The Terminatrix from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Don’t believe the hype: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not help us in the slightest until there is a major reform of the economy. All it will do under capitalism is create widespread poverty and misery.
AI replaces human workers with bots. I know people doing highly skilled jobs including teaching English as a foreign language, who have been thrown out of work – replaced by machines who are held to do the job more efficiently and are cheaper for bosses to deploy.
The replacement of workers by machines is nothing new. The philosopher Karl Marx wrote in 1844 that “capital replaces labour with machines, and the rest of the workers it converts into machines.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Essay on Estranged Labour). Capitalist ideologues call this “progress” because sometimes the unemployed workers can find new gainful employment, they believe. But despite odd contrary examples, the new jobs employed after a machine has replaced you have tended to be more mundane and overly-specialised – pushing a button for a living, and at a lower rate of pay relative to the amount of profit that has been produced. Capitalism therefore has always had an in-built tendency to widening social inequality.
Whilst not strictly a new thing, the tendency to displace workers through AI is new in that it is much more extreme with wide negative ramifications: 1) It will trash the economy creating widespread poverty 2) It will deepen the ecological crisis.
So, regarding (1), Marx observed that ‘value’, i.e. ‘economic value’, including the value embodied in profit, is derived from labour, and pretty much exclusively from labour. Machines do not create profit, though they can be useful aids in a different form of society. But the capitalist eyes his balance sheet and sees one of his biggest costs is labour. The capitalist has thus always sought to replace the worker with a machine who doesn’t have a family to feed or aspirations to fulfil. Yet, in the long run, sacking the workforce will cause his rate of profit to fall, because there is little new living labour generating profit. The machines are only transferring their own cost-price into the value of the commodities they produce, but this cannot generate much profit, unless the capitalist overprices that which he sells (though that tends not to be a durable strategy in the long run). Therefore, the upshot of an over-reliance on machinery will lead to economic collapse because the rate of profit dictates how much capital can re-invest in production, which lays behind any sense society might one day become a dynamic entity. The impressive feat of having created artificial intelligence will lead to scarcity and want. Progress under capitalism is a great big myth.
Regarding (2), creating all these machines has a big carbon footprint, not only in their manufacture, but also the power they need to use. An AI revolution is incompatible with United Nation’s obligations to work towards “Net Zero” which requires a 60% reduction in humanity’s current carbon footprint, not its expansion. In the context of an economic dereliction, messing with the climate in this way is doubly dangerous.
This blogger does not believe AI will ‘turn on us’, i.e., go malevolent. I do not believe the machines have independent interests and would therefore turn on humanity. Rather the problem is something we are doing to ourselves – the capitalist’s quest for a quick short-term profit has economic repercussions which will also have a negative environmental impact. So, I’m with the Luddites. Now, listen to this brilliant piece of music!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9AeUMjoBo&ab_channel=JoslinMusic
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barryessex 