Capitalizing on Artificial Intelligence

Nathan J. Robinson for Jacobin on artificial intelligence and capitalism:

It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day writing legal documents? But we can’t be excited about it, because we live under capitalism, and we know that if paralegal work is automated, that’s over three hundred thousand people who face the prospect of trying to find work knowing their years of experience and training are economically useless.

Mandy Brown on A Working Library on the smoke screen of artificial intelligence:

The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished. We have the power to tell different stories, to counter the narrative of “artificial intelligence” with one that is rooted in democracy and equality, in a vision of a living world in which life is not ranked according to perceived value under capitalism but in which care is extended to all. But—and here’s the trick of it—in order to do that we have to let go of the notion that any one of us is worth more than any other. Countering the story of so-called AI demands that we relinquish the habit of presuming that some people are deserving of care and some are not, that some people are more intelligent than others, that some kinds of intelligences are superior. […]