To make this argument first requires a review of the history of capitalism’s adoption of AI, a survey of some existing and anticipated commercial applications of AI founded on the ML approach, and analysis of the contemporary AI industry. While the basis for accumulation in this industry is a highly advanced techno-scientific commodity, it is, like all capitalist enterprises, governed by compulsions to produce surplus-value, i.e. seek profit, compete, attract investment, control markets and defeat rivals through the formation of oligopolies and monopolies. We draw attention, however, to two structural features of this industry that could contribute to AI becoming a part of the general conditions of production: its lavish support and subsidization by neoliberal nation states eager to foster AI development for economic, administrative and military purposes; and the seemingly anomalous presence of a large and vigorous open-source component to AI research, in which tools and templates are distributed for free and worked on cooperatively, but are nevertheless channelled towards the platforms and priorities of AI oligopolists.
We speculate on how, in the near future, ML-enabled functions of cognition and perception could become ubiquitous via applications ranging from simple chatbots up to smart cities and the Internet of Things (IoT). These examples demonstrate some ways AI could be positioned as a general condition of production. This analysis paints a picture which runs counter to post-operaismo’s humanist reconfiguration of the notion of the ‘general intellect’ (Marx 1993: 706) as referring to the novel capacities of a networked multitude. Contrarily, the possible future of AI as part of the general conditions of production supports Marx’s original formulation of the general intellect as capital’s accumulated machinic capacities, excised from social human labour. While AI development does, for the moment, depend largely on the mining and processing of data drawn from a networked multitude, the aim of such development is to attain a whole new level of automation giving capital unprecedented independence from labour.
means of cognition
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