“What do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks,” US tech entrepreneur Nick Hanauer famously warned in 2014<\/a>.<\/p>\n Democracy cannot survive trillionaires<\/a><\/p>\n Democracy cannot survive trillionaires. We need to start taxing billionaires properly<\/p>\n “There is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.<\/p>\n “You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counter-examples.”<\/p>\n Some tech leaders say it is inevitable that people will revolt against automation.<\/p>\n “This is the real underlying threat posed by automation: tremendous social upheaval, public unrest, and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and grotesque inequality,” warned Kai-Fu Lee, a former president of Google China, in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s why 100 millionaires signed an open letter<\/a> for the Davos Summit in 2025 with a simple message for their wealthy colleagues: “It’s taxes or pitchforks!”<\/p>\n So where is society headed?<\/p>\n Daron Acemoglu, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2024<\/a>), published a working paper recently, with Mehdi Shadmehr and Arda Gitmez that grappled with these issues.<\/p>\n It was titled Automation and Repression<\/a>, and its conclusion was disquieting.<\/p>\n Redistribution or repression?<\/p>\n The economists argued in their paper that, when faced with the threat of a popular revolt against greater automation, political leaders would have two choices, and they would choose the option most people wouldn’t like.<\/p>\n “We show that the capitalist state can use redistribution or repression to reduce the threat of a revolt,” they say.<\/p>\n Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics<\/a><\/p>\n The three laureates were recognised for their work in studying how political institutions are formed, and how they affect prosperity and global inequality.<\/p>\n “[And] greater automation makes repression more attractive to the capitalist state,” they argue.<\/p>\n Why is that the result?<\/p>\n Because according to their model, more automation will require more redistribution to cushion the disruptive effects of automation, so as a country automates more, the tax burden will keep increasing on “capitalists”.<\/p>\n So, the “capitalist state” will opt for repression, since repression only has a fixed cost (as a proportion of output), whereas the cost of redistribution keeps increasing with the extent of automation.<\/p>\n It’s a strange use of language.<\/p>\n They’re talking about the “cost” of repression like it’s a basic financial cost of running a state, and they write in negative terms about the “cost” of redistribution when that redistribution is being used to keep people alive and democratic society functioning.<\/p>\n But that’s the language these economic models use.<\/p>\n A lot of surveillance, forced compliance<\/p>\n And it’s the language some wealthy individuals and business leaders employ.<\/p>\n The paper references an interview with Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X<\/a>, who spoke of the attitudes of many tech leaders as rushing toward full-scale automation and then using other tools to control the population who lose their jobs, in these terms<\/a>:<\/p>\n “And so you’re going to see a world where unfortunately there’s going to be a lot of control, a lot of surveillance, a lot of forced compliance.”<\/p>\n What influence will the new ‘tech oligarchy’ have on the US?<\/a><\/p>\n There’s no official ruling on the collective noun for a group of billionaires, but if ever we needed one it was this week, writes Ange Lavoipierre.<\/p>\n According to Acemoglu, Shadmehr and Gitmez, these types of debates have become prominent in popular media and the business world.<\/p>\n So they have tried to incorporate revolts, triggered by inequality between capital and labour, into a task-based model of automation.<\/p>\n In essence, they have modelled how workers would try to coordinate in an uprising, and how a capitalist state would try to prevent an uprising occurring, in an environment in which automation and inequality are increasing.<\/p>\n Their paper contributes to growing literature on the historical evidence on political and social reactions to automation.<\/p>\n They say the novel finding of their paper is that automation and repression complement and reinforce each other.<\/p>\n Its full dynamic model shows that if society develops to the point where there is a credible threat of revolt against automation, “the economy will ultimately converge to repression and the ‘pitchforks’ will be met with ‘guns’ from the capitalist state”.<\/p>\n “In a further extension, we show that if society first starts in a democracy, democratic decision-making will become less and less acceptable to capitalists as the level of the capital stock grows, and society will experience an anti-democratic coup, once again transitioning to repression,” the paper notes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20 last year. (AP: Shawn Thew)<\/p>\n Data centre and AI boom at risk from backlash<\/p>\n The three economists acknowledge that their paper is only a “first step” in the investigation of the dynamics between political regimes and technology choices, especially automation.<\/p>\n They say it would be great to incorporate richer political interactions into their model, including the reality of lobbying and political donations and other forms of democratic capture.<\/p>\n Police drones over troubled town<\/a><\/p>\n Police will control drones from more than 600 kilometres away from a rural town battling high crime rates.<\/p>\n And they say it would be interesting to explore how advances in AI can change politics in other ways that interact with automation and repression.<\/p>\n But their paper comes at an interesting time.<\/p>\n In recent months, The Economist magazine has been warning that the data centre and AI boom is at risk from a growing public backlash in countries like the United States, Britain and Australia.<\/p>\n In Australia, there has also been public unease about the increasing use of new surveillance tools used by the state.<\/p>\n The NSW Police Force is currently running an Australian-first trial in Moree<\/a> (an area with a high Indigenous population<\/a>) using rooftop drones to “fight crime” in the area, controlled by people hundreds of kilometres away at Bankstown Airport.<\/p>\n Live facial recognition cameras to be used by WA Police<\/a><\/p>\n WA Police are set to become the first in the country to trial live facial recognition of crowds, describing the technology as safer than standard CCTV cameras.<\/p>\n The same police force has been using software developed by Israeli digital forensics company Cellebrite to download the contents of a suspected criminal’s phone, including deleted messages and images, and new legislation before NSW parliament seeks to extend those powers for police<\/a>, which is raising concerns<\/a> that that capability will eventually shift into routine policing.<\/p>\n Back in 2017, the Fairfax Media reported<\/a> that Centrelink, the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, and the Australian Federal Police were already using Cellebrite technology.<\/p>\n\n
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