While Marx may have believed that only human individuals can personify economic categories and execute their associated social functions, non-humans have for quite some time already personified the abstractions of capital if all it takes is to carry out their logic. Institutions like the corporation and the trade union respectively personify the categories of capital and labour-power, but we might also refer to various technologies that have been delegated to make payments or orders on behalf of humans, such as recurring direct debits in banking, IoT-connected fridges, and high-frequency trading algorithms (Kjøsen 2018: 167–8).
A striking and humorous example of AI personifying economic categories concerns Alexa, which cognitively powers Amazon’s Echo home devices. It is a story of a child wanting to play dollhouse, and AI recursions: as The Register explained, ‘Story on accidental order begets story on accidental order begets accidental order’ (Nichols 2017). A Texan six year old asked an Echo device: ‘Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?’ Being a good servant and personification of the money of this child’s parents, Alexa ordered a ‘\$160 KidKraft Sparkle Mansion and four pounds of sugar cookies’, which Amazon quickly delivered to the girl’s doorstep. When CW-6, a San Diego local TV station, reported on this accidental order, one of the anchors commented ‘I love the little girl, saying “Alexa order me a dollhouse.”’ This triggered Echo devices listening in on the broadcast to again personify money and order more dollhouses.
We speculate that the becoming-extinct of humans might not occur through Skynet suddenly coming online and commencing nuclear war, but perhaps through many narrow AIs carrying out economic functions, in particular buying and selling, on our behalf: Alexa, Google Home, IoT-connected fridges, direct debits, business-to-business ordering systems, and more. Connected to AI-run dark factories and logistical systems, in which human labourers have mostly been replaced by either narrow or general AI, the human is taken out of the economic loop in favour of a completely automated capital; AI would personify all economic categories, including capital and labour-power, commodities and money. The class struggle would thus continue, but with generally intelligent machines filling up the rank and file and also personifying capital.
But what would happen to humanity? The trajectory towards a capitalism without human beings would be a story of a permanently unemployed section of the working class that consistently grows larger. In other words, it entails the superlative growth of the surplus population, that ‘redundant working population … which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization’ and is a direct consequence of the law of capital accumulation (Marx 1990: 782). While developing ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’ in Chapter 25 of Capital, Marx considers how changes in the organic composition of capital, in particular the increasingly machinic nature of production, create a fluctuating and variously composed ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed. In a technological steady-state, the ‘accumulation of capital is multiplication of the proletariat’ because the only means to increase output is the addition of labour (Marx 1990: 764). When capital relies on technology for increasing productivity per worker, it can expand without increasing the overall level of employment, but it will also start a labour shedding dynamic, so the accumulation of capital eventually leads to the formation of surplus populations – permanently unemployed workers who have become superfluous to the valorization of capital. This long-term tendency of capital to generate ‘surplus populations’ was largely neglected by subsequent Marxist theory because through Keynesian-bolstered economic growth in the ‘thirty glorious years’ after 1945, capital multiplied both machines and proletarians, thus low levels of unemployment and working-class prosperity seemingly refuted Marx’s theory of surplus populations.
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