Our third object of critique, the left ‘maximalist’ position, is the diametric opposite of the ‘minimalist’ approach. Not only does it hold that AI and associated technologies, such as robotics, are ‘for real’, and have the capacity to drastically transform the conditions of production and work, it also sees these capacities as stepping stones to socialism. Proponents of this view look optimistically at the automating capacities of AI as an opportunity to ameliorate, perhaps eventually abolish, the exploitation of wage-labour, opening up prospects for a society in which people enjoy more free time, for pleasure, personal development and/ or political engagement. This seems to offer a path for socialists that is more achievable than the daunting prospect of a full-scale revolution against capital. Instead, it can be attained by a social democratic government prepared both to foster the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution and to introduce a ‘universal basic income’ (UBI) or ‘citizens’ income’ – a guaranteed payment to all citizens independent of any waged job. Lenin famously wrote that communism equals ‘Soviets plus electrification’. It is fair to say that ‘AI plus UBI’ has become the formula for techno-progressive social democratic thought. A constellation of thinkers has formed around this attractor, articulated in works such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015); Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015) and Aaron Bastani’s (2014, 2019) arguments for ‘fully automated luxury communism’; the xenofeminist (Hester 2018) line of post-gender futurism; and a cluster of autonomist or post-operaismo theorists.
Again, we sympathize with and in many respects share the aspirations of this group; indeed, one of us has written about digital technologies in a very similar vein (Dyer-Witheford 2014), while another has suggested that Marxism might usefully incorporate similarly maximalist elements of transhumanist thought (Steinhoff 2014). However, we have written this book in part to directly challenge some premises of such AI-optimism. In particular, we want to contest the idea that AI can easily be detached, disentangled and re-appropriated from capitalism. Here it is useful to think about the sources on which the maximalist position draws – in part from Marx’s own sometimes enthusiastic embrace of the modernizing powers of the forces of production to catalyse the emergence of socialism or communism, and also the uptake and reinterpretation of this position by poststructuralist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Perhaps the most important source, however, is the ‘accelerationist’ thinking of the anti-Marxist philosopher Nick Land (2012), who uncompromisingly argues for and celebrates what he sees as the unstoppable and species transforming (or terminating) power of computation. Indeed, the inaugurating document for the maximalist line of thought we have mapped here is Williams and Srnicek’s ‘Accelerationist Manifesto’ (2013), which attempted a leftist re-do of Land’s thought: the most accurate shorthand for the group of ‘maximalist’ theorists we have described is ‘left accelerationists’.
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inhuman power