Chapter 3 challenges the (to some) reassuring assumption that capital could not survive omnipresent AI automation. Taking its orientation from value theory, and assessing the long-term possibilities of AGI, it proposes that the humanist assumptions underpinning this belief no longer hold; Homo sapiens is not necessarily the only possible subject of capitalist proletarianization. If AI approaches or attains the horizon of singularity, the vistas that open up are not therefore those of inevitable capitalist collapse, but rather of the elevation of machine capital as a literally automatic subject autonomous from human beings. Social democratic programmes of ‘full automation now’ may therefore merely be positioning themselves as benign accomplices to this trajectory.
Our Conclusion draws out some political assumptions of the preceding analysis. While uncertainty is inescapable in thinking about AI, socialist strategies for reforming AI-capital by introducing a universal basic income and eco-modern techno-planning fail to confront the depth of the problem AI presents to projects of human emancipation. A communist orientation to AI focuses on transforming the ownership of the means of production so that real choices can be made about the adoption or abandonment of such technologies. The emergence of a new mode of production is, moreover, likely to occur under conditions of extreme social conflict and ecological disaster. In this context, it is not only capitalism that will be inhuman, for the form of the human that emerges, if any does, from the struggle against AI-capital will not be the same as that which entered into it.
introduction: ai-capital
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