AI is arguably the ultimate test for the reconfiguration debate, because general AI would be the ultimate technological system. The question of ‘refunctioning’ AI is bigger than that of reconfiguring logistics systems, which have in some ways become a subset of AI, and at least as large as the problem of energy system design, with which AI is, as we will see, closely bound up. The issue is not the reconfiguration of specific algorithms, or the automation of particular jobs – though those are also what is at stake in disputes over the application of specific narrow AI’s – but the trajectory of a far more universal technological project, one that is, it can be argued, a particularly capitalist project. For while the dream of automata dates back at least to Aristotle, only capitalism built into itself a systemic imperative to recruit labour, replace it with machines, accelerate markets, and animate commodities so that their rendezvous with purchasers becomes increasingly self-propelled and auto-guided, up to and including the automation of the very act of purchasing. To simply say that no other economic system has enjoyed the technical-scientific capacities to do these things begs the question of the reciprocal interaction of economics and innovation. As we argued in the Introduction, the real subsumption of labour by capital means that capital develops and adopts technologies that fit its systemic requirements of valorization; this imperative can be baked into the very design of technology.
Under capital, processes of fetishism and reification, by which, in an inverted world, things assume the appearance of human powers while people are treated as things, become real abstractions: AI is the concrete manifestation of that abstraction. Through this process, AI embodies the contradictory potential of capital, as, to quote Fredric Jameson (1991: 47), ‘both the best and the worst thing’ that could happen to humans: it offers humanity freedom from the exploitation of labour for capital, but also capital freedom from a humanity that becomes a biological barrier to accumulation. In our view, left accelerationism ignores the second part of this dialectic.
A COMMUNIST ORIENTATION TO AI
Left accelerationism’s blind spot is reflected in a series of proposals that would, we think, do more to accelerate AI-capital than outdistance it with AI-socialism. These include support for a universal or guaranteed income as an answer to technological job loss; neglect of the ecological problems of intensive AI use; and a confidence in a pacific transition to socialism that overlooks the military and repressive aspects of AI. What is critical to a communist orientation to AI is the issue of the ownership and control of the means of production, a point that postcapitalist and left-accelerationist thinkers partially take up, but also obscure by their insistence on the possibilities of passage to high-technology socialism by parliamentary reforms undertaken within the framework of actually-existing AI-capitalism. We address these issues in turn.
conclusion: communist ai
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