Biological corporeality, inefficient and insufficient for valorization at machinic speed, would become an obstacle for capital to overcome: humans would have to discard it to survive. On this issue, AI-capital meets transhumanism, with its aspirations towards the transformation of human biology. Leading intellectuals of actually-existing AI-capital are explicit on this point. Kurzweil proposes that humans must ‘transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains’ (2005a: 9). Hans Moravec argues that what really matters in Homo sapiens is the mind, the ‘rest is merely jelly’, and advocates brain emulation – copying the ‘identity pattern’ and downloading it to hardware – because it enables a disembodied mind to be endowed with ‘all the advantages of machines’ (1988: 117).
Such speculative scientific proposals for transhumanizing the workforce have flowed into the corporate world. Between 2009 to 2017 Google funded the so-called Singularity University that served as a platform for the ideas of Kurzweil, who also worked for the company on ML and natural language processing (Simonite 2017). Although Google withdrew its support for the institution amidst a series of allegations of shady finances and sexual harassment (McBride 2018), ‘Singularity U’ has rapidly found other corporate sponsors, including US military-aerospace giant Boeing (Catalano 2018). Meanwhile, Elon Musk, while denouncing the dangers of runaway AI, suggests that the only answer to this threat is to implant computers into human brains so that hominids can cognitively keep pace with their machinic competitors. To this end he has invested in the company Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded in 2017 to develop brain–computer interfaces: its aim, Musk says, is to achieve ‘symbiosis with artificial intelligence’ (Hamilton 2018).
To keep up with inhuman AGI labour, humans would have to become equally inhuman, mind and body, as immortal wage-labourers. Together with AGI workers, these no-longer-human beings would make obsolete those who decline transformation. Humans would face a choice: capitalist transhumanism or death. And this choice would generate the ultimate incarnation of Panzieri’s refusal to work, precisely because accepting individual death and species extinction would be the only alternative to working for a wage, 24/7, until the heat death of the universe.
Avoiding this choice requires a new mode of production; it therefore entails a communist revolution. But does repudiating the inhumanism of AI-led capitalist development amount then, to a last-ditch defence of classical humanism, a reaffirmation of human exceptionalism and species sovereignty? No. Communism too, should, indeed must, be inhuman. Critique is necessarily enunciated from a human perspective, but de-centring the human from humanity’s picture of the universe is both demanded by a scientific worldview and, paradoxically, is a requirement of human species survival. It is necessary to intellectually and viscerally understand humankind as bound-in with and indeed constituted in and by systems of other species and of non-living agencies, including (but not limited to) machines. All modes of production have their own anthropogenesis, thus producing different kinds of human (Read 2017). The ‘human’ that (possibly) emerges from a struggle against AI-capital will be different from the ‘human’ that went into it. We see at least two branching paths.
conclusion: communist ai
159