The jobs that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is making disappear-right now, because the process is already underway-are all intellectual or artistic professions. Doctors, writers, lawyers, photographers, translators, illustrators, videographers, journalists, printers, accountants, and so on, only have a few years left. Bad news or good news? ---- Destroy! ---- Capitalism, considered a "mode of production," is most often analyzed as progress compared to the modes of production that preceded it. Capitalists have rationalized and diversified the production of objects and machines, increased productivity with assembly line work, mechanized agriculture, and globalized the economy. In return for achieving this, capitalism has destroyed crafts, both in cities and in the countryside, as well as organic food production (there were no industrial inputs before the end of the 19th century, apart from manure or composted plant waste). This destruction of manual trades and skills is virtually complete, and while some artisans and organic market gardeners still exist, they are only marginal in the "core" countries. Their persistence against all odds-against capitalism!-is nonetheless essential from a political standpoint: this margin holds enormous revolutionary potential since it still produces food and goods that have meaning.
Until now, capitalism had not directly attacked intellectual professions. On the contrary, it had rather developed and overvalued them compared to manual labor. The recent emergence, at the end of 2022, of the IAG (Integrated Agricultural and Food Systems) constitutes, in this sense, a revolution and even one of the defining challenges of the century (along with the over-armament of states and the slide towards war, not to mention the likelihood of widespread famines), but not only that. It is also a challenge to capitalism itself. Because, from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production, IAG destroys the enormous sources of profit derived from these intellectual professions. In other words, IAG undermines capitalism itself!
The nature of the challenge
Capitalism is a mode of production based primarily on destruction-which doesn't mean that capitalism only destroys: it also creates, otherwise it would have disappeared long ago. However, capitalism conceives of and implements its capacity for destruction before launching its creative process. In other words, this system establishes itself where it knows it can destroy. Colonialism was thus an enterprise of destroying the social, economic, and political structures of subjugated countries, forcing them to participate in the capitalist system, to the benefit of the colonizing countries. Some would say that this was merely collateral damage, but no: this destruction was the essential condition for the introduction of capitalism.
In the 1940s, the economist Schumpeter, with his theory of creative destruction, legitimized destruction, which he saw as merely accompanying creation and being a necessary condition for it. Schumpeter thus provided capitalism with its theoretical roadmap up to its current stage. It is therefore no coincidence that he has become, in our time, the most cited and discussed classical economist; he emphasized the challenge that capitalism has, until now, always met: destroying in order to create and perpetuate itself.
According to some, destruction is inherent to the human species. But no: Erich Fromm, in *The Passion to Destroy*, showed that human destructiveness is one of the essential driving forces of modern society, if not its fundamental engine, but that it is merely an adaptation to this destructive capitalist society. Capitalism destroys, and we have adapted to this worldview.
During the 20th century, in its destructive-creative cycle, capitalism gradually shifted the sources of profit. He reorganized them geographically, destroying the basic production of the "core" countries to "export" it to the "peripheries" of the "Global South," and structurally, for example, by replacing local market gardening with industrial agriculture. Thus, Paris and its inner suburbs were self-sufficient in food until the eve of the Great War; today, like any metropolis, the city no longer produces any food; it is rich in its intellectual activities. Throughout the world, office automation, computerization, and now the omnipresence of the internet in industrial and commercial enterprises are the most obvious examples of these recent structural transformations.
The challenge for capitalists is to constantly find what can be destroyed in order to "displace" it elsewhere or produce it differently, so as to conquer areas still "backward" according to the capitalist mode of production, or to invent new methods of work that generate profit. However, nowadays, everything related to concrete, material production is already either exported to the Global South or restructured in the countries of the core, with, for example, assembly lines requiring fewer and fewer workers-hence the persistence of mass unemployment. What is to be done? Where can sources of profit be created?
The problem
: Schumpeter's theory will soon no longer work. With the rise of GAI (Global Industrial Automation), the sectors it destroys are no longer replaced by other innovative sectors employing humans, but by an absolute megamachine: GAI itself. A technology abolishes intellectual professions. A purely mechanical revolution throws humans into unemployment. In the coming months, the situation will worsen, as the AI designers promise that AI systems will improve themselves, no longer needing humans like "scorers" to train them.
The system is self-destructing. And Musk's delusions of conquering the universe won't change anything; quite the contrary, because Musk will devote astronomical sums to a dead-end path. This won't be the first time that "cutting-edge" capitalists have gone astray with insane projects. Consider, for France, the Plan Calcul, the Concorde, the Minitel, the Superphénix, and the A380-projects with astronomical costs whose short- or medium-term failure was, nevertheless, not difficult to predict. As for the other major delusion of capitalism in its current stage, transhumanism, it follows the same logic as AI: the technologization of everything that was biological and human, simply human.
Thus, there are really only two possible outcomes.
First
, if the system self-destructs as it develops, and if AI is this stage of destroying intellectual professions, sources of enormous profits for the system, then the first, classic outcome is the destruction of humanity in its most advanced form: war, or even famine or disease. This was already Robert McNamara's thesis when he was director of the World Bank in the 1970s.
Indeed, from a purely capitalist (and therefore cynical) perspective, McNamara is right: if there are fewer, far fewer, human beings, those who survive will have more opportunities to, first, rebuild what needs rebuilding, then to produce food, survive, and perhaps one day, finally live without fear of tomorrow. This is exactly what happened with the Black Death in the 1340s: the survivors were then able to cultivate only the best land, which allowed them to develop other sectors besides agriculture, since farming was more productive and therefore required fewer workers. This is also what happens after a war, which gives the illusion that war allows for qualitative leaps and technological progress, but it is the destruction of human beings that leads, in a capitalist system, to this type of "progress." It is pointless to dwell here on the horror and absolute chaos that a
world war would represent for humanity in the 21st century, given the technological means that would be deployed to destroy it...
Second outcome
: The other outcome that AI directly brings about is the complete virtualization of life, of our lives, of our lifestyles. This is, broadly speaking, the thesis developed in the first installment of The Matrix. Humans, literally weaned on AI productions (entertained by music or videos generated by AI, and also treated by AI), would have nothing left to do, no productive tasks to perform. But then, who would feed them? In The Matrix, the question is sidestepped with a science-fiction illusion: humans are nourished by a kind of amniotic fluid. But let's return to Earth: who will produce the food, and using what agricultural techniques, on a planet plagued by climate change and rising temperatures?
If we continue this line of reasoning from a capitalist perspective, the most cynical, such as Gianroberto Casaleggio, the ideologue of the Five Star Movement in Italy, who died in 2016, believed that humanity should be reduced to one billion individuals. In such a scenario, the survivors would benefit from increased agricultural productivity on the best land (or the only land still arable, given the impending agroecological disasters). In this case, the two possible solutions-war and widespread artificial agriculture-would combine... to the great detriment of human beings and all living things on this planet. Capitalism would take on new forms, so radical would the destruction have been, with manual skills lost and ancestral, efficient, and simple techniques wiped out.
Would this be a new mode of production? In any case, a form of capitalism that will have little in common with the current one, and which will be even less livable for the few surviving humans, who will become slaves to AI that will think for them, entertain them, care for them, and feed them throughout their "lives."
Clearly, AI will bring nothing good, absolutely nothing. Nothing but pure, absolute destruction. Calling on Schumpeter or Musk for help will only delay the realization. It is up to us to reject AI immediately, absolutely, daily, and not just partially. We must not use any of this technology, which also implies deadly ideological choices. Annihilate AI!
Élisée Personne
Contact: groupe.huko@autistici.org
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=9152
_________________________________________
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten