Morris-Suzuki and Ramtin not only pointed to important changes in work and labour conditions associated with early AI. Between them, they also provided important revisions of Marx’s basic conceptualization of machinery. Ramtin, drawing on cybernetics theory, pointed out that Marx’s account of machines omits the key function of the control, presumably assuming it is ultimately directed by a human agent. This assumption is, however, Ramtin pointed out, precisely what was challenged by cyberneticists as they introduced the theory of feedback into machine operation. It is, he suggested, precisely the control function that distinguishes automation from mechanization and makes it qualitatively new. Morris-Suzuki emphasized the vastly increased scope and flexibility of machine application that comes with the separation of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’: with machinery whose operations can be changed by the switching of instructional programs, so that machines start to attain some of the variability that had previously been seen as unique to human labour.
While Ramtin and Morris-Suzuki provide analytic anticipations of AI drawn from early moments of digital automation, our third exemplar of Marxist AI analysis, George Caffentzis, provides a crucial theorization as to why many of the predictions of jobless futures of that era have not come true. In a series of essays written from 1980 to 2008,
introduction: ai-capital
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