Max Weber's great contribution to the sociology of world history was the transition from kinship-based organization to bureaucracy. From the earliest human tribes up through the medieval period, societies were organized around families and clans-- which is to say, by kinship (including pseudo-kinship of ethnic groups claiming to descend from mythological ancestors). In such societies, politics was marriage politics. Individual love or lust were secondary, if allowed at all; marriages were the fundamental tie that determined political alliances as well as property inheritance, too important to be left to personal feelings of individuals. There would come a great change in personal life -- call it the love revolution -- when the era of kinship politics gives way to another form of organization.
The second type of organization was bureaucracy. Although the term now is pejorative, Weber used it to point out the key features of organization not based on familistic connections. Bureaucracy is impersonal organization, administered by abstract rules that apply to everyone. It is a literate society where rules and laws are written down: a society of record-keeping. It is the administrative state that keeps track of everyone and everything -- the world of censuses, dossiers, identity numbers, passports, licenses, school grades and everything else (not to mention budgets and business inventories).
Bureaucracy is often defined as "meritocratic". This is true at least in the negative sense that personnel are chosen, not by family background, but by impersonal criteria such as examinations and performance evaluations. As we know from a couple of centuries of experience, bureaucracies are not necessarily the most efficient way of doing things; and records such as educational degrees are not the same as being the best at a job. But the great virtue of bureaucracy is as a safeguard against lapsing back into nepotism. The coming of bureaucracy was thus a liberal or modernizing approach to social life.
Bureaucracy is the epoch-making transition in the history of the state towards centralization. In the familistic era, conquests and astute marriage politics could expand into far-spread empires. But these were also prone to disintegrate into feudalism, as locally dominant families consolidated control. To counter this tendency, monarchies tried to replace local aristocrats with their own administrators, chosen for their abilities at record-keeping, logistics and finance, and whose loyalty could be assured by moving them around and hiring or firing them for performance. Thus arose the distinction between aristocrats and the "middle class", who henceforth would become the prime movers of social change.
Regions where centralizing bureaucracy took hold underwent a change in social identity: the ideal of a state whose boundaries contained a unified people, and hence the ideology of nationalism. It was originally a liberal idea, replacing the cosmopolitan marriage politics of aristocrats and court favorites. Nationalism also implied that local ethnic groups (reflecting family ancestry) were merged into one national identity-- we are all Englishmen (as Shakespeare proclaimed), all Frenchmen (as the 1789 Revolution proclaimed).
And since bureaucratic ideology of non-hereditary "merit" and formal equality before the law applied to everyone, centralization and nationalism inspired revolutionary movements. Revolutions start by mobilizing mass enthusiasm, and demanding some form of democracy-- rule by the people through representative government. Like all ideals, initial enthusiasm gives way to organizational realities, and tends to slide back into rule by bureaucracy -- in the name of the people but in practice rule by officials, elected and unelected. Democratic revolutions have never been the end of history, but staging grounds for an endless struggle among political movements. And thus bureaucracy gives rise to that now-pervasive modern phenomenon, social movements for protest and change.
Class conflict
At this point Marxism enters the picture. This is the emergence of class conflict, focused no longer against hereditary aristocrats, but on the taken for granted working class, servants, poor people, the repressed, exploited or otherwise underdogs of the population. From this matrix would come all sorts of movements of rebellion and protests, flowing in an apparently inexhaustible sequence of social identities, diversities, and inclusions. Karl Marx is emblematic of a spectrum of protest movements organized by a similar process of mobilization.
Marxism in the narrow sense did not itself have a good track record at predicting the future of revoutions. With its focus on factory workers, it failed to foresee that most revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries would be revolutions of nationalism. Most unexpected of all were the Fascist revolutions, a combination of nationalism with populist ideology of representing forgotten or oppressed peoples, a right-wing version of Marxist revolution. The successful Marxist revolutions came not from industrial strikes but state breakdown in costly or lost wars -- Russia, China, and the colonial empires. But these too did not prove to be the end of history, and by the turn of the 21st century underwent another round of revolutions, including anti-communist ones.
Another mixture not anticipated by Marxists was capitalist democracy. This is a compromise between private property and all-out socialism-- the welfare state based on taxation. Welfare states are necessarily bureaucratic, with all the rules and record-keeping involved in administering services, deciding eligibility, and handing out payments --- mirrored as well in private insurance coverage, as we all experience around medical bills. All this is a constant source of political squabbling that makes democracy less than utopian. In short, capitalist democracy is a blend of those two big ingredients, bureaucracy and class conflict.
Where does technology come in?
There is a much simpler (not to say simplistic) theory of history, called technological progress.
This has gone on in an endless series since the earliest proto-humans discovered fire, tools, hunting, fishing, and edible wild plants. Then came how to plant your own garden, build shelters, homes, burial places and monuments. Herding and breeding animals provided a new source of power, while innovations in metallurgy and weaponry brought military power, adding massed human muscles to create large-scale agriculture, irrigation canals, pyramids, the Great Wall, built by slave labor and its equivalents. The result was what we call ancient civilizations. History took a new direction when human and animal power were supplemented and then replaced by new sources of inanimate energy, even during the so-called stagnant Middle Ages-- wind and water mills, gears and crankshafts, pipe organs and mechanical clocks. The industrial revolution added power from steam, coal, oil, and eventually electricity.
The innovativeness of modern capitalism
But technological innovation does not just happen by itself, not without a sociological component. The pace of innovation was deliberately accelerated by the combination of bureaucracy and capitalism. Bureaucracy because keeping records and calculations led to systematic breeding of crops and animals, an acceleration of agricultural capitalism at the same time steam engines and factory machinery were being developed. A more calculating form of capitalism came to dominate, as bigger companies added research departments or were started by scientists and engineers. Economics was invented, having new processes to calculate when banking turned into financial markets where investors calculate which profitable developments were likely to happen in the future.
As Schumpeter emphasized, always-expanding modern capitalism takes off when finances become the control center of capitalist markets. The entwining of finance and industry became the driving force of technological innovation. In the modern era, technological progress does not stand on its own; it is a social invention.
The digital age
This is where we are now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The rapidly moving front of computerization-- the personal computer, the Internet, smart phone, AI-- is familiar in the following respect: they are all forms of high-tech capitalism, fundamentally no different from the technological, organizational, and financial innovations of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. The digital age is the financial-industrial complex in spades. The financial maneuvers of high tech innovators like Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Altman et al. show that the linkage between finance capitalism and the high-tech cutting edge is tighter then ever. It is hard to imagine how this would change in the future.
The big issues in the future of technology are sociological. The central controversy from here on out will be the threat by high tech to eliminate jobs of a substantial portion of the labor force.
The optimistic argument is that technological innovation has eliminated jobs in the past, but new jobs have always emerged. The argument relies heavily on the historical period of the industrial revolution in the 1800s and early 1900s, as factory machines replaced manual labor; but each mechanical innovation was compensated by expansion of white-collar workers, administrators, and professionals. The difference is that AI is now taking away jobs not only of low-level clerical workers, but managers, scientists, and programmers in the AI industry itself. AI is now being trained to shadow the daily work of the middle class elite, in effect making them train non-human replacements for themselves.
Cheerleaders for AI and robotization declare it's wonderful; everyone will have more leisure, machines will do all the work. Technological innovation will create new products for people to buy, a future of yet unimagined luxury.
This ignores a fundamental fact about the capitalist economy: profit depends on selling your product. If customers with money don't exist, it doesn't matter how great your product is, if no one can buy it. The prospects of putting 50% or eventually 80% of the population out of work would create a depression far deeper than the one beginning in 1929 that reached 25% unemployment.
For the near-term future, a saving grace would be if it turns out that AI isn't that good at doing human jobs. In recent years, introducing computerization has created jobs for humans trouble-shooting automated systems that don't work well. This may be especially true for Large Language Models; not a human-like intelligence at all but a statistical memory bank which estimates which words tend to follow from other words. This is a far cry from the psychology of human intelligence that children grow up learning how to navigate with all their bodily senses in the world of other persons and things -- and what gives us what we call common sense.
Not to say that AI taking a different route than LLM might not eventually be better. If and when that happens, we are back in a mega-Marxian crisis-- the reserve army of the white-collar unemployed, demanding government intervention if not socialist revolution.
Ironically, this means future government will continue the trend towards ultra-bureaucratization. Politics will focus on doling out tax money from the few surviving mega-capitalists so that the masses can buy their products and keep their businesses from bankruptcy. Politics in democracies will be an ongoing tug-of-war over how much will be doled out by the equivalent of depression-era bread lines and soup kitchens.
To further the irony, it will mean that the master trend of modern history is bureaucratization. The essence of bureaucracy is written rules and records, which is what computers do-- following rules to process information, the programmed rules-based based manipulation of memory stores. An AI-managed world would be omnipresent bureaucracy.
Plus climate change
Any discussion of the future needs to factor in the other big crisis already in our midst: climate change. It will go on at the same time as technological unemployment of the labor force. How will the two crises interact?
One point of connection: the root cause of climate change is the same as the cause of high-tech displacing the labor force, the capitalist economy.
Why has global warming accelerated so much since the 1950s? Because world population has grown from about 2.2 billion to 8.3 billion, about four times as large. Why did it grow so much? Because economic prosperity has increased, improving health and food conditions, and accelerating a trend that began in the countries that first went through the industrial revolution. In the US alone, population went from 140 million in 1950 to 340 million today. During that period, the population of South Asia (India, Pakistan etc.) went from 430 million to 1.8 billion; China from 590 million to 1.4 billion; Africa from 200 million to 1.6 billion.
And throughout the world, economic growth has raised the standard of living. Almost everywhere people have been consuming more, buying the products and imitating the lifestyle of the most prosperous Western countries, and taking over production for world markets. With aspirations spurred on by global communication via the film industry, TV and the Internet, world-wide consumption has rocketed, increasing the energy spent on transportation, air travel, automobiles, construction and infrastructure.
Multiply population expanding by a factor of 4 by consumption increasing at a similar rate, and the result is global warming.
The solution is obvious, if unwelcome. If population were to return to early 20th century levels, global warming would slow down. Consumption of energy might still be high; but a large enough decline in population would eventually bring global warming to a halt, or even reverse it.
Below-replacement fertility
There is already a move in this direction. Since 2000, in one country after another, the fertility rate has fallen below replacement. In many European countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen below the 2.1 level for stable population -- in Italy and the Mediterranean countries, down to 1.3. In the US it dropped to 1.6; in Japan to 1.3; in China a precipitous fall to 1.0.
If fertility rate keeps on dropping to 1.0 per woman, world population would be cut in half. And population decline would concatenate in the following generations. Two generations from now population would be down to one-quarter what it is now (for the US, roughly from 300 million to 150 million to 75 million). *
* This simplified calculation does not take account of rising life expectancy. But life expectancy is rising at a much slower rate than the declining rate of fertility; given current trends, population decline starting about 30 years from now is inevitable. In France, where fertility is 1.5 and heading downwards, a recent projection is that total population will peak before 2040, and that by 2070 the population of childbearing age will be cut in half. The population of any particular country also depends on migration in and out; this is a political process that we will look at below.
Economists and financial investors blanche at the possibility of a shrinking population. Capitalism thrives on growth. Investors invest on prospects of further growth. When any product sector shrinks, capital flees. Consider also that the amount of money itself is multiplied by booms in investment markets. For the past century, money no longer represents any fixed material value like gold; it has a purely sociological reality, consisting of promises to pay. Valuations based on the price of stocks, credit available, or debts payable hold up as long as the amount of financial exchange continues high. The amount of money at any particular time exists in collective psychology, the confidence of investors and consumers (e.g. credit-card borrowers) holds up.
A declining population is the formula for a feedback cycle of economic depression: falling consumption, falling investment, falling profit, falling employment.
Thus the one clearly feasible solution to global warming is anathema to economists, capitalists, and policy makers.
Three big questions remain in the scenario
[1] How will population decline interact with job displacement by robotization and AI?
In all likelihood, massive technologically-driven unemployment would make people even less likely to want to have children, or to be able to afford them. Huge population decline could come even sooner than two generations, depending on when fully effective AI and robots arrive.
[2] Would socialism help solve either of these problems? It would force the remaining rich people to share their wealth, in order to keep the rest of the people alive and consuming. Would socialism be good or bad for population decline? These may be the horns of a dilemma.
[3] Both the negative effect of global warming and the negative effect of below-replacement fertility will happen unevenly. Countries less penetrated by AI would be able to keep up their population levels better. These economically-lagging countries might however be the ones most subject to extreme heat, drought, or low-lying areas subject to rising ocean levels.
The result would be that pressure for global migration would increase-- from countries worst-hit by global warming to those less hit by it. In conjunction with national concerns for maintaining the home country's cultural identity, this would increase political struggles over closed borders and immigration policy.
The caveat here is that the traditionally rich countries (the most technologically advanced) would also be those whose population is most displaced into unemployment, and whose economic depression would be the worst. This would make them less attractive as a destination for migrants.
This is as far as sociological prediction, as of today's conditions, can go. We have three crises ahead through the remainder of the 21st century, plus a series of complexities that give rise to a range of specific scenarios for different countries. This is what a theory looks like where multiple causal processes (below-replacement fertility, economic investment and consumption, technologically driven unemployment, political movements such as nationalism and socialism) interact.
And the interactional flow chart will be strongly affected by which processes are much faster than others. At present, fertility decline is speeding along in many parts of the world; although Africa still has a very high birth rate around 4.0. When AI will really rampage through employment is anyone's guess. Global warming moves at a slower pace, with the crisis point around the year 2100.
One thing is certain. No realistic view of the future will emerge as long as each issue is treated in isolation from the others. Can we find a combination of conditions that offers better possibilities? Some scenarios may offer hope.
