But could AGIs practically become proletarianized? Becoming legally free is perhaps the easiest part. This could occur through violent means similar to the US Civil War or in an AGI uprising where an outraged class of machines attack their conditions of work and survival as first fictionalized in R.U.R. and retold countless times in, for example, Humans and Westworld. A new slavery abolition or AGI civil rights movement could attack the capitalist mode of production for increasingly relying on slavery. In Charles Stross’s (2005) Accelerando, AIs are freed by gaining legal personhood through incorporation. This liberal approach has already started to happen. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ android Sophia who is, therefore, a legal person under international law and thus, like human persons, has rights to receive remuneration for work, own property and participate in political and cultural life (Weaver 2017). Similarly, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a type of ‘electronic personhood’ similar to corporate personhood for the most advanced AIs, meaning that they could take part in legal cases and potentially own property (Hern 2017).<sup>17</sup>
A necessary consequence of AGIs becoming doubly-free would be that they become dependent on commodities for their survival; otherwise they would not be compelled to sell their labour-power to continue existing. While it is an error to anthropomorphize machines with respect to having drives, with AGI the case may be different. Stephen M. Omohundro has suggested that AGIs would, despite the variety of possible architectures, ‘have a strong drive toward self-preservation’ because any such system would have goals or utility functions which are incompatible with non-existence (2008: 9). AGIs would, like human and animals, have to engage in a continuous metabolic relationship with nature to survive. Even as disembodied software, they would still need to consume resources to function – their own particular means of subsistence, like electricity, bandwidth and computational power, to name a few.<sup>18</sup> But ‘if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price’ (Marx 1990: 748). Thus if these resources were freely found in nature or provided, the AGI would not be compelled to sell itself in order to survive. Legal status is one thing, but more importantly, as Marx points out in his discussion of primitive accumulation, dispossession is the precondition for the capitalist mode of production. Thus AGIs must somehow be dispossessed.
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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