ABSTRACT
Debates over the influence of AI-powered technologies on the 2016 US Presidential election were dominated by claims of Russian interference by way of industrial scale troll farms, the leaking of files and emails hacked from various Democratic Party servers, and what became known as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The ambivalence attending the early experiences of industrialisation registered clearly in the work of key political economic thinkers throughout the 19th century. In the 1930 essay Keynes argued that, having dispensed with Adam’s Curse, two further problems would emerge as a consequence. Problems of abstraction and a lack of nuance associated with a focus on employment aggregates as a measure of the impacts of advanced automation on work have been picked up by a number of prominent labour economists. This chapter points out on accentuating the radical uncertainty and complexity that attends the development and dissemination of all technologies, not the least being those that fall under the head of AI.
