AI innovation in the capitalist economy is driven by capitalist ideals of the winner takes all - this makes inequality, poverty, unemployment and every other instance of violence and exploitation exponentially worse - turns case and ensures that the use of AI is always ineffective and for the wrong goals 1 - AI innovation is integral to capitalism-uses capitalist economics and increases worker exploitation
Markov 19
[Kieran Markov, The dangers of artificial intelligence under capitalism, Fightback, 7-31-2019, https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-under-capitalism, //1LEE]
Indeed, AI is playing an integral part (along with other important technologies such as quantum computing) in ushering forward a new technological stage in human history, what scientists and economists call the “fourth industrial revolution”. Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently released a report detailing that, while the introduction of steam engines offered a 0.3 per cent increase to annual GDP growth between 1850 and 1910, they expect AI to raise annual GDP growth by 0.8-1.4 per cent by 2065. Another massive consulting firm, Accenture, anticipates that AI will offer a $14-trillion boost to global GDP by 2035.
However, these bourgeois predictions should be taken with a large grain of salt. Under capitalism, the development of the means of production is always accompanied by job losses, and AI is no exception. Kai-Fu Lee, who is certainly no Marxist (but much more sober-minded than Elon Musk!) predicts,
As deep learning washes over the global economy, it will indeed wipe out billions of jobs up and down the economic ladder: accountants, assembly line workers, warehouse operators, stock analysts, quality control inspectors, truckers, paralegals, and even radiologists, just to name a few. … Rising in tandem with unemployment will be astronomical wealth in the hands of the new AI tycoons [e.g., Google, Facebook, etc]. … [We] will begin to see greater and greater concentration of these astronomical sums in the hands of a few, all while unemployment lines grow longer.
[…]
The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics [i.e., capitalism!] with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, [Lee believes], is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality.
AI Superpowers, 2018, pp. 53-58
In other words, under capitalism, AI means the rich get richer while the workers enjoy increased exploitation, unemployment, and social crisis. As well, contrary to what many predict, wide-scale introduction of AI will not lead to unheard of levels of growth. In an epoch of capitalist crisis like the one we live in today, the capitalists are incapable of using the amazing technological advances to deliver economic growth. The fact is that there are already historically low rates of what is known as “capacity utilization,” which means that the capitalists are already unable to use the productive capacity at their disposal.
This is because world capitalism is saddled with a crisis of over production. The introduction of AI would only exacerbate this by making millions of jobs obsolete thus reducing the consumer market. This is the fundamental barrier to growth today. If the capitalists cannot sell their products, they will not invest and the economy will enter crisis. Only under a democratically planned socialist economy could we harness the amazing potential of AI for the benefit of all.
Impacts of AI today
We don’t need to wait for the future to see how AI will impact us—it is already playing a disruptive role in the lives of workers. We experience unprecedented levels of privacy violation: from systematic surveillance via cameras with precise facial recognition technology, to implicit bias and racism in algorithms used for purposes such as credit assessments and the criminal justice system. Indeed, an algorithm may assign a longer prison sentence to a black person because the data suggests “they are more likely to reoffend.” In addition, every person who uses social media is well aware that everything they do is invasively tracked by advertising companies to a creepy degree; this is because all of your data (your likes, dislikes, buying history, etc) is held and monopolized by private companies like Google and Facebook.
AI also motivates large-scale exploitation in new forms. Recalling that these AI algorithms require huge amounts of human-labelled data to work well, it’s not surprising that the extremely mind-numbing work of so-called “data farming” has become a new, prominent source of income for private companies. AI startups in Finland have adopted the creative business strategy of hiring prison labourers to do their data farming. Meanwhile, Amazon has created “Amazon Mechanical Turk” as a platform for extreme exploitation of humans to do data farming for companies and universities, where the workers make a median wage of $2/hour from the safety of their home computer. In China, “data factories” are becoming ubiquitous, and their workers make between 10-20 yuan ($1.47-2.94) per hour.
2 - AI integration through capitalism causes endless terror – empirics
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