How AI is introduced around the planet varies according to capital’s spatial organization. In North American and European economies, increasingly dominated by services, retailing and financialization, AI initiatives are strongly oriented towards circulation, although they also attempt to repatriate industrial production. In China, Southeast Asia and other manufacturing zones connected to export markets, AI is strongly oriented to automating industry, though the breakneck speed of economic development also incentivizes circulation-accelerating AIs deployed by companies such as China’s Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. In the sacrifice zones of the planet, the AIs most immediately in play are those of domestic and foreign security forces deploying drones and surveillance systems to control immiserated populations. Here we focus primarily on how AI automation is changing the technical composition of labour in North America and Europe, but taking into account developments elsewhere. Capital’s AI deployment is incipient, at a stage of experimental introduction, accompanied by large promises. As Kim Moody points out, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, business investment in new technologies has been subdued by low profit rates and repressed wage growth; while these conditions persist, the advance of AI automation is likely to be ‘bumpy and slow’ (2018a: 26). Over the same period, however, corporations have been testing, and using, AI applications in many spheres; as capital’s previous waves of technological innovation suggest, this process is likely to escalate if and when capitalists’ confidence or workers’ wage demands increase. Some prospects may prove far more difficult to implement than others, or even be completely blocked by unanticipated technological or regulatory problems – or, perhaps, working-class resistance. Yet even if only a portion are successful, AI will significantly change the balance of power between proletariat and capital.
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inhuman power