I’m listening to The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Callum Chase, 2022 edition.
It’s interesting in parts. The first chapters run through a list of technical advances. He calls them revolutions, technical revolutions.
It’s painful.
It’s painful to listen to someone talk about the history of the forces of production without mentioning the relations of production. It’s criminal how people can describe stages of technological development as though they unfold in a vacuum. As if the social relations that organised labour, ownership, power never happened. As if Karl Marx never wrote anything.
It’s incomplete in a way that distorts the whole picture. There’s a dialectic missing. The tension between forces of production, such as technology, and the relations of production. The way each pushes and shapes and reshapes the other.
As a Marxist, I live and breathe that dialectic. Listening to someone intelligent, well read, with a strong grasp of stages of development, and the there’s a silence where the relations of production should be. Cultural amnesia.
He says AI will have an impact on the economic structure. Its happening.
My job hasn’t been replaced by AI. I’m a psychotherapist, psychodramatist and supervisor. I sit with people. But many of our clients are already chatting to AI systems. They tell me the AI knows them well. They speak about the pleasure of companionship. Even loved.
That’s the shift in social life.
I have a friend whose job now involves using AI to create in hours what used to take weeks or months. Their work is to develop tech to make themselves redundant.
This is happening now.
The forces of production are moving fast. Faster than most of us can envisage. The relations of production have not disappeared. What is happening to them?
To talk about an economic singularity without talking about ownership, labour and class is to describe only half the engine. The other half is obscured.
AI is transforming the economy. The question is who owns it, who directs it, who benefits, what happens to those whose labour is displaced. Will there be class struggle? Class war?