The ML production process has a double significance for the analysis of class composition. First, it is an important part of an expanding occupational sector of software development crucial to digital capital. Discussion of this sector conventionally focuses on the well-paid, high-status labour of software engineers and programmers, of whom ML designers are the latest incarnation. This obscures the work conducted ‘behind the AI curtain’ by data cleaners and monitors (Gray and Suri 2017), part of a global clickwork-force that a UN survey found characterized by ‘low pay, poor prospects, and psychological toll’ (Berg et al. 2018; Geuss 2018a). All parts of ML’s segmented workforce confront a horizon where the very product they create may automate their labour, so that data scientists and data cleaners may both be working themselves out of a job. Second, while ML accounts for only a fraction of global labour, the patterns it discloses of digitally mediated labour, subject to powerful polarizations, and rendered insecure by automation, also appear where the new AI is applied across the wider social factory.
LEARNING THE WAY OF THE HUMAN
The social function of AI as fixed capital in production, like any other labour-automating technology, is the reduction of necessary labour and the concomitant increased extraction of surplus-value. In circulation it accelerates the realization of value, i.e. reduces circulation time, by enabling a tighter integration (coordination and scheduling) between factories, distribution centres and retail stores, and more precise targeting of both seller and advertisers to potential purchasers. It also reduces or eliminates the labour costs of all these activities. In the finance sector, automation speeds the speculative metamorphosis of money into more money. And as AI impinges on consumption and social reproduction, it both eliminates waged workers in industries such as health care, education and entertainment, and establishes new patterns of machine-mediated interpersonal relations (such as social media), or human-machine relations (such as elder-care robots).
automating the social factory
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