This suggests a process of AI employment effects different from both the sudden-onset, across-the board ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the moreor-less steady-state ‘Business-as-Usual’ models: we might call it a ‘Slow Tsunami’ of market-driven technological change gradually flooding out the labour market, driving remunerated work to diminishing – and, in terms of the logic of capital, more and more economically insignificant – islands of human-centric production. This is would be the situation metaphorically represented in the many sagas in which humankind is pursued across the universe from one refuge to another by implacable machinic adversaries: Cylons come to mind. Ameliorated by reforms such as a universal basic income (whose merits and demerits we discuss in the Conclusion), this process could be very protracted. For a sense of possible time scale, consider that capital’s foundational process of ‘primitive accumulation’, with its large-scale eviction of populations from the land to form urban proletariats, is generally considered to have occurred over centuries rather than decades, and indeed, on a global scale, to still be incomplete. Despite futurist insistence on the speeded-up nature of contemporary social change, one could imagine a capitalist phase of ‘futuristic accumulation’, shedding, rather than amassing, wagelabour, but in a similarly uneven and protracted fashion.
With the emergence of AGI, however, the futuristic accumulation of surplus populations would slowly or quickly engulf the human species. While capital does not care what material its labour-powers come in, it cares about the productivity of labour, and AGI would be far more productive than baseline humans. An AGI need not engage in time-consuming superfluous behaviours like breathing and eating. AGI hardware could be endlessly augmented and could, therefore, do whatever humans can do, but with more efficiency and precision, and faster. Indeed, an AGI need not be limited to any morphology or even a body at all; learning how to use new and different bodies for environments with extreme pressure, cold or heat, it could likely divide its attention between numerous bodies or entities; indeed it could exist as a factory or even an entire supply chain. If a supply chain could speak, would we understand it?
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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