Humans are naturally cooperative creatures. The ability of people to dominate other life forms on the planet, to produce a built environment structured to their needs, to ensure food and water supply, to develop complex civilisations and produce all kinds of structures and objects designed to enhance interest and comfort, and to interact on a social plane that includes communication of abstract thought – all of it is a result of coordinated endeavour.

This cannot be achieved without altruism. Ever since humans have existed, people have contributed to the communal good or to the individual good of other humans through acts of social solidarity.

It is of course possible to construct an argument that selfless acts are performed on the basis of expecting wider advantage to oneself or one’s descendants from the fruits of societal advancement, but it is not necessary to believe that empathy and kindness are a manifestation of subconscious selfishness. In fact it is rather perverse to do so.

The argument was popular in the West in the 1980s when dismantling the intellectual underpinnings of the welfare state was a prime mission of those in power. But it is counter-intuitive, does not survive introspection nor observation, and it is unnecessary.

In fact it is not merely in seeking directly to help others that humans may act without selfish motive. There have always been those, for example, who seek to advance the frontiers of knowledge for its own sake, because they are intellectually fascinated, without seeking to derive any personal advantage or even practical benefit to humanity from their area of research.

The quest for spiritual enlightenment or for artistic expression is often followed with no thought of gain.

Poor people, who can hardly afford to, give to charity. Those hundreds setting sail today on the Sumud flotilla to bring aid to Gaza put their lives in danger, from an opposition to social evil.

None

Personally, when I investigated Israeli crimes in Southern Lebanon under Israeli drones and in the sights of Israeli snipers, or when I went to jail for revealing the truth of the conspiracy to imprison Alex Salmond, I cannot convict myself of any ill motive. I was acutely aware of my own danger and of my own responsibilities. A belief in the need to oppose the wicked actions of those controlling the power of the state, and a belief that knowledge of the truth is an essential public good, drove me in both circumstances.

I sat with Ghassan Abu Sitta in a Beirut cafe discussing the fortune he could be making as a plastic surgeon in London when instead he had chosen to work in circumstances of the most extreme professional stress and personal danger on earth, striving to save lives in Gazan operating theatres.

Ghassan is a Palestinian Scot; and there are dozens of healthcare workers with no cultural or ethnic connection to those they serve who have braved the terrors of Gaza to save lives.

Can you imagine how much more common altruism might be if the entire state were not constructed in order to teach us that it is abnormal?

Yet we live in a neoliberal society of which the carefully structured and regulated social model operates on the assumption that everyone wishes to gain maximum resources to themselves, and that the activities of a tiny percentage – who often do little discernible work in production – are hundreds of thousands of times more worthy of reward than those of ordinary workers.

It is not an accident. It is not the natural order of human society. All kinds of human societies have existed, and all have been constructs. They can be patriarchal or matriarchal, communitarian or hierarchised, religious or secular, aggressive or pacific.

Modern neoliberal society is structured around monetary systems that store wealth, in currencies that largely exist as digits in computers, and which are allocated to institutions and individuals through state-regulated systems that in no sense capture societal value as the basis of reward.

Take the UK’s richest citizen, Jim Ratcliffe. What is the basis of his wealth? Did he invent something? Did he pioneer a new form of management? Did he build vast new industrial plants that employed tens of thousands of people?

No, he did none of those things, and indeed arguably he did the very opposite of those things. All he did was accounting tricks with digitised currency units, and then indulge himself in football clubs and Land Rover nostalgia.

I have still never seen a satisfactory explanation of Epstein’s wealth, yet nobody finds it strange to associate with people whose billions have appeared through mystical financial structuring.

For a period of approximately half a century from about 1930, the primary function of states was seen to be ensuring the welfare, comparative economic well-being and social mobility of the vast bulk of its citizens.

From the Reagan/Thatcher era that changed, and the prime activity of states became the fine-tuning of the systems of finance and resource-holding in order to increase the concentration of capital. In other words the state became the facilitator of the relentless accrual of the assets of the nation into the hands of the already wealthy.

As a result we live in an incredibly unequal society, and one in which the living standards and income security of the majority are highly precarious, with disastrous social consequences of scapegoating and xenophobia.

It is at this moment that the major social disruptor of Artificial Intelligence has arrived.

Those of my generation did not usually foresee the impact of the internet. I remember typing green text on a black screen in Dundee in 1979 and being amazed I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with somebody in Manchester.

A decade later we had home computers that made noises I will never forget as they connected down the phone line; if you were lucky you would get a good enough connection to send a plain email.

There are those who foresaw the decline of city centres, the delivery culture, the fall in in-person business and social activity, the growth of corporate knowledge gatekeepers, state control of personal data, and all the other things that happened since.

I was not one of them. Similarly many people were talking about the effects of AI long before I started to give it serious thought. I remember visiting Julian Assange in Belmarsh and listening to his main views on the subject, realising that despite being isolated in jail he understood the subject far more than I did.

He was particularly worried about the centralised power that would arise from the concentration of resources required to achieve AI, and the potential for further abuse and population control by ever-expanding state power. I have to confess at the time I was hazy about what he was stating.

In short, I am not much of a seer. But I want to look for the moment at the more prosaic question of AI’s capacity to replace people in the workforce.

You can’t sit on an AI, and one isn’t going to convey the children to a camping trip: nor can you eat it. Manufacturing and food production will not be massively affected by AI (though design of course will).

What AI will be able to replace is the kind of financial pimping service for world oligarchs in which the UK specialises. Investment managers, insurance underwriters and several score kinds of banker are no longer going to be needed as humans. Vast swathes of civil service employment and administrative employment in the private sector are under threat.

I want to make, for now, just two very obvious points. The change is going to be much bigger in service-based economies like the UK and the other Western “post-industrial” economies. They have imported their needs from the non-West in return for payment based on their services earnings that will be largely redundant. I see AI as contributing to the shift in economic power from the West.

That is potentially a good thing.

The second point is that any advance that increases productivity with less labour ought to be a boon to all mankind, enabling people to work less and society still to receive as much in goods and services.

But as the AI revolution is starting at a time of maximum inequality, and where states are structured to reinforce that inequality; this of course will not happen. Unemployment will rise and people will be driven into desperate poverty, while all the productivity gain will be harvested by the billionaire class.

That is our immediate future.

The need for a more egalitarian society is urgent. The need to break away from systems that enshrine and glorify selfishness and greed is urgent. Otherwise the future is bleak.

We need a politics of altruism and empathy.

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