In Marx’s analysis surplus populations are relative because of their fluctuation in size, as workers are alternately expelled and incorporated into capitalist production. With the advent of proletarian AGI, this population would become absolute, coextensive with a human species rendered obsolete to the valorization of value. Humanity would become a ‘legacy system’, outdated hardware unsuitable for running the inverted world of capital. The status of humans in such a situation might be comparable to the current status of wild animals, tolerated on the fringes of capital so long as they do not detract from valorization, or so long as they are not usable as raw material in production processes. In contrast to the malice of the machines in the Terminator series, in this scenario humans would simply no longer be of interest to capital. According to this view, we have not seen capitalism yet.
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inhuman power