I recently received a couple of replies from friends mentioning both Artificial Intelligence and social media. AI and internet technology are often treated as separate disciplines, but the two have now fused as search engines, help desk software, and medical diagnostic and other research tools increasingly incorporate sophisticated neural network processing and natural language models.
Both a novelty and a threat, AI has now blown past the Turing Test – a test of human verisimiltude – as we are increasingly bombarded with wholly invented images, almost-convincing “scholarship,” and computer-generated replies to human social media posts.
Since to some degree AI performs certain tasks like a human, this now calls into question our value as real humans. Under Capitalism, economic vulnerability has now become sharpened by a very specific kind of existential fear.
Both of my friends’ observations stand by themselves so I will simply reproduce them here:
“The bigger problem is what to do about lack of regulation of a technology that poses a threat on a number of levels in the name of a sacred freedom. The technology has long since outpaced societal regulation to prevent its misuse and harm and that needs to be redressed, not just offending platforms boycotted.”
and
“While Stephen Hawkin thought AI was our biggest threat, and it may well be, I find it sad that we collectively refuse to see that our fears that machines will have no use for us and do us in are also a projection of our culture’s attitude towards many humans and all of the non-human world.”
To the first reader, computer technology poses an intractable regulatory issue pitting personal freedoms against the uncontrolled forces of technological development. To the second, it is a moral issue. AI awakens human fears of suddenly finding ourselves lower on the food chain. And since AI calls into question our value as humans, we are reminded of how inhuman we have been to the world around us: to other humans, animals, and our environment.
These are both apt and wise observations. But both are framed in terms of the present realities of our economic and legal systems. Neither observation identifies a particular culprit or a possible solution.
Yet computer technology today poses precisely the same problems that 19th Century British Luddites encountered with the introduction of automation and steam powering of textile factories.
Contrary to the common understanding of the term, “Luddites” were not technophobes who disliked technology they could not comprehend. These weavers and spinners knew exactly how the technology worked. Rather, Luddites resented that the new technology was being forced upon them by industrialists bent on destroying their livelihoods because they now owned all the means of production and distribution. For the Luddites, this was a fight for economic survival, not an effort to keep up with technology.
As early as 1811 Luddites in the English Midlands began destroying textile factories and almost immediately became targets of both private retaliation and state repression. There were mass hangings and deportations to Australia. Children, rather than adult artisans, were soon put to work in these factories. The Industrial Revolution was so grim and foul that Charles Dickens wrote about it and Karl Marx developed a whole theory around it.
But even Karl Marx showed little sympathy for the Luddites. After all, for him economic progress was human progress; feudalism replaced barbarism; Capitalism replaced feudalism; and socialism would ultimately replace Capitalism. Opposing technological development wasn’t the answer for either 19th Century Marxists or Capitalists. And for 20th Century Capitalists and Communists alike, technology was practically fetishized.
Many of us internalize a fatalistic view of technology forced upon us by billionaires: we regard the introduction of new technologies as inevitable and we struggle to keep up and pay for it. We rarely ponder what life would be like if we actually had a voice in deciding how to use new technology. Instead, it is always up to the courts to address wrongs and abuses, and the courts can’t keep up either. But in any case, this is the wrong institution to regulate technology.
But back to Marx. Marx had no crystal ball, though he certainly had a keen mind. But for all that intellect he also had no idea that two feudal societies, Russia and China, would skip right over Capitalism directly into a broken form of socialism. Marx never fully connected slavery or racism with colonialism; for him slavery was simply a more extreme form of theft of labor value and, in the end, just another “economic category.”
“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”
It would be up to later writers (Cedric Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams) to make the case that Capitalism could never have existed without colonialism and racism.
But Marx was right about at least two things: (1) the labor of workers is being stolen; and (2) the end of Capitalism will involve changes in both production and social relations. After Capitalism’s time is finally up, capital (and this includes technology and intellectual property) will pass from the exclusive hands of industrialists, venture capitalists, and billionaires and become a commonly-owned, socially-controlled resource. A social good.
With the end of Capitalism – at least the predatory, completely unregulated Stage 4 variant the GOP champions – we all will finally have a say in how capital / technology / IP can be used – and for what social ends.
No more Murdochs (FOX), Musks (Twitter), Zuckerbergs (Facebook), or Sam Altmans or Peter Thiels (ChatGPT) changing your world.
But to get there we’ll have to change theirs.
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