AI---AI increases capitalist exploitation---the link alone turns case because AI steals human jobs---that triggers all of their impacts
Justie 20, Brian Justie, Brian Justie is a PhD student at UCLA, and a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center. His current work focuses on the political economy of CAPTCHA, 3/11/2020 “The Rise of AI Capitalism: An Interview with Nick-Dyer Witheford”, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-rise-of-ai-capitalism-an-interview-with-nick-dyer-witheford/ - FT
The moment is ripe because of the surging corporate interest in and applications of machine learning and other new branches of AI research.Major info-tech companies have come to see the cognitive and biological limits of the human as a barrier to accumulation, and glimpse the possibilities of smashing through that obstacle with machine learning, advanced robotics, and other “fourth industrial revolution” technologies. AI today is still in a rudimentary phase, limited to narrow, domain-specific applications, very far from the human-equivalent or human-exceeding general AI that remains the stuff of sci-fi imaginaries, although it is also the target of some serious research programs. Nevertheless, in this restricted formAI permeateseveryday life, in the Global Northwest, in China, and to some degree globally: its algorithms organize social media feeds, financial activities, virtual games, workplace monitoring, welfare systems, and police surveillance. We are now in what I and my co-authors, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, term “actually-existing AI capitalism.” Its technologies will likely continue to encroach on what we have thought of as exclusively human capacities, and be applied across a steadily broadening spectrum of activities. As James Steinhoff speculates, AI may well become what Marx termed a “general condition of production,” a prerequisite infrastructure for commercial activity, as steam engines and railways were in the 19th century, and electricity and mass transportation for the 20th. This process is unfolding almost entirely under the direction of giant oligopolistic corporations— Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu — with help thrown in by governments eager for AI’s national security state applications. Marx would have understood this very well. So we need a Marxist critique of AI, as what is probably the prime contemporary example of profit-driven and revolt-suppressing appropriation and direction of techno-scientific knowledge. But this process is also throwing into doubt the humanist assumptions built into Marx’s concept of labor: so we also need to critique Marxism from the viewpoint of AI.
