AI, long waves and the crisis of labour under capitalism – ft. Lefteris Tsoulfidis, Michael Roberts

Today we had the chance to speak to two great critical economists, professor Lefteris Tsoulfidis and Michael Roberts, to whom we asked the question that is lingering behind all talks about the future of the economy: is AI a bubble? Will it be a new general purpose technology upon which a new cycle of growth could be built? And how will that impact on the welfare of society: will it create more jobs than the ones it will destroy? And which type of jobs, which social classes will be most affected by its development? In order to understand these questions, we tried to reconstruct how economic thought has so far framed the role of technology in explaining economic growth and its cycles, focusing especially on the Schumpeterian theory of creative destruction that is upheld by mainstream economist (such as the 2025 Nobel prize winners) and the marxian inspired theory of long cycles of capital accumulation, upon which professor Tsoulfidis recently published a book in 2024.