WHILE Marx and Engels predicted that the proletariat would be the gravediggers of capitalism, the left-wing German economist Wolfgang Streek says that today capitalism has become its own gravedigger. 

He quotes Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

And, boy, are we experiencing the morbid symptoms.

The most recent technological changes that are shaking our world are also rattling the very foundation of the capitalist system. 

At a very rapid rate computers, robots and electronic technology are taking over and carrying out the jobs humans used to do. 

But capitalism is predicated on the exploitation of workers to generate profit and it also needs workers to buy the products thus produced. 

But if humans are no longer needed and have no earned income, then who will buy those products that the capitalist needs to sell? In the face of this tectonic social transformation what are our politicians doing?

Their thinking remains stuck in the past as if nothing is changing.

In car factories robots now do much of the assembly work, already a fast food outlet in north London is delivering food via a robot delivery vehicle and in Japan robots are working as restaurant waiters.

Amazon is launching shops with only electronic checkouts, we have driverless trains and self-driving cars are not far away, and there are plans for the next generation of cargo ships to be completely crewless.

This is simply the beginning of a gigantic revolution taking place in the workplace. 

The impact of information technology is undeniable. From the time personal computers began infiltrating the workplace, there have been huge gains in productivity. 

At the same time, there has been an uncoupling of the traditional link between productivity and employment; unlike in the past, the benefits have not been felt by most — or even many — in society. 

Of course, technology has been destroying jobs since the beginning of the industrial revolution. 

But in the past, the jobs taken by machines were those involving the carrying out of specific tasks like weaving cotton or threshing corn, but today it is skilled, multi-task jobs too. 

In a recent lecture given by Professor Moshe Vardi to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he argued that we are now facing the possibility of machines being better than humans at nearly everything. 

This emerging phenomenon can be seen in areas like medical surgery and in the airline industry, to take just two areas.

There is already a problem with airline pilots no longer being able to make the right decision in emergencies because most in-flight decision-making is undertaken by computers, and pilots are losing the skills of being able to react appropriately in emergencies. 

We have already seen the invidious implications of AI in the field of war in the Middle East, with drones and computer-controlled weapons systems taking the place of soldiers.

Business leaders and the political elite have not even begun to think about the implications of AI and certainly are not proposing any answers. 

We need intervention urgently and in concerted ways if we are to shape emerging technology to prevent it determining our future in an inimical way.

We need ethicists and social theorists to be included in design teams; researchers and engineers also have to take responsibility for the social impact of the systems they design.

As far back as the 1970s the then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was predicting that technology would free us from arduous work and we would have to learn to cope with increased leisure time. 

Such were the utopian visions, but capitalism does not exist to create utopias. Our future looks much bleaker. We are already seeing how increased — and usually involuntary — leisure time is becoming a reality for the underemployed or unemployed, but it is and will be a leisure characterised by poverty.

The rise of robots and AI seems almost inevitable. Today top computer scientists in the US are warning that the rise of AI and robots in the workplace could cause mass unemployment and dislocate economies, rather than simply unlocking productivity gains and freeing us all up to play games or go for long walks, as the naive prophets predicted.

Vardi is far from being the first scientist to warn about potential negative effects of AI and robotics on humanity. Stephen Hawking told the BBC already in December 2014 “that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

The World Economic Forum backed up such fears with a report warning that the rise of robots will lead to a net loss of over five million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020.

The report, released in January 2016, concluded that 35 per cent of jobs in the UK are at risk of being replaced by automation, 47 per cent of US jobs are at risk, and across the OECD as a whole an average of 57 per cent of jobs are at risk. 

In China, the risk resulting from automation is higher, at 77 per cent. Most of these threatened jobs will be low-skilled service jobs like those in call centres or in manufacturing.

But increasingly skilled jobs are also at risk. As we know, the pace of change is more rapid than in the past and, as technology advances, it will hit the world of work faster.

The report also predicts that many workers will have to retrain in their lifetime as jobs are replaced by machines. 

In order to even begin to address this problem, there is an urgent need to transform the educational system so that young people are properly equipped with the necessary skills and flexibility to cope with the coming changes, but that, of course, is only one aspect. 

In the EU nearly half of all new job opportunities will require highly skilled workers. Today’s technology sectors are not providing the same opportunities as the industries that preceded them, particularly for less-educated workers.

Not only is technology set to destroy low-skilled jobs, it will replace them with high-skilled jobs (but fewer of them), leaving the hardest hit to bear the main burden of change. The low-earning and undereducated section of the workforce will need retraining for higher-skilled technical jobs — a big task both financially and politically.

Automation and robotics will undoubtedly bring advances and benefits to people — but only a select few: shareholders, top earners, and the well-educated will enjoy most of the benefits that come from increased corporate productivity and a demand for technical, highly skilled roles. 

Meanwhile, the majority of society — the middle and working class, but particularly the poor — will experience significant upheaval and few benefits. They will be forced to retrain and relocate as their old jobs are replaced by machines.

And even if it were possible for many of us to enjoy more leisure time as a result of this technological change, this alone would not address the fact that we humans derive much of our sense of identity, status and satisfaction from work and our sense of contributing to the good of society.

No amount of leisure time can replace those functions.

The demise of the capitalist system has often been predicted by overoptimistic lefties, but the present global financial and economic chaos which has been accelerated not least as a result of electronic technology has reached a point where they system does appear to be in its death throes. 

One of the chief characteristics of capitalism and of its philosophy (or lack of) is that it does not readily accept government or regulatory intervention, direction or control.

Thus its inner contradictions are allowed to play themselves out like a pilot-less aeroplane hurtling to its own destruction.