Keeping in mind that curation is only one possible application of infrastructural AI, we suggest that AI could well become, and is being positioned by capital to become, a part of the general conditions of production. If this occurs, AI would become a cognitive analogue to the means of transport and communication – the means of cognition. The means of cognition would be a new layer of technological infrastructure interlaced with both the means of production and the means of transport and communication. While capitalist production has always relied on the human capacity for cognition in both conception and execution, an infrastructure of AI would allow the distribution of cognitive and perceptive tasks to machines, which would perform them in different, machinic ways, with potentially revolutionary effects on the mode of production. Just as Marx felt it necessary to specifically mention the then-new types of the means of communication and transport (steamships, railroads and the telegraph) because of their pivotal role in enabling large-scale industry, we single out the means of cognition as the factor which might come to define a new mode of cybernetic production.
In establishing the means of cognition, capital would, without metaphor, gain the ability to think and perceive. Marx noted that ‘The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital’ (1993: 694). In the possible future we have outlined here, capital is reshaping the primordial capabilities of the capacity to labour – cognition and perception – into machinic forms adequate to capital. The push to ‘democratize’ AI may be read as capital’s effort to accelerate the capture of these fundamental capabilities and their implementation in machines distributed throughout society.
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inhuman power