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Socialism after AI

The old socialist calculation debate asked whether markets or planners could allocate resources more rationally. But neoliberalism long ago shifted the terrain from calculation to creativity, experimentation and worldmaking — and AI now radicalises that shift by enclosing the infrastructures of knowledge, culture, judgment and imagination.
The old socialist calculation debate asked whether markets or planners could allocate resources more rationally. But neoliberalism long ago shifted the terrain from calculation to creativity, experimentation and worldmaking — and AI now radicalises that shift by enclosing the infrastructures of knowledge, culture, judgment and imagination.
Monday 5 October 2026 | 1 hour 27 minutes 39 seconds
Watch on YouTubeDownload File | 80.27MB

The old socialist calculation debate asked whether markets or planners could allocate resources more rationally. But neoliberalism long ago shifted the terrain from calculation to creativity, experimentation and worldmaking — and AI now radicalises that shift by enclosing the infrastructures of knowledge, culture, judgment and imagination. This lecture, by Evgeny Morozov, argues that AI exposes a deeper blind spot in socialist thought: the absence of a robust theory of technologically-mediated action.

The Left has struggled to grasp how human capacities, state power and technical infrastructures make one another inside the capitalist world-system — and how that same process might become a path from dependency to emancipation. From Europe’s search for AI sovereignty to the Global South’s long experience of technological dependence, the question is no longer only who owns the machines, but who controls the infrastructures through which societies learn, create, remember, govern and make worlds.