As significant to the AI industry was the widespread perception that US and European capitalist liberal-democracy was in trouble. Precarious workers occupying Wall Street and rust belts voting for Trump or Brexit brought home the point that the advanced capitalist economies were not delivering growth sufficient to both give corporations big profits and raise working-class living standards. Despite utopian promises about computers and networks, digital technologies had not been able to repeat this amazing double act of Fordism. Silicon Valley’s response was to double-down on its cybernetic bet. ML and advanced robotics would be magic bullets for renewed economic growth (Purdy and Daugherty 2017; Swanson and Mandel 2017). Such promises are appealing. What they obscure is that for AI investments to be undertaken by capital, they have to ensure not just economic growth, but profitable growth, a surplus well over anything accruing to labour. And this might require making labour more, not less disposable, and less, not more capable of claiming improved wages and working conditions and of exercising any type of autonomy vis-à-vis capital. It could, in short, entail further decomposition of the working class, which arguably never recomposed after the 1970s.
THE LABOUR OF AI
It seems paradoxical to speak of the labour of AI, a technology that purportedly eliminates human work. Yet AI itself has to be produced before it is applied in other industries. This is both a precondition for the AI-driven transformation of other types of labour, and provides some clues as to the direction that a more general recomposition of work may take. There are many different kinds of AI research currently in play, and while there are broad similarities in their production processes (e.g.
automating the social factory
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