AGI is a completely different type of machine both from the nineteenth-century steam-powered machines Marx discussed in Capital and from the narrow AI of the early twenty-first century. Being generally intelligent, it would have a generic capacity for labour and would therefore be capable of performing labour. While labouring machinery and value-positing machinery are Marxist oxymorons, Marx seems to recognize this possibility in a little-known and curious passage from the Grundrisse that appears about 60 pages after the ‘Fragment on Machines’.
THE FRAGMENT ON PERFECT MACHINES
Did Marx have a theory of AI or intelligent robots? This may seem a strange question to even entertain given that nothing even remotely resembling those technologies existed during his lifetime. However, the notion of creating artificial humans and animals long pre-dates the birth of Marx. The various automata of the eighteenth century were celebrated and widely known. Jacques de Vaucanson built the automata ‘The Flute Player’ and ‘Digesting Duck’ in the mid-eighteenth century, Pierre Jaquet-Droz built his three doll automata between 1768 and 1774, and during the Victorian era people were so fascinated with these mechanical devices that the period from 1848 to 1914 has been described as the ‘golden age of automata’ (Bailly 2003). It is therefore likely that Marx was aware of such automata and they may have been in the back of his mind when he wrote the following:
If machinery lasted for ever, if it did not itself consist of transitory material which must be reproduced (quite apart from the invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine), if it were a perpetuum mobile, then it would most completely correspond to its concept. Its value would not need to be replaced because it would continue to last in an indestructible materiality … It would continue to act as a productive power of labour and at the same time be money in the third sense, constant value for-itself. (1993: 766)
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inhuman power