Any resources AGIs need for survival would have to be commodified or be enclosed; energy from abundant natural sources such as the sun would need to be forbidden or limited; computational power would necessarily have to be centralized (as it increasingly is) in data centres, or perhaps sold on-demand in high-speed bidding wars. In addition, AGIs would require maintenance costs and would suffer from the effects of competition with augmented human and other AGI workers. They would therefore have to engage in a computational version of ‘lifelong learning’ in which their software is continually being updated, as well as an endless series of hardware augmentations and replacements. Even if recursive self-improvement is possible, such self-improvement plus outside help would be one step better. Finally, embodied AGIs would have all kinds of potential for commoditized components and continual upgrades. In a world of proletarianized AGIs, capitalist strategies of planned obsolescence will find new markets galore. It is only under these conditions that AGI would be capable of creating surplus-value. The ultimate consequence of intelligent machines being able to labour and joining the ranks of the proletariat is that the capitalist mode of production could continue without human beings (Kjøsen 2018).
AN INHUMAN CAPITALISM
Marx argued that labour-power exists in the ‘physical form, the living personality, of a human being’ (1990: 270). Irrespective of having the self-awareness that is implied with ‘living personality’, an AGI could ‘personify’ the unique commodity of labour-power and therefore potentially be a worker, a variable part of capital. That is, AGI would no longer, as it was when it was a mere slave or thing, merely appear in and be the content of economic categories like the rest of the wealth of the capitalist mode of production. But if AGI can personify the category of labourpower, it can also personify other economic categories of capital, which suggests a yet darker implication of the emergence of machines that are so perfect they are no longer machines: capital not just as an ‘automatic subject’, but also as an autonomous one, and autonomous not just from human labour, but from human beings tout court.
138
inhuman power