{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780745338613","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","uuid":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","normalized_title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780745338613","isbns":["9780745338613","9780745338606","9781786803955","9781786803979","9781786803962"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":225,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%E5%92%8C%E8%B5%84%E6%9C%AC%E4%B8%BB%E4%B9%89%E7%9A%84%E6%9C%AA%E6%9D%A5","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/search"},"page":{"printed_page":81,"pdf_page":89,"physical_index":89,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"57bbbdca3366b171f4428093e8a5aa327d4e417b6fc362b18aa88860c26dd29c"},"chapter":"Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics","content":"In the realm of production, AI in the global North West is hailed as a means of re-industrialization. Manufacturing capacity offshored to foreign locations, or threatening departure, is to be recovered by the injection of robots, sensors and process control computing, all enhanced by ML. While ‘[m]any industrial AI applications are still somewhat new and bespoke’, powerful companies such as GE, Siemens, Microsoft and Intel are ‘all making significant investments’ in applying ML in manufacturing to bring down labour costs, reduce product defects, shorten unplanned downtimes, improve transition times, increase production speed and conduct predictive maintenance (Faggella 2018b). Siemens has reportedly been using artificial neural networks ‘to monitor its steel plants and improve efficiencies for decades’ (Walker 2018). In Europe, this project marches under the name of ‘Industry 4.0’, while in North America it often goes under the broader heading of ‘the Internet of Things’.\n\nSuch industrial automation is most flamboyantly and problematically exhibited in Elon Musk’s Freemont, California factory producing Tesla vehicles (Bhattacarii 2017) – a facility planned not only to produce self-driving cars and trucks but also to itself be so highly automated as to resemble, in Musk’s words, an ‘alien dreadnought’ (DeBord 2017). This craft’s operations have, however, been plagued by scandals over injuries to the workers it hopes to dispose of completely (Wong 2017a, 2017b); production bottlenecks Musk concedes were caused by ‘excessive automation’; digital sabotage by disgruntled employees; and the crashes and burnings of auto-piloted vehicles that proved better at self-combustion than self-steering. Tesla indicates the difficulties of extreme automation (Wilson and Daugherty 2018). Nonetheless, rising trade protectionism continues to fuel plans for plants tethered to the homeland, even if they employ more patriotic robots than domestic workers. It is, however, an irony dictated by capital’s competitive logic that China’s corporations, facing labour shortages and wage pressures of their own, are moving in the same direction, and probably faster. Terry Gui’s vow to robotize Taiwanese-owned but China-based Foxconn has by no means been completely fulfilled, but nor has it proven totally empty; by 2018 so-called ‘Foxbots’ were a feature of production lines at Foxconn, as the company expanded its revenues while diminishing its workforce (Chan 2017; Wang 2018). Since 2013, China has been the world’s largest market for industrial robots. The majority are purchased abroad, but with growing domestic production, its factories are becoming as or more automated than those in the West (Bland 2016; Ying 2018).\n\nautomating the social factory\n\n81","previous_page":80,"next_page":82}