AI and the Advent of the Age of the Brahmin Workers

From 4thgenerationcivilization substack by Michel Bauwens

Before I start explaining the logic implicit in the title of this article, please read carefully the following statement, which you should see as ‘preliminary evidence’ for the thesis that I will propose.

The first quote is from Venkatesh Rao, a very intellectual minded investor, who has delved very deeply into macro-history.

His thesis is very counter-intuitive, now that almost everybody, following the scenes of Trump’s inauguration, claims that the oligarchy or technocratic class has take the reins of power. Rao clearly sees something entirely different on the horizon, which is beneficial to the ‘working class’.

He  writes :

“The rise of AI is perhaps best understood as a working-class positive singularity, as centuries of accumulated technocratic knowledge, in one fell swoop, is gifted to the working classes. It might be compared to the introduction of longbows in our reference period. The models that have been open-sourced are already good enough to permanently weaken the technocratic class’s monopoly on knowledge capital. And inevitably, as hardware costs plummet in the next cycle, the “estate” of compute hardware required to run at least inference, and a good deal of fine-tuning class training, will be within reach of individual working class members. It would strain my finances, but I can already afford to buy enough hardware to run a personal state-of-the-art inference rig (in knowledge terms, I’m probably best described as a lapsed and fallen technocrat) and practice archery with it every Sunday. In 10 years, basically anyone will be able to do the same.

The impact of crypto is less mature, but is again empowering the working class disproportionately at the expense of the other three classes. The “ownership” economy has meaningfully shrunk from homes, cars, and retirement funds to a much smaller consequential unit, and one that is portable beyond national borders. Here we might make an analogy to the early use of the Gutenberg press to print indulgences (religious shitcoins?), with the actual print revolution yet to come.”

Let’s put that into a historical context.

In short, once we have a differentiated class society (but even before, as shamans and the esoteric brotherhoods which succeeded them harshly protected their secret knowledge), knowledge is no longer ‘free’, but is privatized and protected in guilds etc. …. For a brief moment, during the Enlightenment, radical humanists opened up the knowledge, previously protected through the guild system, but it’s aim and effect was less beneficial to the public at large, than to the merchants who could embed this new public knowledge into the operations of their new automating industrial machines. Not long after, knowledge was protected again, but now through the ‘Intellectual Property’ regimes, even though these monopolies are periodically challenged, such as most recently through the shared knowledge, free software and open design movements.

What Rao is suggesting is that AI, which summarizes the world’s past knowledge, and is available in both private and open source formats, is making technical and scientific knowledge available to the broader public, i.e. to the working classes, those that do the material production for society. So not the oligarchs, the technocrats, nor the monarchy, which are the three other social categories he is using in his analysis.

I agree with this premise on the democratization of knowledge, and believe that the advent of DeepSeek confirms this. Until DeepSeek, even though we knew about the small Mistral.ai and the not to be trusted open source Meta (or even Grok ?), we could realistically fear the monopolization of AI in closed source oligarchic and technocratic companies, such as OpenAI, the latter being the opposite of Open. Many of the people I talk to in the technical-intellectual circles, were convinced that a single company would dominate the world through a super-intelligent AGI, and that this would mean the death of democracy. Such a foregone conclusion is now unwarranted.

Indeed, DeepSeek is not only more efficient, costing only a fraction of the cost of OpenAI subscriptions, uses 90% less of the computer chips, and is fully open source. Its algorithms can be tweaked locally and it can be downloaded independently. The implications of this are staggering.

From now on, the interlinked, cosmo-local regenerative productive communities that we monitor and support, i.e. the actors of commons-based peer production, are in a position to have their own AI tools and to scale them cosmo-locally, outside of the control of any single AI corporation.

This is the equivalent of the technical revolution that took place in October 1993, which democratized access to the internet to billions of people after the invention of the Web and the browser. The world hasn’t been the same since. Of course, this is also a cautionary tale, since, later on, after 2,000, the business world once again took substantial control of the infrastructure of these networks, transforming many of the peer to peer logics into client-server logics, re-introducing centralization. So don’t see my prediction as a prediction of utopia, but simply as an analysis of the ongoing struggles between the forces of centralization and decentralization, of control vs autonomy. The only thing I am saying is : this fight is not over, and we have again a new tool, or ‘weapon’, at our disposal, which fundamentally questions the current equilibrium which was again in favor of the U.S. technocratic elite.

Arnaud Bertrand, a really good French geopolitical analysis whom I follow on X, seems to  agree :

"What China is actually proving with Deepseek is that the "winner-takes-all arms race" approach, which is largely the approach taken so far by U.S. tech giants (Palantir included!), is foolish and that AI development should rather be treated as a global collaborative endeavor. It's about pushing for an alternative vision of AI as a democratized commodity that anyone is empowered to make theirs, as opposed to a closed and scarce resource controlled by a handful of oligarchs.

… If there's one technology that has to be developed openly and transparently, by all of us collectively as humans with a shared stake in its trajectory, it's AI. The real choice here isn't between winning or losing an arms race - it's about whether we want an AI created by humanity for humanity, or an AI shaped by the cycles of conflict and domination that we need to move beyond. We should all be extremely thankful to Deepseek for enabling the former."

So yes, dear readers, please consider the advent of DeepSeek as a historical pivot to the era of ‘Peer to Peer AI’.

Lawrence Taub’s historical canvas and future predictions

How do we get from this general analysis to my concept of Brahmin Workers ?

To understand the context of this claim, I look at the work of the remarkable futurist, Lawrence Taub, who wrote the book,  The Spiritual Imperative , which was once a bestseller in Japan.

If you are a bit familiar with the history of spiritual conceptions, you know that, for example in the Hindu world, the dominant vision is one of ever-repeating cyclical decline.

The first stage of a full cycle is dominated by the spiritual class of the Brahmins, and is a near perfect world, a stool with four pillars. Brahmins are the spiritual or intellectual class, who keep the harmony between the universe and human society, through their true knowledge and rituals.

The second stage is a first descent, as the Kshatriyas now take power, the warrior class, who take power through the institution of the monarchy, or aristocracy/oligarchy. Warriors are obviously less suited than the Brahmins to lead society but they do have ideals of honor and justice. The stool now has three pillars.

The third stage is marked by the taking power by the merchant class. Profit and greed are now the dominant values of society, the stool has only two pillars, it’s getting much harder to keep society in balance for a long time, and this leads inevitably to a fourth stage, of ultimate descent.

… Marked by the domination of the working class, which, from this point of view, is seen as the most coarse class in society, fully materialist, lacking spirituality. For spiritual traditionalists, or ‘perennialists’, (a la Guenon, Evola) who still believe in this scheme, this is the age of the Kali Yuga, the age of destruction. Current traditionalists will claim that our technocratic society is indeed run by a ‘working class’, i.e. the technocratic managerial class, that is in power in every institution, having displaced the merchants several decades ago, something they see as the ultimate degeneration. China is the ultimate proof of this reality, from their point of view, as it is run by a ‘masonic lodge of engineers’.

Note that such a vision, which was also popular amongst the Hellenes and the Romans, is the dominant ideology in relative static imperial systems, which indeed ‘rise and fall’, and based on that visible reality of the inevitable decline of societies, this vision made a lot of sense.

But it makes a lot less sense, once technological innovation becomes a dominant factor, as of such a moment, progress <is> visible. Hence, the new vision of Zoroaster, of a beginning and ending of a human cycle, with linearity as its basic feature, eventually morphed into visions of stadial progress. Science also often insists that it is a fact of the universe that it moves towards ever more complexity and integration, from matter to life to cultured consciousness.

Hence, quite appropriately, Lawrence Taub uses the Hindu insights, of the evolution of the relative dominance of psychological types, but embeds it into a story of positive evolution, using the evolution of Age, Gender and Class as combined markers for human progress. Note that this is very similar to efforts undertaken by Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, and others, all looking to integrate what they see as the proven evolutionary character of our universe, into a story of progressive unfoldment. The ‘ Cosmo-Erotic Humanism ’ of Zachary Stein and Marc Gaffni are a current exponent of that new tradition of evolutionary spirituality.

In this new version, the advent of the working class is, far from being a proof of degeneration, it is rather a proof of moral and human progress. This was of course the view of the Christians, with their notion of ‘ora et labora’, work and prayer, which elevated labor to the highest spiritual level, at the same level as praying. Christian monasteries were ‘prayer-maximizing enterprises’ in which work had to be undertaken ‘with consciousness’, but also efficiently to create more space and time for prayer.  Labor was seen as a salvific endeavour , and this vision was maintained until the dominance of ‘commodity labor’ after the Reformation, which was a revolution of the merchant class in the cities.

But in the original vision, matter (the body) and spirit are as sacred, the body is no longer the ‘doom of the soul’, as was the vision of Late Antiquity but on the contrary, the temple of the soul, and we are therefore awaiting a resurrection of the body AND the soul. A big break came with  Joachim de Fiore , who saw a sacred future in the works, after the Age of the Father (based on the fear of God), and the Age of Christ (based on the Church), would come the Age of the Spirit, based on brotherly love.

This idea was then secularized by the socialist labor movements and other ‘mass’ ideologies of the modern industrial era.

Again, on the crucial role of Crypto

But notice that Venkatesh Rao ends the quote I cited with a reference to Crypto, which he sees as equally favorable to the working class.

First a quick recap of what we learned from Kojin Karatani in his ‘ Structure of World History ’.

The first value model of humanity, in kinship based tribal cultures, is gifting and commoning, Mode A.

Then, in the more complex class-based societies, humanity develops the state (mode B), and the market (mode C).

But the disruptions due to these alienating and division creating extractive modes, clash with the attachment of humanity to its convivial roots. Hence, history is marked by permanent attempts to recreate Mode A, ‘at a higher level of complexity’. To each innovation in extractive capacity, corresponds an attempt to humanize it by injection Mode A characteristics, ending in uneasy compromises.

If world religions were the first attempts at achieving such universal harmony with fellow human beings and nature, then the social mass movements of humanity were the second attempt, and it seems they are exhausted as well.

Hence the third attempt, this time through ‘networked organizations with commons’, which are actively constructing the world they want to see, marked by the wish for conviviality. For the moment, the best of this idealistic effort is undertaken under the name of decentralization.

As I argued before, what crypto has achieved is the capacity for mutual coordination of labor and money, and a way to pay for its commons. The new organizational vehicle is no longer the state or the corporation, but ‘networks with commons’, based on open contributory ecosystems, that operate cosmo-locally.

But who are the workers in crypto: Mostly coders and developers!!

I would argue they are ‘worker-technocrats’, in other words: Brahmin-Workers. They do own their own means of production, their computers, but they do not own the systems of valuation, that either belong to the capitalist platforms, or to the commons-based systems they are constructing on their own. In other words, these nomadic digital workers, and their ‘Völkerwanderung’ ( see Toynbee on the role of nomads in civilizational transitions ) are playing a vital role in the construction of a new cosmo-local world order.

Of course, they need to expand and coalesce with the rest of the working class.

And here is where AI comes in, as Rao argues and I concur: AI is the vehicle to bring the world-historical knowledge in the hands of all the commoners. With the first internet revolution of October 1993, we created the conditions of a explosion of available knowledge, beyond the capacity of humanity to process; with AI we can now re-summarize such knowledge, in context, and through DeepSeek and open source P2P AI, we can make this knowledge available to the working classes, which now take the form of commons-based, cosmo-local productive communities, and no longer the commodity-labor of capitalism.

Moreover, AI is the crucial interface between humanity and nature. For humanity to transcend its eternal cycles of ascent and descent, as described by the Hindu sages, and live stably with nature, we need to manage the complexity of our usage of natural resources, and our relationship with all other inter-dependent beings.

Here,  two scenarios  are open to us:

We of course suggest a third way, in which smart mutualization keeps us as ‘modern’ and ‘complex’ as we can, and for this, we need human-friendly AI, available autonomously to the productive communities, the commoners, which are the new agents of human history.

In conclusion, why speak of ‘Brahmin Workers’ and not just on a simple renewal of the recurrent cycles of societal evolution. Because this transition is different: we have nowhere to go, we have exhausted the planet. The conclusion is therefore stark: we can’t just continue the cycle of extraction, collapse, dark age, regeneration, and starting over. We have to ‘transcend’ the cycle of extraction and arrive at a steady state relation with the natural world, to which we integrally belong. Hence, not just a transition to a new cycle, but a synthesis, to a self-aware, spiritually driven, human group, neither brahmans, nor workers, (and not warriors or merchants either) but brahmin-workers.

Towards the Fifth Era of Technology

But perhaps you find it difficult to square the short-term evil and the problems that you see, with such a more hopeful stance.

So let me end  with a quote summarizing the Russian mystic Nikolai Berdyaev , on the human historical phases as they relate to technology, and I hope they make sense to you. Precisely as we enter the fourth problematic phase in our history, we prepare the conditions for the subsequent phase:

“Berdyaev put forward five historical periods that illustrate past and future relationships that human beings have to nature and the cosmos: