Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for perception and reasoning in narrow domains.
This book explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through the lenses of different theoretical concepts, including surplus-value, labour, the general conditions of production, class composition and surplus population. It argues against left accelerationism and post-Operaismo thinkers, asserting that a deeper analysis of AI produces a more complex and disturbing picture of capitalism’s future than has previously been identified.
Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI represents an ultimate weapon for capital. It will render humanity obsolete or turn it into a species of transhumans working for a wage until the heat death of the universe; a fate that is only avoidable by communist revolution.
Table of Content
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: AI-Capital
1. Means of Cognition
2. Automating the Social Factory
3. Perfect Machines, Inhuman Labour
Conclusion: Communist AI
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
James Steinhoff is a Ph D Candidate in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His dissertation is about work in the artificial intelligence industry, and he has published on the philosophical connections between Marxism and transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and media theory. He is the co-author of Inhuman Power (Pluto, 2019).
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