This would not, however, be a very powerful attribute of ML if these systems could not generalize what they have learned to data not included in the training data set. Thus they are assessed according to their ‘generalization ability’ (Alpaydin 2016: 40). While the ML systems of 2019 are at best able to generalize to new data of a similar kind to that which they were trained on, increasingly sophisticated systems may approach AGI’s hypothetical capacities for generalization across domains. This book is about the implications of AI, from machine learning to AGI, for the future of capitalism.
MACHINE MARX
Machinery is crucial in Marx’s analysis of capital, so much so that almost any serious study of his work engages the topic in some way. Here we rapidly map those aspects of Marx’s thought that are most important to the discussion of AI, highlighting points relevant for our arguments later in this book. There are, we suggest, three main strands in Marx’s thoughts about machines. In the first, major line, the machine is a supplement to the human labour that is the crucial creator of value within the capitalist system. While production becomes increasingly machinic and intensifies the exploitation of workers, machinery ultimately contributes to the system’s terminal crisis. The other two, minor lines, logically emerge from this major current but also depart from it. Both of them posit a moment at which the machine becomes autonomous from labour. However, one sees the consequences as liberatory, the other as nightmarish. These three strands of Marx’s machine-thinking can, with care, be conjugated together, but this depends on glossing tensions between them that widen and deepen as we confront the conundrums of AI.
What we term the major line of Marx’s machine analysis unfolds in the first volume Capital. In this account, machines, along with other equipment, buildings and raw materials, are ‘constant, fixed’ capital.<sup>5</sup> This is contrasted with the ‘variable’ capital of human labour (Marx 1990: 508–9; 1992: 237–48). This distinction between ‘fixed’ and ‘variable’ capital rests on the basic proposition that it is only human labour that creates value within capitalism: the machine, however gargantuan its powers seem relative to those of humans, can only act as a supplement or force-amplifier to the essential, human activity, increasing its efficiency, albeit by manifold times. Machinery, which has itself been built by humans, is ‘dead labour’.
introduction: ai-capital
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