Today, the social consequences of the increasingly massive use of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) are at the center of a debate that includesa wide range of positions: from techno-optimists, who see it as the
driving force for a generalized growth in productivity capable of
relaunching the capitalist economy and producing a new wave of
well-being, to those who, instead, see it as the warning signs of a wave
of mass technological unemployment, intensification of social control
and loss of control of citizens over their own existence.
This is not a new debate. In history, the potential effects of
revolutionary technological innovations have already been discussed,
today the English would say disruptive, such as the application of the
steam engine and electricity to the large-scale production of goods that
were once hand-made. Often this has been done by blaming the tool rather
than the person wielding it, that is, by attributing to technology
consequences that were actually effects of the social relationships
between workers and capitalists. At the beginning of the 19th century,
thousands of textile workers-artisans vented their anger at the loss of
their jobs resulting from mechanization by destroying the machinery they
saw as the cause of their ruin, giving rise to the Luddite movement. But
the problem was not the appearance of the first mechanical looms, but
the use that industrialists in the sector made of them to change the
conditions of production in their favor and to the detriment of workers.
Scott Galloway – liberal economist, marketing professor at New York
University and entrepreneur in the field of market research – argues in
the newsletter No Mercy/No Malice of June 24 that AI is a speculative
bubble similar to the many that have inflated in the history of
capitalism – from that of the Dutch tulips in the 17th century to the
more recent dot-com and subprime. So sooner or later it will explode
and, since bubbles are a tool of Darwinian selection, it will not leave
the desert, but will leave alive the companies that have made the most
successful (and luckiest) investments. Amazon, founded 30 years ago, has
managed to survive the crises of 2001 and 2007-2008, becoming a giant of
global capitalism.
Michael Roberts – a Marxist economist, a financial analyst in the City
of London for forty years – writes in his blog The Next Recession of
June 6 that, similarly, AI is not a game changer, it will not change the
rules of the game: productivity recoveries will be modest and above all
it will not free companies from the problem that Marx indicated as a
tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the potential loss of
profitability of investments as the ratio between machinery and living
labor increases. Furthermore, the multiplication of data centers
necessary to host the masses of Big Data on which AI tools are trained
causes a drastic increase in energy consumption, with significant
effects on the environment.
In their contributions, however, the concrete impact of AI on work
remains marginal. It is true that technological unemployment is
mentioned, but how much will the adoption of AI affect the organization
of work and the capitalist control over its execution and consequently
the structure of society?
The spread of smart factories, almost entirely automated factories, is
still quite limited. The necessary investments, in fact, are very high
and technological unemployment itself, by reducing the cost of labor,
tends to establish a threshold beyond which they are no longer profitable.
On the other hand, as a text cited by Roberts, Labor and Monopoly
Capital (1974) by Harry Braverman, explains, companies tend to automate
only the sectors from which the greatest increases in profitability
derive and these, today as 50 years ago, are the production support
services rather than production itself. According to the Mc Kinsey
report The state of AI in early 2024, published in May, 34% of the
companies analyzed use AI in the marketing and sales sector, only 4% in
production.
In the first book of Capital (Chapter XIII) Marx observes that the
contribution of machines to the transition from artisanal production to
industry and from the work tool to the machine is such that the driving
force is no longer supplied by man – already in ancient times the power
of water or draft animals were exploited – but rather in the
appropriation of the work tools – the spindles in the mechanical
spinning machine or the toothed blades in a sawmill – by the machine,
which therefore in fact carries out the work, while man mostly checks
that the machine carries out the work correctly and corrects any errors,
sometimes remaining the driving force.
“After the instrument in the strict sense has been transmitted from man
to the mechanism, the pure and simple instrument is replaced by a
machine. Even if man himself still remains the prime mover, the
difference is immediately obvious”.
As Braverman further underlines, this is where the separation between
ideation and execution, intellectual and manual work originates and
therefore we already find the seeds of the “scientific direction of
work” formulated in a complete manner by Taylor at the beginning of the
20th century, but one of the precursors of which was Charles Babbage,
author of the first project for a calculating machine in 1823 and
therefore rightfully considered one of the precursors of AI.
In this regard, it should be emphasized that the idea of a machine
capable of breaking down human thought, of which calculation is a
particular case, into a sequence of mechanical operations and therefore
not subject to errors transposes the function of machines in capitalist
production within a particular machine and anticipates and fuels the
invention of numerically controlled machines, which tear the knowledge
accumulated over time from the worker and concentrate it on a punched
card containing the algorithm with the instructions that the machine
tool will follow to create the desired artifact.
Therefore, when we ask ourselves whether AI will be a game changer, at
least from our point of view, it is not just a question of understanding
the effects in terms of productivity and profitability of investments,
but also whether its applications will produce a new industrial
revolution or whether they will instead limit themselves to taking the
traditional effects of automation on work to their extreme consequences.
Of the three concrete effects that Marx attributes to the removal of the
tools of labor from the worker – expansion of the workforce, longer
working days, and intensification of work – AI certainly exerts the
first and third, while the increase in working hours is largely made
superfluous, at least in advanced economies, by the abundant supply of
labor and the flexibility of work performance.
Take Amazon. If the simplification of tasks thanks to the introduction
of machines in the nineteenth-century factory allowed the co-optation of
child and female labor, in the “e-commerce factories” AI and new
technologies allow the recruitment of low-skilled personnel, of every
age group, gender, and nationality. Furthermore, the traceability of
each individual worker at all times and the control over the rhythms of
warehouse flows allow for the imposition of high rhythms and the
intensification of work, maximizing productivity. As for the length of
the working day, the abundant supply of labor, 24 hours a day if
necessary, and of ultra-flexible contractual forms makes it superfluous
to increase working hours (even if for drivers the problem of completing
more than 200 deliveries a day, even at the cost of extending the shift,
is present).
Of course it is not possible to exhaust the topic with these brief
reflections, which we have put down in black and white for the sole
purpose of tracing the coordinates of a discussion to be explored in
depth. Let us conclude with one last consideration. The development of
AI in the coming years will also depend on the production of dedicated
microchips. The production of the necessary raw materials and the
manufacturing of these same chips, largely located in the Far East, are
today looming with the threatening shadows of political-military
competition between the great powers. At the same time, the trade union
movement can also play a role, as we are seeing following the strikes of
Samsung Electronics workers in South Korea. For this reason, we believe
that this is a discussion that needs to be explored from the workers’
point of view, not only on the concrete terrain of collective
bargaining, but also on a more general and scientific level. To do this,
the material produced by academics can be a useful starting point.
From PuntoCritico.info Newsletter, July 20, 2024,
https://www.puntocritico.info/newsletter/
Marco Veruggio is editor of PuntoCritico.info and co-author of Da New
York a Passo Corese. Conflitto di classe e sindacato in Amazon
(PuntoCritico, 2024).
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL
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