Such a strategy is consistent with the AI industry dynamics we have already reviewed. Major AI developers, themselves the direct and indirect beneficiaries of government-supported AI research, are both supplying AI capacities to other businesses and fostering the growth of large open-source communities. For capital as a whole, this means that AI-driven business analytics, managerial tools and production automation will become increasingly available, supplied from a combination of large cloud computing platforms and edge computing devices. For end-users, apps and products will increasingly integrate AI functions, and tools for making AI will be increasingly available and easy to use. Such a ‘democratization’ of AI will be entirely consistent with the reaping of massive profits by the major oligopolists of the AI industry – just as the production of earlier generations of general conditions of production, such as railways and telecommunications, created the fortunes for the corporate producers of such infrastructural technologies. If AI becomes generally available, it will still remain under the control of these capitalist providers.
THE SMART CITY, THE INTERNET OF THINGS,AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE
‘Democratization’ programmes are not the only way AI might be made generally available. Three other topics favoured by high-tech capital illuminate this possibility from different angles: the Internet of Things (IoT), the smart city and ambient intelligence. The IoT can be simply defined as the ‘pervasive deployment of [networked] smart objects (Kopetz 2011: 307). While the internet is commonly understood as a technology for communication between humans, the IoT is a hypothetical or emerging internet comprised of machine-to-machine communications, empowered by technologies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID).<sup>6</sup> The term IoT was coined by Kevin Ashton (2009), who believes ‘[w]e need to empower computers with their own means of gathering information, so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, in all its random glory. RFID and sensor technology enable computers to observe, identify and understand the world – without the limitations of human-entered data.’ The goal of the IoT is for machines to dispense with human intermediaries and to communicate and act intelligently in the world on their own. Recapitulating Microsoft’s thesis about the fundamental constraint posed by human cognitive limitations, some analysts suggest that such a machinic population will require AI to be functionally realized: ‘the flood of data that comes from IoT devices … [has] limited value without AI technologies that are capable of finding valuable insights in the data’ (International Data Corporation 2016).
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inhuman power