Given that AGI researchers understand general intelligence to refer to the ability to reason with general knowledge, to perform many different tasks, and to operate in new and completely different domains and environments, Marx’s arguments for why only humans can labour can be reformulated as: human beings can labour because they are generally intelligent. We therefore posit an isomorphism between general intelligence (at least how the AGI community understands it) and Marx’s concepts of labour-power and labour; if general intelligence is isomorphic with Marx’s concept of labour-power, it follows that AGI, almost per definition, would be capable of performing labour.
A possible objection against the possibility of AGI labour is based on the claim that machines, following John Searle’s (1980) Chinese Room argument, can never be conscious. Given that Marx considered labour to be conscious and purposeful activity, Searle’s argument is also an objection against the possibility of AGI being capable of labouring. While it may be possible to automate the mental capabilities of creativity and imagination and a degree of adaptability, consciousness may prove to be the last-ditch defence against machines further encroaching on human uniqueness. But to what degree does consciousness or self-awareness matter?
For some, it is not really possible to talk about intelligence unless the machine is conscious and can, therefore, understand what it is doing in the sense of its actions and thoughts being meaningful (see e.g. Searle 1980; Nadin 2018). In relation to creativity, for example, it has been posited that an intelligent machine should be able to consciously identify what is actually novel or valuable (be it cultural or economic) about its creations or its creative process, and be able to explain the difference between bad and good art (Coeckelbergh 2017). Others posit that an embodied AI that has to navigate not just a particular environment, but the world in general, would likely require some sense of self (which is tied to consciousness). For example, Christoph Adami argues that embodied AI ‘have to ascertain where they are in the world, and like us, they would work better, if they have an accurate sense of self’ (quoted in Johnston 2008: 411).
But to what degree is intelligence really tied to consciousness? In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that ‘intelligence is decoupling from consciousness’ (2016: 101). He notes that until quite recently there were certain tasks – playing chess, driving cars or diagnosing diseases – that not only required a lot of intelligence, but could only be done by conscious human beings. IBM’s Deep Blue beat the then-reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match in 1997 through a brute force calculation of possible moves, and while diagnosing diseases and driving cars require more than brute force, machines need not be conscious as long as their neural architecture is deep enough to recognize fine-grained patterns in data. Similarly, the AI researcher Murray Shanahan (2015) suggests that ML may be on a trajectory that divorces intelligence from self-aware consciousness. Following Harari and Shanahan, we argue that labour can also be decoupled from consciousness. Whether the human being should be the touchstone for creativity, imagination and intelligence – even consciousness – is beside the point; all that would matter to capital is that these capabilities are emulated. In the age of intelligent machines, the Chinese Room may very well be the hidden abode of production (Kjøsen 2018: 161).
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