would have to be possible for there to be citizen science, for people to say, hey, we need new metrics. These metrics don't capture what we're after because the society doesn't have to agree on its values in order to be able to decide what to do. The values and the concrete alternatives just like are important within these pursuers. where people are making choices across concrete alternatives, you could have many different statistical frameworks, right?

Like we could have many different measures of sustainability and you could be saying, hey, I think this is the one that matters. And I could be saying, no, it's that one. So we wouldn't have to, like with capitalism, agree on like five metrics that then become the like organizing ones of society. But it's true, the development of statistics would be very important. And that's why we'd have to open it up and kind of like, you know, yeah, like think about how to democratize the production of this kind of knowledge too.

having the five statistics could be fun though because you know we could just like put them up in the central square and be like how are we doing on the statistics guys you know but it's it's fine it's people can have their own that's okay but earlier you were talking about how you do have a vision for how to make progress toward this right and you know as we start to wind down i think that's an important thing to think about right because i think it's easy to look at something like this and just say like oh it seems impossible why bother especially in the kind of you know society that that that we're in now and how, you know, how politics has kind of worked for the past few decades, right? I think people feel really kind of disconnected from that system and feel not very much hope that that things can get better in this moment, right? So, so I wonder, you know, you lay out this vision. You've obviously done a ton of work to get it to this point, you know, to think through the really difficult complex elements of how it would be. What avenues do you see to make progress toward this kind of society, you know, not even just to achieve it, but to start to head in that direction? I would say one thing that really guided me is this idea that if you come up with a viable vision of the future, you should be coming up with it in part to figure out how to get there.

Do you know what I mean? Like there's this famous line from Alice in Wonderland. If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. And the idea of knowing where you're going is that it should help you identify which roads would actually take you to that place. And here, at the kind of largest level, I really draw on, in the first part, in a critical way, a lot of Keynesian ideas. Because I think there are some real resources there for thinking about how to start transitioning an economy. I think that in the neoliberal era, we've become really, like, part of what makes us so pessimistic is the sense that, oh, the global economy, it's so interconnected. Every piece is reliant on every other piece.

And it feels like there's nothing we can do to change anything without changing everything. And I think that actually some of these old 1940s and 50s Keynesian ideas help us think about actually, no, like you can't break off pieces of the economy and start to change them in ways that violate the terms of a private property economy and like everything that, you know, the capitalists hold dear. But that doesn't mean you can't do it if you don't have power. that's another very important piece of it. I would say it's much more an implementation plan. Like, my transition plan isn't a plan of how you get power. I think getting power is always based on really local and specific conditions and strategies. Sometimes people just come to power very unexpectedly.

Like in July and August of last year, suddenly, like these student protests in Bangladesh erupted into a transformation of the government. And I think that, you know, if Bangladesh had a more worked out transition plan, And they would have been able to do something really cool and not just invite Muhammad Eunice to like take over the government. But so I think the way you you gain the capacity to do things is that you have to be able to implement capital controls and you have to break the independence of the central bank. That's like the two framing conditions for being able to gain policy autonomy. So you're very pro what Donald Trump is doing to the Federal Reserve. That's a thing, right?

It is true. It's weird that all these people are suddenly defending the independence of the central bank. Bank? Like, no, breaking the independence of the central bank is an incredibly important part of democracy. Obviously, we would want to do it differently than what he's doing. But breaking that is a goal. And we should, if we're thinking about things we want to do, that should be one of the things we want to do. Because if you can implement capital controls and break the independence of central bank, the limit of what you can do going forward is on the one hand, like the power of your local capitalists. And on the other hand, the degree to which you depend on trade with the outside world.

what the world needs from you and what you need from the world is the last remaining constraint on what you can do internally. And for many countries, that's going to be so limiting a constraint that you can't do that much. But there's many countries that do, the world needs stuff from them, and that gives them more autonomy. Like China has all these conditions, and that's why they have a lot of policy autonomy locally. But once you have those things, you can build basically a national investment authority

that would start to say, hey, our society needs better housing. It needs, you know, maybe better schools. It needs all of this infrastructure. It needs a green transition. And we are going to create this vehicle that's going to just start making these investments. And then you would need to simultaneously with starting to build that, starting to democratize and decentralize that apparatus to, like, create these sectoral investment boards that have a lot more democratic direction.

But you'd kind of build that slowly as you build this investment board. You'd have to go into the financial markets. They would go crazy anyway. And you'd have to just start, you'd have to, like the Fed did in the COVID crisis, open up a window in the Fed and just say, hey, we'll buy all your assets and we'll give you this document that says, like, you're entitled to a certain amount of income, but you can't sell this. It's like in the proposal, it's like this very extensive way that you wind down the financial

markets by pushing everyone into this one financial asset that I call transitional annuity bonds, that then when they expire, like private property and, you know, the means of production is gone. You have to have this whole program for transitioning firms over to be non-profits and to democratize their operations. We need these like new associations for workers, you know, that are kind of like unions, but also take on all these other training roles and help organize people politically and organize the expertise of society. And of course, I forgot to say the most important part, you need like punishing taxes on the rich, right? To obliterate their ability to shape the politics of society through their wealth. And so once you, you

you get those basic frameworks in place, you can start hammering on all of these different aspects of building the society, introducing in the final step, these currencies. What I want to do and what I'd like to find, maybe there's listeners out there. I appeal to the technologist in an earlier point. On this one, it's like, you know, we have to appeal to like the policy people to like generate and build out a model of if we came to power, how would we transition? But I think the other thing is just that like really building and invigorating associated. of working people around this idea of constructing positive alternative visions of the future of what we could do.

I think across all the different realms of society, we need to start imagining the different futures, like the specific futures for those industries that we want to envision. Because having that, having politically organized groups of workers building out those visions today is really important to, like, informing the possibilities of tomorrow. We can't fix the tech sector unless all these people in tech are already starting to do that. And we're seeing that happening, right, in opposition to Silicon Valley. We're seeing tech workers and tech-interested people start to build those positive futures. We see it also in the sustainability space.

But like, what about everything else? We need to start building all of this associational capacity to kind of like say what futures we could walk towards and then really fight to bring them about in the world through this plan, that I'm trying to start laying out anyway. Absolutely. No, I think it sounds fascinating, right? And it brings to mind, like, you know, I remember the stories about the Lucas plan, which I think was in like the 80s, you know, these workers in the UK who came up with a different way that their factory could produce different things other than like arms, I think it was at the time,

right? And they were thinking about air conditioning units and other things that could be produced, right? And so like, why can we not see that on a much broader level? Why can other people not think about, you know, how production might change in their workplaces or how things might be organized differently if they had kind of the autonomy and the power to actually start to think that way. I think it's totally possible. And just on your point about, you know, taxing the rich really, really highly, I think, you know, making Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and these people pay loads of taxes right now would be a very popular policy. I feel like you watch that show Succession and you see what goes on with Elon Musk and you just think like purely from a mental

health standpoint, we have to take away these people's money. It's like really bad for that. It makes them insane. And then they do insane things in the world. Just from the perspective of happiness alone, like, we need to take away all these people's money just like to make a minimally better world. But it is really the condition, I think. You really get the sense from the past that if you do not quickly move to prevent the rich from shaping politics, you're in deep trouble. And of course, that's such a feature of the world we have today. And hopefully why it would be so so popular. I like the framing of, you know, we're not just, you know, helping to fund all these things.

We're taking all this money back from them, seizing their power. But we're actually helping them in the process, you know, because their minds are being totally shot by it, which is absolutely true. Aaron, it's always great to chat with you. I feel like I always come away with like so many ideas and I'm thinking about so many things after talking to you. It was really great to read this series to, you know, get a better idea of what you've been working on for the past few years.

I can't wait to see, you know, when you kind of expand on it further and what more you have in the works on it. Thanks so much for coming on the show for talking to me about it. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Aaron Beninov is an assistant professor at Cornell University and the author of Automation in the Future of Work. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris

Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech won't save us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.