What you hate about AI is the capitalism

AI pulls the curtain back on the extractive logic that orders our lives

This week’s guest post is from Ryan Ward, a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. You can subscribe to his Free Market Moralism newsletter here.

“Most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism.” - Ted Chiang

Capitalism extracts value from the efforts of those who have no choice but to sell their labor power to survive. The additional value extracted from the labor power of workers, above and beyond what they are paid in wages, is profit. Whether or not something is profitable determines all decisions made by capitalists.

This is the logic of the modern capitalist system. We all feel it to a certain extent, but the system’s callousness is mostly hidden.

Image by Galina Nelyubova on Unsplash

We don’t see the backbreaking labor of underage miners in the Congo that provides the material that makes up our iPhone batteries, or the assembly-line labor of the workers who assemble the iPhones in “iPhone City” in Foxconn’s factory in Zhengzhou, China. We only see the iPhone itself. The value of the labor that went into its creation is hidden behind the price of the phone. The brutal conditions and precarious lives of the workers are masked by slick packaging and digital convenience.

Pulling back the curtain

In capitalist societies, the social relations of production are obscured behind the commodities we consume and the advertisements we see. Even if, on some level, we understand what’s going on, the stark reality of exploitation and oppression rarely seems visible in our daily lives.

But every once in a while, there is a development that pulls back the curtain on the reality of the system. It is telling that when such a rupture in the capitalist facade occurs, people hate it.

The last big capitalist rupture was the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, in which speculative investing by banks and other financial actors led to millions of people losing their homes and livelihoods, while the federal government bailed out the big banks responsible for the crisis. The GFC led to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which called attention to the unscrupulous practices of the actors responsible for the crash and the government’s bailouts. But this all came after the crisis, after the housing bubble had been inflated and burst.

The current AI boom represents the latest rupture. And the public backlash against AI has started before the bubble pops. It could be argued that this early backlash is down to the public becoming more savvy to the risks of unregulated capitalism. That is certainly the case. But I think that it can be attributed to how AI technology reveals the exploitation of capitalism in a way that has previously been hidden behind opaque financial systems.

The ghost in the machine

Let’s start with the tech itself. The miracle of LLMs seems to be that they can assemble information on any topic and regurgitate it back to the user very quickly. But this ability is only made possible by the training protocols on which LLMs are developed. These protocols scrape the internet for millions of texts, books, articles, essays - anything written. This scraped information is then used as a repository for the statistical process that underlies the LLM’s output.

There is a clear connection between exploitation and the technology underpinning LLMs. These models are extracting the labor of millions of people and turning it into an answer to a prompt. The laboring over phrasing and content, on which authors spent much time and energy, is abstracted and commodified.

Artists have been sounding the alarm for decades about capitalist appropriation of the product of their labor. With the advent of AI, the words, images, videos, and drawings of millions of people are extracted and commodified without any compensation. The wage relation, exploitative as it may be, is bypassed entirely - and the value of labor is extracted directly as massive profits for tech billionaires.

The great replacement

Not content to extract profit from prior labor without compensation, AI is now being used by companies to streamline their operations, with the goal of replacing the need for human labor altogether.

In the last two years, Amazon has laid off close to 30,000 workers in its pivot to AI. Meta has laid off thousands of workers and restructured thousands more roles in addition to implementing AI training programs, which record and analyze every computer move made by human employees to train AI to do their jobs. Google has laid off at least 12,000 workers in a move directly tied to its increased focus on AI priorities. Microsoft has laid off at least 15,000.

On the face of it, this process has much in common with historical job loss due to technological innovation. Since the Industrial Revolution, industrialists and economists have discussed the utility of replacing human labor with machines. In some ways, they were even more explicit in stating this goal in previous centuries. The language of today’s capitalists masks the goal of replacing workers, referring instead to “streamlining”, “increasing efficiency”, and “sharpening focus”.

But while the public face of these companies uses all the right language and professionalism, the true intentions cannot be hidden so easily. Information is far more accessible today, which makes the connections between moves towards AI and layoffs clear. For example, the website layoffs.fyi documents tech sector layoffs in close to real time across the world. Multiple news outlets regularly run stories related to tech sector restructuring and layoffs. Whistleblowers routinely leak internal company memos which reveal the real goals behind the layoffs, and the cavalier manner in which CEOs are ignoring known risks and potential dangers of AI development.

Then there are the data centers: gigantic warehouses requiring unfathomable amounts of power and water. Public funds are being spent, land expropriated, and politicians bought by AI companies to guarantee smooth building of these behemoths, which drive up energy prices and consume so much water they produce water shortages and droughts in the counties in which they are built.

The mask is off

The AI boom represents the pinnacle of the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos - and the excesses of its tech-bro-edgelord-wannabe-philosopher CEOs. Whether it’s the cartoon super-villainy of Alex Karp, the documented lies of Sam Altman, the Hitler worship of Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos lamenting human consumption of water curbing the potential of AI, the mask is off and the psychotic personalities behind these companies have been revealed for all to see.

Capitalism changes its spots but the leopard remains the same. The public backlash to the rapid rise of AI is the product of the convergence of a nakedly capitalist industry with a modern information ecosystem that makes clear the fundamental exploitation and extraction upon which this tech relies.

In this regard, AI is capitalism encapsulated. The fact that it is so revolting to so many is indicative of the fundamentally inhuman character not just of AI, but of capitalism itself.

Ryan Ward is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. You can subscribe to his Free Market Moralism newsletter here.