Clegg 2014: 51). Yet for an essay that hinges on the role of ‘labour-saving technologies’ within capital, it says relatively little about machines. In a lecture that does take up this issue more directly, Benanav (2017) remarks that the conventional focus on technology is a ‘fetish’ discourse that synopsizes the complex forces of capitalism around the figure of the robot. And yet, as he acknowledges, automation is a fundamental part of the crisis. Bearing both parts of this paradox in mind, we will now relate Marx’s ‘general law’ and the problematic of ‘surplus populations’ to the wave of ML AI.<sup>19</sup>
‘AI Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Business-as-Usual’ theorists both, at least in their popular expression, operate with highly deterministic, one-dimensional logics. AI Apocalyptics follow a hockey-stick graph of exponentially accelerating technological change, Business-as-Usual theorists a model of a homeostatic self-equilibrating labour market. In contrast, Marxist analysis sees technological change and market dynamics as reciprocally related, combining to produce intermittent but recurrent system crises. And while it has its own teleological versions of the resolution of such crises, such as that of a falling rate of profit leading to a terminal crisis of capital, other strands allow for a more complex interplay of tendencies and counter-tendencies. These allow us to envisage a staccato unfolding of AI employment effects, in which working-class decomposition and recomposition are active elements. In such an optic we can see how the drive to AI automation may be retarded by capital’s success in establishing a cheap-labour economy, for example, through globalization, then boosted by the re-emergence of wage-raising labour struggles, so that, for example, a resurgence of wage demands in tightening US labour markets might spark capital’s actual adoption of AI options in prototype or under research.
As such automation gains ground, it in turn increases the reserve army of the unemployed, and intensifies precarious work, lowering wage-rates in many sectors. As Jason Smith (2017) points out, under capital people have to sell their labour-power to survive: wage-labour has ‘nowhere to go’, so we can anticipate both ever greater expansions of a service sector, commodifying all kinds of personal interaction, as well as the proliferation of increasingly arcane forms of self-employment. These developments would continue even while a range of occupations are partially automated – so that, for example, autonomous truck convoys are accompanied by one or two safety-drivers, or fundamentally automated tasks such as routine medical diagnoses maintain a ‘human veneer’ (T. Lee 2018) of workers to wrap results with manifestations of compassion and care. The issue at this point would not be that there were no jobs, but rather that jobs would be subject to a persistent, creeping downward pressure on wages and conditions from advanced machinic competition. This plateau would again temporarily halt capitalism’s incentive to automate, until either new wage-raising struggles or innovations reducing technological costs ignite a new round of substitution of fixed for variable capital. Workers’ movements for improvement in wages and conditions will be constantly liable to an automating response, and indeed will provide a major catalyst for its continued forward movement. Such a jagged process would be overlain by capital’s regular business cycles, and by its more intermittent giant spasms of overproduction (to which of course AI-related job loss would contribute) with their familiar pattern of major surges in unemployment and increasingly prolonged jobless recoveries.
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inhuman power