Artificial Intelligence: ‘Frankenstein’ or Capitalist Money Machine

    
JAMES PETRAS

      Introduction: The Financial Times’ Special Report (2/16/2017) published a
      four-page spread on the ‘use and possible dangers of artificial
      intelligence (AI)’. Unlike the usual trash journalists who serve as
      Washington’s megaphones on the editorial pages and political columns, the
      Special Report is a thoughtful essay that raises many important issues,
      even as it is fundamentally flawed.
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      The writer, Richard Walters, cites several major problems accompanying AI
      from ‘public anxieties, to inequalities and job insecurity’. Walters
      pleads with those he calls the ‘controllers of autonomous systems’ to heed
      social and ‘political frictions’ or face societal ‘disruption’. Experts
      and journalists, discussing the long-term, large-scale destruction of the
      working class and service jobs, claim that AI can be ameliorated through
      management and social engineering.
      This essay will proceed to raise fundamental issues, questions leading to
      an alternative approach to AI relying on class analysis. We will reject
      the specter of AI as a ‘Frankenstein’ by identifying the social forces,
      which finance, design and direct AI and which benefit from its negative
      social impact.
      Basic Questions: Demystifying AI
      The best and the worst of the experts reporting on AI assert that it is an
      autonomous system, devoid of any link to the class structure within which
      it operates. Their version of technological determinism, above and beyond
      the needs and demands of capitalists, has fits neatly with the corporate
      ideology of the trash journalists and pundits.
      The fundamental questions that must be raised include: 1) ‘AI’, for whom?;
      2) How are the productivity gains of AI to be distributed between capital
      and labor? 3) How are work time, income and pensions distributed between
      the owners of technology and the labor force?; and 4) What kinds of
      socio-economic activity does AI serve?
      ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and related technological innovations are
      financed, designed, controlled and ultimately applied by the major
      corporations and financial institutions in order to reduce the cost of
      labor and to enhance profits and competitiveness between capitalist
rivals.
      AI and similar capitalist technological changes, along with the overseas
      relocation of information technology and manufacturing production are the
      principal destroyers of workers’ employment and living standards in the
US.
      AI technology, alongside vast spending for imperial wars and military
      procurement, multi-billion dollar bank-bailouts and the promotion of
      finance-over-productive capital represent the forces driving down wages,
      salaries, living standards, pensions and, lately, life expectancy for the
      marginalized working class and rural population.
      The innovators and promoters of AI, whether individuals or small groups,
      seek capitalist support to finance, market and ‘acquire’ their
      ‘discoveries’. In fact, the entire industry has been built upon
      large-scale, tax-funded public research centers and university
      laboratories, which have paid for the buildings as well as the scientists’
      and professors’ salaries.
      Most of IT and AI related profits are distributed among the
      military-industrial complex, the chemical agro-industrial monopolies and
      the transport and consumer goods manufacturing elites. While garbage
      journalists and experts cite ‘AI’s contribution to health, education and
      social services, they forget to clarify that these ‘innovations’ are
      controlled by private health corporations, private ‘charter’ schools and
      public sector education elites intent on increasing profits, lowering
      teachers’ salaries, slashing programs and undermining student learning.
      The dismal, fragmented and mal-distributed state of healthcare and
      education in the United States are never seriously discussed because they
      put the lie to the absurd claims made about the benefits of AI and IT for
      the broader population.
      Far from being ‘autonomous’ and subject to abstract ‘controllers’, AI, IT
      and high technology serve to concentrate wealth, power and profits for
      multiple sectors of the ruling class who determine how such technologies
      will be used.
      The financiers of AI and their partners direct the scientists, engineers
      and marketers. The garbage journalists are paid to proclaim the arrival of
      ‘history-making’ innovations. The media describe AI as ‘machine learning,
      a form of advanced pattern recognition technology to make judgments by
      analyzing large amounts of data (which) could supplement human thought’
      (FT Special Report 2/17/2017).
      Contrary to the above-mentioned assumptions, the ‘judgments’ are made by
      the ruling class, using parameters and metrics determined by the elite,
      deciding on what kinds of ‘patterns are to be recognized’ in order that
      they can derive the kind of information they need to enhance profits, make
      war, maximize killing and engineering massive layoffs of workers. In a
      word, class assumptions dictate AI, IT and the use of these innovations.
      Conclusion: Alternatives
      If class determines AI, and in present-day America that means the ruling
      class, then only changes in the class structure can pose different
      questions and answers to our originally stated problems. Only by
      sharpening the class struggle, which changes who rules the banks,
      factories and social institutions, will new assumptions direct AI and IT
      and other innovations.
      Only workers, professionals and scientists, who replace the prioritizing
      of profits with meeting social needs, can produce an AI that lowers the
      retirement age, increases national health care, facilitates workers’
      decision making, distributes high quality education and information to the
      citizenry, reduces inequalities and shifts earnings from capital to labor.
  

      The Official James Petras Website
http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2129
     2/21/2017