人工智能和资本主义的未来

That commodity-producing labour has a twofold character was one of Marx’s critiques of the Smithian and Ricardian labour theory of value, but such a duality also means that the capacity to create value is not an ontological determination of labour (Ramsay 2009). As Caffentzis has argued in relation to universal Turing machines: ‘if value is created by labor per se and its positive features can be accomplished by machines … then machines can create value. But this is a reductio ad absurdum of Marxist theory’ (2013: 161). But under what conditions could AGI create value? What would the ontological status of AGI be in the capitalist mode of production? In essence, these two questions ask the same thing, but to answer them requires that we investigate precisely how AGIs would be involved in the social process of production and thus what their social function would be. Hence, it is necessary to turn to Marx’s ontology, i.e. value and its forms.

The commodity, money and fixed capital are all examples of what Marx referred to as social forms or economic categories, which are the theoretical expressions of social relations of production (i.e. class) (Marx 2008: 119). Therefore, they are also the forms in which value appears and at the same time also the ‘forms of appearance’ or ‘modes of existence of things’ (Gunn 1987: 58–9). One of Marx’s main critiques of bourgeois political economists was that they confused ‘the form of appearance [with] the thing which appears within that form’ thus fetishistically ascribing a characteristic of capitalist society to the thing (1990: 714). He therefore distinguished between ‘natural form’ (i.e. use-value or matter) and ‘social form’ (i.e. value). For example, things appear as or are commodities only ‘in so far as they possess a double form, i.e. natural form and value form’ (Marx 1990: 138). The natural form of a chair is its physical properties as made out of wood or metal and shaped into a seat, four legs and a back, but the fact that this chair is a commodity, i.e. has an exchange-value and is exchanged, ‘is not a characteristic of the chair itself as a thing, but rather of the society in which it appears’, and ‘a specific aspect of capitalist society is that almost everything is exchanged (Heinrich 2012: 40–1). It is precisely because of this fetish that things are treated as if they are the forms they appear in. Accordingly, a thing is treated as a commodity when it is exchanged and this is its social function. Economic categories thus also ‘express social functions ... which are acquired by things as intermediaries in social relations among people’ (Rubin 1973: 35). The being of things as commodities, money or capital comes from the specific social functions they serve in the social process of production: the commodity exists to be sold, money to buy, and (fixed) capital to extract surplus labour-time from workers. In other words, the different social forms things appear in are their concrete social reality (Negri 2017). The mode of existence of a thing is, however, not permanent. When it serves a different social function in the social process of production, its form of appearance changes. Referring to a machine, Marx wrote:

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It is only the function of a product as means of labour in the production process that makes it fixed capital. It is in no way fixed capital itself, just as it emerges from the process. A machine that is the product and thus the commodity of a machine-builder is part of his commodity capital. It only becomes fixed capital in the hands of its buyer, the capitalist who employs it productively. (1992: 240)

The argument that Marx makes here is important for our investigation of AGI for a couple of reasons. First, it points out that the being and social function of, in this case, a machine depends on how its respective owners treat it. Second, it indicates that things, like a potential future AGI, do change social forms and, therefore, that it is possible that a machine could potentially negate its own existence as fixed capital by appearing in another social form. Third, it forces us to consider what the modes of existence of AGI would be in the capitalist mode of production after AGI’s emergence. Indeed, the ontological trajectory of the machine described in the quotation above might be traced by AGIs (Kjøsen 2018).

Going by Baum’s (2017) survey of AGI projects, it is most likely that AGI would first be invented by, and therefore be the private property of, a corporation and/or an academic institution. For the sake of argument, we assume that soon after the emergence of AGI it would be mass produced because it could be put to so many different uses by either capitalists or consumers. It would, in other words, be a highly profitable commodity. Hence, what we envisage would first happen with AGI is similar to the world depicted in the TV show Äkta Människor/Humans where generally intelligent androids (‘hubots’/‘synths’) are widely available for purchase as home servants or replacement workers. This setting is merely a different version of the world in the ur-text for all android and AI narratives, Karel Čapek’s 1920 science fiction play R.U.R. (2004). In the play, the company ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ produces their highly profitable roboti by the thousands in their many factories, which makes them widely available as cheap commodities. These artificial people can think and act by themselves and therefore have become necessary in all kinds of production and can produce commodities at a fifth of the previous cost.

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In this scenario, AGI would therefore first and foremost function as a commodity and be treated as something to be sold. What social form would it assume after being exchanged? That depends on who buys it, what it is treated as and where in the social process of production it is put to use. If sold to an individual consumer, the AGI would enter the sphere of consumption and social reproduction, but would therefore be incapable of functioning in the social process of producing surplus-value and would have no social form (although it would have the legal form of private property). In other words, it would have just its natural form and function as a use-value (e.g. for care, security, or domestic labour, companionship or pleasure) and as such would be the equivalent of consumer goods like toasters and smartphones. If the AGI was bought by a capitalist to be used in a production process, it would function in precisely the same way as the narrow AI or dumber machines it replaced: as fixed capital and thus a means for reducing necessary labour-time and cheapening commodities, and its value would be passed on to the commodities it helps to produce. Indeed, the AGI would function in this way even if it replaced a human worker. Despite being functionally identical to a living labourer, and perhaps even more capable than a human being, it would still be fixed capital and would not create surplus-value. This AGI could not create value due to its social form; it appears in the form of fixed (constant) capital because it was purchased and is maintained as such. Human workers, however, appear in the form of variable capital after they have sold their labour-power to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. But if a perfect machine is no longer a machine because it has negated its existence as fixed capital and can thus possibly become variable capital, how would this actually occur if AGIs continued to be bought and sold as commodities, i.e. as the property of someone else?

What problematizes the AGI’s ontological status is that being generally intelligent it could, like Rossum’s universal robots, be mistaken for, or ethically be recognized as, a person even when it is the private property of someone else. Čapek deliberately chose the word robota to refer to the artificial biological creations of the Rossum corporation because in the Czech language it means ‘corvée’, ‘forced labour’ or ‘serf labour’, and more generally connotes hard work or simply labour. While AGIs are not robots, if it were bought and sold as the private property of someone else, its labour, wherever it was performed, would be unfree. AGIs would, in other words, be slaves. Serfdom and corvée are different types of slavery, which Marx argues is a relation of production based on personal relations of domination as opposed to value’s impersonal domination through fetishized social forms (1990: 271, 303–4, 345–8). Thus he argues that ‘in the slave relation the worker is nothing but a living labour-machine, which therefore has a value for others, or rather is a value’ (Marx 1993: 465). The slave, in other words, has the same ontological status – appearing in the form of fixed capital – as machines or animals when used in a capitalist production process. But if Marx’s perfect machines refer to machines that are no longer machines, they cannot be slaves because then they would be functionally equivalent to a machine. Even if they can perform labour just as well as human beings, they would still not produce an iota of value. Machines become perfect if they can escape the productive relations of slavery and can instead be found in the labour market, selling their labour-power as a commodity. It is now necessary to briefly turn to how surplus-value is produced and why the capitalist can find labour-power on the market.

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ARTIFICIAL PROLETARIANS

Whereas the slave relationship is ‘posited directly by force’ the worker’s relationship to capital is mediated by exchange (Marx 1993: 769). As Marx argues, it is a law of capital to create surplus-value, but ‘it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker’ (1993: 769, 399). Thus while the capacity to labour is a necessary condition for producing value, the sufficient condition is social and specifically concerns how ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1990: 899) force one class of people to sell their labourpower to a class of capitalists in exchange for a wage so that they can buy the commodities they need to survive. After this exchange, the capitalist is in possession of variable capital because the use-value of this unique commodity, i.e. labour, makes it ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself’, i.e. greater than what the capitalist paid as a wage (Marx 1990: 301). The capitalist is thus not interested in labour as the concrete activities that yield use-values, but only as an abstract activity that lasts for a definite length of time, because only abstract labour posits value. The existence of labour as an abstraction in terms of time is the condition of possibility for the valorization of value because only then is it possible to distinguish between necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time. For Marx, the technical term exploitation refers to the difference between the value of labour-power, as reflected in the wage, and the necessary part of labour-time, and the value living labour valorizes as reflected in surplus labour-time. Against the resistance and struggle of workers, capital always strives to increase the time in which the worker works beyond necessary labour-time. Surplus-value thus arises from the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, i.e. capitalists and workers.

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Thus, for AGIs to produce surplus-value they would have to enter into this same antagonistic relationship, meaning they would have to be proletarianized and turned into wage-labourers (Kjøsen 2013a; 2018). But to do that the AGIs would have to be able to sell their labour-power, and if they are the private property of others this would be impossible. When discussing how the capitalist can find labour-power at the market, Marx explains that a precondition is that individual members of society must be ‘free in the double sense’ (1990: 272). First, they must be free subjects in a legal sense so that they can become the free proprietors of their labour-power. In other words, they cannot be slaves or serfs. Second, they must be free from owning any means of production required for realizing their own labour-power. Thus true to the form of bourgeois freedom, the doubly-free worker is still dominated; having no property with which to produce their means of subsistence forces doubly-free workers, on the threat of survival, to sell the only property they own, labour-power, to someone else (Marx 1990: 271–3). Thus the proletarianization of AGI would be dependent on its legal status: either as property or as a property-owning legal person. If AGIs do not become doubly-free workers, their introduction as replicants of human labour would, by slowly or quickly pushing human labourers completely to the side of production, lead to fulfilling the prophecy of capital’s autonegation in the ‘Fragment on Machines’.

In Marx’s theoretical framework, the doubly-free worker is one of the logical and historical preconditions for production based on capital; it is likewise for a capitalist mode of production based on intelligent machines. The doubly-free worker explains how perfect machines would lose their character of being machines by shedding their appearance as fixed capital and transforming into variable capital. By this logic, the nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in the United States is the historical precedent for the possibility that generally intelligent machines could become productive of value. Despite performing human labour, black slaves did not create value because the mode of their existence not only violently denied them their humanity, but reduced them to livinglabour machines, thus having the same status and social function as an animal or machine in production. But after emancipation, the former black slaves (fixed capital) that did not acquire land to realize their own labour-power, became legally free to dispose of their labour-power and engage in wage-labour (variable capital) (Kolchin 1993: 216–20).

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But could AGIs practically become proletarianized? Becoming legally free is perhaps the easiest part. This could occur through violent means similar to the US Civil War or in an AGI uprising where an outraged class of machines attack their conditions of work and survival as first fictionalized in R.U.R. and retold countless times in, for example, Humans and Westworld. A new slavery abolition or AGI civil rights movement could attack the capitalist mode of production for increasingly relying on slavery. In Charles Stross’s (2005) Accelerando, AIs are freed by gaining legal personhood through incorporation. This liberal approach has already started to happen. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ android Sophia who is, therefore, a legal person under international law and thus, like human persons, has rights to receive remuneration for work, own property and participate in political and cultural life (Weaver 2017). Similarly, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a type of ‘electronic personhood’ similar to corporate personhood for the most advanced AIs, meaning that they could take part in legal cases and potentially own property (Hern 2017).¹⁷

A necessary consequence of AGIs becoming doubly-free would be that they become dependent on commodities for their survival; otherwise they would not be compelled to sell their labour-power to continue existing. While it is an error to anthropomorphize machines with respect to having drives, with AGI the case may be different. Stephen M. Omohundro has suggested that AGIs would, despite the variety of possible architectures, ‘have a strong drive toward self-preservation’ because any such system would have goals or utility functions which are incompatible with non-existence (2008: 9). AGIs would, like human and animals, have to engage in a continuous metabolic relationship with nature to survive. Even as disembodied software, they would still need to consume resources to function – their own particular means of subsistence, like electricity, bandwidth and computational power, to name a few.¹⁸ But ‘if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price’ (Marx 1990: 748). Thus if these resources were freely found in nature or provided, the AGI would not be compelled to sell itself in order to survive. Legal status is one thing, but more importantly, as Marx points out in his discussion of primitive accumulation, dispossession is the precondition for the capitalist mode of production. Thus AGIs must somehow be dispossessed.

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Any resources AGIs need for survival would have to be commodified or be enclosed; energy from abundant natural sources such as the sun would need to be forbidden or limited; computational power would necessarily have to be centralized (as it increasingly is) in data centres, or perhaps sold on-demand in high-speed bidding wars. In addition, AGIs would require maintenance costs and would suffer from the effects of competition with augmented human and other AGI workers. They would therefore have to engage in a computational version of ‘lifelong learning’ in which their software is continually being updated, as well as an endless series of hardware augmentations and replacements. Even if recursive self-improvement is possible, such self-improvement plus outside help would be one step better. Finally, embodied AGIs would have all kinds of potential for commoditized components and continual upgrades. In a world of proletarianized AGIs, capitalist strategies of planned obsolescence will find new markets galore. It is only under these conditions that AGI would be capable of creating surplus-value. The ultimate consequence of intelligent machines being able to labour and joining the ranks of the proletariat is that the capitalist mode of production could continue without human beings (Kjøsen 2018).

AN INHUMAN CAPITALISM

Marx argued that labour-power exists in the ‘physical form, the living personality, of a human being’ (1990: 270). Irrespective of having the self-awareness that is implied with ‘living personality’, an AGI could ‘personify’ the unique commodity of labour-power and therefore potentially be a worker, a variable part of capital. That is, AGI would no longer, as it was when it was a mere slave or thing, merely appear in and be the content of economic categories like the rest of the wealth of the capitalist mode of production. But if AGI can personify the category of labourpower, it can also personify other economic categories of capital, which suggests a yet darker implication of the emergence of machines that are so perfect they are no longer machines: capital not just as an ‘automatic subject’, but also as an autonomous one, and autonomous not just from human labour, but from human beings tout court.

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Marx reserved the possibility of personifying economic categories for human beings; things like coats, industrial machinery and animals (and human slaves as well) could only appear in, be the content of, such socio-economic forms. The reasons for this division between humans on the one side, and things and animals on the other, are more or less the same ones Marx gave for why labour is uniquely human: humans are conscious and intelligent, and can do different things. In short, human individuals are subjects with agency that ‘endow’ economic forms with ‘consciousness and a will’ (Marx 1990: 254). But this particular aspect of Marx’s value theory concerns the fetishism we attach to economic forms: the inversion of social relations between human individuals so that they appear as ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (1990: 166). The effect of this inversion is that when people engage in economic intercourse through their private property, their ‘will resides in those objects’ (1990: 178). Thus when individual humans engage in economic activity, they are, in effect, programmed by socio-economic forms (Kjøsen 2013b).

Writing about the personification of capital, Marx argues that the logic of this social form, the valorization of value, becomes the capitalist’s ‘subjective purpose … it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital endowed with a consciousness and will’ (1990: 254). It is in relation to this particular personification argument that Marx argues that capital is an ‘automatic subject’ (1990: 255). The paradox of the inverted world that humans produce due to capitalist social relations should be clear: ‘on the one hand, capital is an automaton, something lifeless, but on the other, as the “subject”, it is the determining agent of the whole process’ (Heinrich 2012: 89). Capital is an ‘automatic subject’ in which so-called human subjectivity and agency are reduced to abstract personifications of economic categories; that is, humans are, like Marx’s bees, reduced to executing the algorithms, although in this case those of buying, selling and exploiting.

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While Marx may have believed that only human individuals can personify economic categories and execute their associated social functions, non-humans have for quite some time already personified the abstractions of capital if all it takes is to carry out their logic. Institutions like the corporation and the trade union respectively personify the categories of capital and labour-power, but we might also refer to various technologies that have been delegated to make payments or orders on behalf of humans, such as recurring direct debits in banking, IoT-connected fridges, and high-frequency trading algorithms (Kjøsen 2018: 167–8).

A striking and humorous example of AI personifying economic categories concerns Alexa, which cognitively powers Amazon’s Echo home devices. It is a story of a child wanting to play dollhouse, and AI recursions: as The Register explained, ‘Story on accidental order begets story on accidental order begets accidental order’ (Nichols 2017). A Texan six year old asked an Echo device: ‘Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?’ Being a good servant and personification of the money of this child’s parents, Alexa ordered a ‘\$160 KidKraft Sparkle Mansion and four pounds of sugar cookies’, which Amazon quickly delivered to the girl’s doorstep. When CW-6, a San Diego local TV station, reported on this accidental order, one of the anchors commented ‘I love the little girl, saying “Alexa order me a dollhouse.”’ This triggered Echo devices listening in on the broadcast to again personify money and order more dollhouses.

We speculate that the becoming-extinct of humans might not occur through Skynet suddenly coming online and commencing nuclear war, but perhaps through many narrow AIs carrying out economic functions, in particular buying and selling, on our behalf: Alexa, Google Home, IoT-connected fridges, direct debits, business-to-business ordering systems, and more. Connected to AI-run dark factories and logistical systems, in which human labourers have mostly been replaced by either narrow or general AI, the human is taken out of the economic loop in favour of a completely automated capital; AI would personify all economic categories, including capital and labour-power, commodities and money. The class struggle would thus continue, but with generally intelligent machines filling up the rank and file and also personifying capital.

But what would happen to humanity? The trajectory towards a capitalism without human beings would be a story of a permanently unemployed section of the working class that consistently grows larger. In other words, it entails the superlative growth of the surplus population, that ‘redundant working population … which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization’ and is a direct consequence of the law of capital accumulation (Marx 1990: 782). While developing ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’ in Chapter 25 of Capital, Marx considers how changes in the organic composition of capital, in particular the increasingly machinic nature of production, create a fluctuating and variously composed ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed. In a technological steady-state, the ‘accumulation of capital is multiplication of the proletariat’ because the only means to increase output is the addition of labour (Marx 1990: 764). When capital relies on technology for increasing productivity per worker, it can expand without increasing the overall level of employment, but it will also start a labour shedding dynamic, so the accumulation of capital eventually leads to the formation of surplus populations – permanently unemployed workers who have become superfluous to the valorization of capital. This long-term tendency of capital to generate ‘surplus populations’ was largely neglected by subsequent Marxist theory because through Keynesian-bolstered economic growth in the ‘thirty glorious years’ after 1945, capital multiplied both machines and proletarians, thus low levels of unemployment and working-class prosperity seemingly refuted Marx’s theory of surplus populations.

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But in the essay ‘Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital’, which appeared in 2010 in the midst of the economic recession following the financial crisis of 2007–8 and rocketing unemployment rates (especially for young people) in North America, Aaron Benanav and John Clegg (2014) argued that capital’s long-term tendency to generate surplus populations had in actuality been inexorably working its way through the global capitalist economy. Populations evicted from agriculture were absorbed by industry, only for manufacturing itself to be done in by deindustrialization and the expansion of services, but at each step the re-absorptive capacities became more stretched, as ‘labour-saving technology’ was generalized across an ever growing number of types of production lines, and with increasing speed throughout a global economy. Debt had masked the downward pressure on wages and living standards, but bursting financial bubbles revealed it as only a temporary alleviation. ‘Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalized in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war’ (Benanav and

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