AI and Capitalism
In the last few decades, Artificial Intelligence has undergone exponential growth in its capacities. It is no longer a part of the dystopian future that science fiction movies, pop culture and books narrate, but has become general-purpose technology that permeates every corner of our life. Considered to be the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, AI with its algorithms and cutting edge automation has started to impact the economic and societal organization and decision making. While debates on ethics of AI are long-standing, recent contestations on the effect of AI on capitalism and the economy have surfaced.
AI and robots have the potential to revolutionize our way of life, labor market and economy. Scholars are increasingly claiming AI to be the last frontier of capitalism. With the coming of automation, the tasks normally done by human beings are now done by machine and given the rapid rate at which AI is developing, the substitution of human labor will perpetuate. The complementary effect of automation claims that when a human job is automated, the amount of wealth generated in the economy increases. That increases demand, which in turn increases employment. Therefore AI will lead to the generation of more jobs. This might be true for the short term but in the long term, it will become convenient and feasible to replace most jobs. The end result of this is not difficult to imagine — a labor-less world.
Replacement of jobs by algorithms and robots threatens social upheaval due to mass unemployment and the creation of the ‘useless class’. The working class having no advanced technical skills or knowledge will lose their leverage in the workplace. This will force them out of the labor markets which would come to be dominated by robots. As human labor gets weakened, the workers will be left with no viable employment alternative. The cumulative economic and emotional resentment and frustration of this class towards the wealthy, who obviously will comprise of owners and controllers of automated knowledge, threatens to destabilize the economy and society. Capitalism has so far survived because of its abilities of co-opting dissent and hegemonic consent. However, the scope of co-option in the AI-driven world seems rather bleak, thus directly challenging the foundations of capitalism. Capitalism’s undying thirst for innovation, production and technological advancement gave birth to AI which, in Karl Marx’s words, might prove to be capitalism’s ‘inherent contradiction’.
AI threatens to dig capitalism’s grave by exposing yet another one of its inherent contractions of overproduction. Capitalism is saddled with a crisis of overproduction. The introduction of AI would only aggravate the crisis by making millions of jobs obsolete thus reducing the consumer market. This would directly hamper the health of capitalist economies forcing states to replace the ‘invisible hand’ with a democratically planned socialist economy. The flourishing of AI will only generate benefits for the tech overlords, i.e., those who invent and control the robots. These owners of AI will naturally be reluctant to share the benefits of the technological advancements with others leading to increased income gaps in the society, which would again give impetus to state involvement in the economy to guarantee universal basic income and minimum standards of living. The only recourse that would be available with the government to finance the welfare schemes on such a scale where a percentage of the population will be dependent on government assistance will be increased taxation on income and consumption. State’s involvement beyond a certain level will eventually put an end to unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism. AI can thus, nullify capitalist equilibrium and tip the balance in the favour of centralized economic systems.
The opposite camp claims that AI will make capitalism more embedded and pervasive in our lives in the form of the big data economy. The advent of surveillance capitalism which uses business models based on the digital world is extremely reliant on the big data generated from AI to make money. Knowledge and data have replaced capital to become the foundational stone of capitalism. AI is used to study consumers, target them and control their choices through subconscious consent. AI is furthering the concept of non-coercive domination and this consensual compliance is useful for capitalists to promote their cultural, moral, economic and ideological gains. Shoshana Zuboff claims that AI is converting humans into pawns of ‘Silicon Valley’s capitalists’ by fashioning private human experience into computed behavioral predictions for production and exchange. Data extraction, social and psychological profiling and behavior control have provided astonishing business growth for the companies giving a further push to commercialization and market capitalism. Experts fear that AI not only has the potential to strengthen the capitalistic roots of the economy but also transform the world of politics. The recent case of involvement of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US Presidential election is considered to be the first step towards the operation of reigns of politics by surveillance capitalism. With AI increasing the profitability of capitalism, improving decision making rationalization, capitalism’s fall due to AI is difficult to imagine for some.
This paradox requires the creation of viable and suitable conditions to nurture the potential of AI along with carefully addressing and defusing the risks it poses. The core issue in this dilemma are the questions about the distribution of gains from AI and harnessing of AI with ethics. Only time will tell, whether AI will force capitalism out of existence or become its elixir. The present is for thinking about what form of economy and society can ensure that we get the most out of AI and robots, to defend against future human joblessness and tech titans cornering all the riches.
