In the posthumously published essays of the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, notes emerged in which Hawking attempted to make speculative claims about the future of humanity. Among other things, he predicted that due to advances in genetics, "superhumans" could easily emerge within a few decades. Hawking discussed what political problems this might cause and predicted that "ordinary" humans would be unable to compete with the superhumans and could eventually become extinct.
Hawking's reasoning is typical among those who analyze the future primarily through a technological or natural-scientific lens: they often believe the future will be full of technological innovations—and that the resulting political difficulties will be resolved by the disappearance of those who are technologically uncompetitive. However, the history of humanity suggests a very different outcome. The appearance of any "superhumans" could easily be most dangerous for the superhumans themselves—since humanity's first reaction to the appearance of some alien community is often exclusion or persecution. Within a democratic framework, this would mean that "anti-superhuman" sentiment could be a winning electoral strategy, while being "pro-superhuman" would at best get a political force into parliament. The "superhumans" would likely have to rely solely on "superhuman rights" advocacy organizations and NGOs—they would not be the danger, but rather they would be in danger relative to the social majority opposing them.
This—perhaps only partly amusing—example seeks to highlight how much the political dimension is missing from technology discourses about the future. There is an abundance of research, analyses, and projections about the technological changes that lie ahead, and many also examine the economic effects of these changes. Yet the exploration of possible political consequences is consistently absent.
This is despite the fact that the great socioeconomic transformations of the past have consistently been accompanied by enormous political upheavals. The first industrial revolution—which in the 18th and 19th centuries led to industrialization and urbanization through the appearance of the first machines—completely transformed the political relations not only of the affected countries but of the entire world. In Europe, feudal relations were dissolved, the bourgeoisie grew stronger, and parties representing their interests appeared: democratic party competition began, often taking the form of the conservative–liberal conflict. Europe and North America became the world's leading powers. The second industrial revolution—which took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and led to mass production—created the industrial working class and its parties, the socialist and communist parties, placing class conflicts at the center of political debate. The third industrial revolution—also known as the digital revolution, which took place in the last third of the 20th century—contributed to the collapse of the communist world order, the rise of right-wing economic policies in Western Europe and America, and the formation of today's more fragmented party system.
The technological changes of the future may bring about the fourth industrial revolution, at the center of which stand the spread of data-driven information, the interconnection of technologies, and the development of artificial intelligence. Following the logic of similarly large changes in the past, we can expect radical social and, correspondingly, political transformations as a result of this fourth industrial revolution.
The present paper undertakes to contribute to initiating analyses of the political consequences of these changes. Given this nature, it should be expected to formulate questions and raise problems rather than provide ready-made answers. The paper begins by discussing the effects of the fourth industrial revolution, then its presumed political conflicts. Following this, I analyze the positions of Hungarian parties, touching on the opportunities inherent in the topic—and at the same time the unpreparedness of domestic parties.
Technological changes carry political consequences by affecting a large part of society and exerting a clearly identifiable impact. That is, not every technological change is felt by the political system. The changes most identifiable as "frontier technologies" can transform every area of life, but most of them directly affect only a specific group or lack system-transforming impact. It is useful to imagine the social effects of these technologies in a two-dimensional function, whose two axes are the extent of the impact and its conflictual nature.
| Conflictual nature | Low exposure | High exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Low | Healthcare innovation | 3D printing and its consequences |
| High | Human genetic manipulation | Automation and job losses |
Since we do not know the specific technological discoveries, we can only offer examples of these phenomena—but within this coordinate system, we can potentially place any future innovation. The extent of the impact refers to the proportion of people regularly, daily affected by a given change. We encounter certain changes only in the rarest cases: a typical example is healthcare, where fortunately only very few people and very rarely need the most modern treatments. Changes in warfare—self-guiding drones and robotic weapons—similarly affect the majority of people directly only in extreme cases. In contrast, changes in mass communication can literally affect everyone—just as the spread of the internet transformed our everyday lives.
Political life is transformed by social changes that are connected to some conflict, and the more intensely and durably so, the more a conflictual area emerges that affects everyday life. The spread of the internet, for example, remained typically conflict-free, and therefore had almost no party-political impact. Initially, the appearance of social media also seemed like a depoliticized phenomenon—but by now this area has become highly conflictual due to economic concentration, changes affecting press freedom, and the possibilities for manipulation. It is worth adding that political actors possess significant autonomy in defining areas of conflict: politics can create value or ideological conflicts even from seemingly marginal issues. Therefore, we can presume that human genetic manipulation will lead to serious conflicts even if it affects only a minority of people in the short to medium term.
Among the areas affecting many people, there are those that almost certainly lead to political conflicts—where political actors cannot fail to react. Of these, automation currently appears by far the most important, making it a perfect example of what kinds of cleavage lines to expect and what political alternatives may emerge.
The spread of automation represents one of the most important technological problems because the elimination of jobs can potentially affect everyone. While every new technology's appearance has some labor market consequence, the automation associated with the fourth industrial revolution is the first change in history of a scale that could make every currently known job obsolete. There is no consensus on what percentage of jobs automation will actually affect. A thorough analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts, over a fifteen-year horizon, that 35 percent of jobs could fall victim to automation. The much-cited research conducted by Oxford University puts this figure even higher, at 47 percent. Moreover, there are analyses that project robotization even for creative and high-level decision-making processes, given the development of algorithmic and self-learning capabilities. The other extreme is represented by OECD researchers, who consider much lower figures, around 10–14 percent, to be probable. Yet it is easy to see that even accepting these lowest figures, we can expect very serious changes: if we accept even the most conservative estimates and assume that roughly half of those who lose their jobs will find employment in other areas, a 5–7 percent increase in unemployment is the realistic scenario, which in many countries would mean a doubling of unemployment.
While there is even less consensus on the specific course of job automation than on its exact scale, four general tendencies are worth noting. First, not every job is equally affected by this process: jobs requiring high added value, creativity, and/or the management of human relationships are the hardest to automate. The work of advertising designers, psychologists, or indeed politicians will be the last that robots perform—if we ever reach that point. Most people are aware of this consequence—unlike the second element: the progress of automation is not correlated with a profession's socioeconomic prestige; it is not simply that today's well-paying, high-prestige jobs are the most protected. The work of bank analysts, brokers, or even programmers is easier to automate than that of kindergarten teachers or physiotherapists. Related to this is the third consequence: automation increases but also transforms the structure of inequalities. Finally, automation will not appear as a one-time shock but as a drawn-out process, permanently shaping the social and political agenda.
Automation may create at least five cleavage lines that could affect the domestic politics of individual countries, along which parties may redefine their positions within the party system.
The first and most important relates to what kind of regulatory environment should be created around the spread of automation. The first reaction of automation's losers will almost invariably be to demand a ban. In the coming years, we can expect this conflict to arise first in connection with self-driving cars, one of the most visible automation-related technologies: professional drivers—truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery workers—can hardly be expected to peacefully and without political resistance accept the elimination of their jobs. To appreciate the expected magnitude of this conflict, one need only recall the debates that accompanied the spread of Uber—even though this application negatively affected only a small subset of those in the driving profession, namely taxi drivers. The more people are negatively affected by automation, the greater the political logic in someone initiating the slowing down, or even banning, of new technologies. It is very important here to consider what was written in the previous section: at some point, it will not be just those with weaker advocacy capabilities whose jobs disappear. When this effect reaches higher-earning workers, the voices demanding the halt or slowdown of automation could accelerate.
The second conflict concerns the state's role in mitigating the harmful effects of technological change. This debate fits into the classic free market vs. state intervention conflicts, with the difference that in the context of advancing automation, natural free-market processes are politically much harder to defend. In theory, a policy could specifically aim to support automation's losers and channel state resources toward mitigating the effects of automation.
The above two conflicts could roughly pit "consumer-friendly" liberal or conservative views against "worker-friendly" left-wing approaches. But technological change can also have a cultural dimension: adaptation to change, to the rapid transformation of the world, can easily become a subject of political debate. One of the most important questions regarding the adaptation of parties in individual countries may be whether attitudes toward technological change remain an economic issue or expand into a general "pro-change" / "anti-change" cleavage.
But even this cleavage somehow fits into debates we know today. Social changes, however, can also bring new types of political responses and even lead to the emergence of new political forces. Among the innovative proposals for dealing with automation, universal basic income is currently the best known; although the concept was not created to address the effects of automation, it undoubtedly offers some solution for mitigating negative social effects. But even more radical proposals could emerge. Certain parties could even break with the approach that work is the foundation of society and instead become "parties of leisure time." On the other side, it is easy to imagine political forces emerging with extreme conservatism toward this set of issues and adopting radical anti-technology positions.
The fifth challenge sounds the most futuristic and concerns the possible emancipation of machines that may become intelligent. From the point when—presumably in the not-too-distant future—certain machines become capable of being aware of their own existence, they will raise all the questions that today mainly concern the rights of intelligent animals. In recent years, "animal emancipation" has traveled an enormous path, as a result of which non-human beings can receive a certain degree of legal protection in an increasing number of countries. This has already led, in the case of certain intelligent animals, to the appearance of legal personhood for animals. Following this logic, the appearance of intelligent machines could bring questions about treating these machines as property, legal issues related to "switching off" machines, and problems of self-determination to the forefront. After the great emancipation struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, the emancipation of robots could be the great debated topic of the 21st century.
There is no single conflict that would affect different political actors equally: certain issues represent ideal political terrain for one or another political side. In recent years' European debates, the strengthening of the refugee issue put the political right in an easier position, since voters in most countries opposed the pro-admission stance—often wrongly—attributed to the left or the liberals.
The above conflicts pose serious challenges for every existing party family, though they do not affect them equally. Three questions may fundamentally determine what political dynamics the conflicts listed above will create. The first relates to whether there will be a political force that specifically acts on behalf of voters who have lost their jobs and gives political dimension to the presumably mass resentment against automation. This political stance will inevitably demand representation—the main question is who will take it on. Considering the political traditions of individual party families, the left would have the best chance: defending jobs against technological progress is a classic social democratic position. But in recent years, most left-wing parties have become centrist and, moreover, culturally strongly liberal—from such a position, anti-modernization sentiment might appear inconsistent. If not the left, then presumably some populist or radical force will become the representative of those who have lost their jobs.
The second question is whether there will be a political force that makes some innovation-related political topic a central theme. In Europe, there are already experiments with this: the Czech Pirate Party and the Italian Five Star Movement both treat the consequences of the fourth industrial revolution as a key political issue. But for most parties, these questions are currently peripheral; at best, they supplement their "major" political themes.
The third question concerns the general stance of individual parties on the issues raised by the fourth industrial revolution. The ideological baseline of individual party families does not necessarily automatically lead to a particular position. Perhaps the liberals' approach is the easiest to deduce: from liberals we can expect support for automation, enforcement of free market mechanisms, and even affirmation of emancipation efforts. For liberals, the presumed unpopularity of these positions may pose a problem. Social democrats face the choice described above. The right's problem may be how to combine economically useful innovation with the population's presumed alienation and concerns.