INFRASTRUCTURAL AI
Our approach to the question of how AI might become part of the general conditions of production is informed by the ‘infrastructural turn’ in the humanities and political economy (Rossiter 2016; Cowen 2014; Steinhoff 2019a), as well as Marxist assessments of logistical and energy infrastructure (Toscano 2011; 2014; Bernes 2013; Kjøsen 2016). Such critical approaches seek to counteract the frequent invisibility of infrastructure by showing how it is implicated in varieties of power relations. However, the particular notion of infrastructural AI comes to us directly from the representatives of AI-capital. As we have seen, commentators such as Andrew Ng and Kevin Kelly expect AI to become ubiquitous, distributed by a network infrastructure, just as electricity and internet access are distributed today. Is there a fetter to production or circulation, a supply bottleneck or something else that could be motivating this particular situating of AI? No less than Microsoft (n.d.) identifies one for us in what it terms the ‘fundamental constraint’ of human cognitive limitations. Framing modernity as an information explosion which escalates with the computer, Microsoft laments: ‘In the midst of this abundance of information, we’re still constrained by our human capacity to absorb it.’ The notion is that the shift to a data-centric mode of production is underway and that, as Marx argued about large-scale industry, the tech industry will not be able to ‘stand on its own feet’ until it creates for itself an ‘adequate technical foundation’ (1990: 506). This foundation is infrastructural AI – the means of cognition.
The slogan under which major AI producers advance their creation of a generalized AI infrastructure for advanced capital is ‘the democratization of AI’ (Microsoft n.d.; Gosaduaff 2017; Gent 2018). Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all announced projects with this goal. Microsoft has announced a plan to ‘democratize Artificial Intelligence (AI), to take it from the ivory towers and make it accessible for all’. It lists the following four points, which deserve to be quoted in their entirety:
We’re going to harness artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how we interact with the ambient computing, the agents, in our lives.
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inhuman power