Means of Cognition
[T]he Microsoft view is that AI needs to be included – or in Microsoft speak, ‘infused’ – in everything, from a simple word processor to a quantum computer.
James Thompson (2018)
THE NEW ELECTRICITY
In 2016, Andrew Ng, Stanford professor, entrepreneur, former Chief Scientist at Baidu and former head of Google Brain, pronounced AI ‘the new electricity’ and argued: ‘Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years (Lynch 2017). Ng is not the only one to espouse the notion of AI as a basic utility leading to a new industrial revolution – the idea is implicit in proclamations of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ issued by capitalist institutions such as the World Economic Forum (Schwab 2017). It has also been explicitly advanced by tech guru Kevin Kelly (2014), who predicts that in the near future we will have a ‘common utility’ of ‘cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything … Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize.’ Companies such as Viv (n.d.) deploy this idea in their business plans, asserting that with their AI platform ‘intelligence becomes a utility’.
Predictions such as those of Ng and Kelly suggest that AI could become part of what Marx referred to as the ‘general conditions of production’ (Marx 1990: 506; 1993: 530), i.e. the technologies, institutions and practices which form the environment for capitalist production in a given place and time. Marx spoke of infrastructure, which includes the means of communication and transport, as a significant component of the general conditions of production. If AI becomes the new electricity, it will be applied not only as an intensified form of workplace automation, but also as a basis for a deep and extensive infrastructural reorganization of the capitalist economy as such. This ubiquity of AI would mean that it would not take the form of particular tools deployed by individual capitalists, but, like electricity and telecommunications are today, it would be infrastructure – the means of cognition – presupposed by the production processes of any and all capitalist enterprises. As such, it would be a general condition of production. We propose the term ‘means of cognition’ – the AI-equivalent to Marx’s means of communication and transport – but insist that it not be conflated with the post-operaismo notion of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang 2011), for reasons we discuss in the conclusion of this chapter.
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