Many of Taylor’s points are excellent; we expand on some of them later, especially in Chapter 2, where we discuss the labour conditions of AI automation. We concur that ‘automation has an ideological function as well as a technological dimension’, but we disagree with her overall emphasis. While the aggregate employment effects of AI and robotics are uncertain and hotly debated, dismissal of automation as a ‘charade’ is deeply ahistorical. Generations of workers, from hand-loom weavers to assembly line auto-workers and cold metal print-setters would testify that there is nothing ‘faux’ about capital’s tendency to replace humans with machines. The millions of people migrating from planetary zones bypassed by analog and digital supply chains and automated factories testify to the reality of surplus populations. While Federici may have been quite rightly suggesting that we should rethink who or what should be considered socially disposable, there is no doubt that capital always has made people and indeed entire populations ‘disposable’ (which, of course, is why it has to be resisted). Shrinking from that reality at the moment when a new instalment of corporate machinic power raises such disposability to a new level, and writing it all off as bluff and hype, may be reassuring, but it is unwise, sentimental and dangerously complacent. Probably recognizing this, at the conclusion of her essay, Taylor abruptly changes course, and concedes: ‘There is no denying that technological possibilities that could hardly be imagined a generation ago now exist, and that artificial intelligence and advances in machine learning and vision put a whole new range of jobs at risk. Entire industries have already been automated into nonexistence.’ And she rightly remarks that the ‘emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict’ (2018). To which we say d’accord. But confronting these issues demands understanding AI and its automating capacities, accompanied though they are with abundant mystification and fetishization, as something more than just a ‘charade’.
introduction: ai-capital
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