The shock sacking of Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, by his own board reveals the contradictions emerging in the development of ChatGPT and other ‘generative artificial intelligence’ models driving the AI revolution.
Will AI and these language learning models (LLMs) bring wonderful new benefits to our lives, reducing hours of toil and raising our knowledge to new heights of human endeavour?; or will generative AI lead to the increased domination of humanity by machines and even greater inequality of wealth and income as the owners and controllers of AI become ‘winners take all’ while the rest of humanity is ‘left behind’?
It seems that the OpenAI board sacked their ‘guru’ leader Altman because he had ‘conflicts of interest’ ie Altman wanted to turn OpenAI into a huge money-making operation backed by big business (Microsoft is the current financial backer), while the rest of the board continued to see OpenAI as a non-profit operation aiming to spread the benefits of AI to all with proper safeguards on privacy, supervision and control.
The original aim of OpenAI was as a non-profit venture created to benefit humanity, not shareholders. But it seems that the carrot of huge profits was driving Altman to change that aim. Even before, Altman had built a separate AI chip business that made him rich. And under his direction, OpenAI had developed a ‘for-profit’ business arm, enabling the company to attract outside investment and commercialise its services.
As the FT put it: “this hybrid structure created tensions between the two “tribes” at OpenAI, as Altman called them. The safety tribe, led by chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, argued that OpenAI must stick to its founding purpose and only roll out AI carefully. The commercial tribe seemed dazzled by the possibilities unleashed by ChatGPT’s success and wanted to accelerate (ie make money). The safety tribe appeared to have won out for now. “
Altman is not a scientist, but it seems he is a great ideas man, an entrepreneur in the Bill Gates tradition (with Microsoft). Under Altman, OpenAI has been transformed in eight years from a non-profit research outfit into a company reportedly generating $1bn of annual revenue. Customers range from Morgan Stanley to Estée Lauder, Carlyle and PwC.
The success has made Altman the de facto ambassador for the AI industry, despite his lack of a scientific background. Earlier this year, he embarked on a global tour, meeting world leaders, start-ups and regulators in multiple countries. Altman spoke at the Apec Asia-Pacific regional summit in San Francisco just a day before he was sacked.
Altman apparently has “a ferocious ambition and ability to corral support”. He has been described as “deeply, deeply competitive” and a “mastermind”, with one acquaintance saying there is no one better at knowing how to amass power. As a result, he has a ‘cult’ following among his 700-plus employees most of whom signed a letter demanding his re-instatement and the resignation of the safety tribe on the board.
OpenAI has lost half a billion dollars in developing ChatGPT, so it was about to launch a sale of shares worth $86bn before the split on the board. That would have continued the non-profit approach. Now with Altman and others joining Microsoft as employees, it seems that the OpenAI may be swallowed up by Microsoft for a pittance and so end the company’s ‘non-profit’ mission.
What all this shows is that those who think that the AI revolution and information technology will be developed by capitalist companies for the benefit of all are being deluded. Profit comes first and last – whatever the impact on safety, security and jobs that AI technology has on humanity over the next few decades.
Some fear that AI will become ‘God-like’ ie a superintelligence developing autonomously, without human supervision and eventually controlling humanity. So far, AI and LLMs do not exhibit such ‘superintelligence’ and, as I have argued in previous posts, cannot replace the imaginative power of human thinking. But they can hugely increase productivity, lower hours of toil and develop new and better ways of solving problems if put to social use.
What is clear is that AI development should not be in the hands of ‘ambitious’ entrepreneurs like Altman or controlled by the mega tech giants like Microsoft. What is needed is an international, non-commercial research institute akin to Cern in nuclear physics. If anything requires public ownership and democratic control in the 21st century, it is AI.
Michael Roberts Blog 
Michael’s analysis really helps us better understand what is going on. And his way forward is really spot on. Congratulations!
> Some fear that AI will become ‘God-like’ ie a superintelligence developing autonomously, without human supervision and eventually controlling humanity. So far, AI and LLMs do not exhibit such ‘superintelligence’ and, as I have argued in previous posts, cannot replace the imaginative power of human thinking. But they can hugely increase productivity, lower hours of toil and develop new and better ways of solving problems if put to social use.
Exactly. In fact, the LLM right now is not an omnipotent spirit, but a dumb mechanical nerd who has “read” all the books and all the conversations on the Internet, but has not understood their meaning, and is unable to influence or change anything in the real world. All it can do is respond to the text, continue the thought, offer the quintessential knowledge of the topic, and for that it is valuable. It can somewhat improve the work of an amateur in writing or processing a text in a particular field of knowledge and significantly speed up the work of a professional, acting as a virtual assistant, an opponent, a prompter, a quick but sometimes inaccurate substitute for any Internet search engine.
If it is additionally trained on properly handpicked texts of the subject area of interest, for example, on the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., we’ll get a “virtual Marxist” who, relying on the corpus of Marxist works, will in most cases correctly answer theoretical questions, including complex and debatable ones.
What the commentators here fail to recognise is that all so-called artificial intelligence relies on the appropriation of HUMAN, intellectual labour, embedded in machines via SOFTWARE. There’s no such thing as artificial intelligence! And this is not a new phenomenon, it’s been happening since the Industrial revolution when the skills of the artisan was stolen and embedded in the machines of the factory. It’s the appearence that fools people, as it seems as if the machines are thinking. Read the David F. Noble’s ‘Forces of Production’ for an excellent description of the origins of so-called expert systems and machine ‘learning’. It’s not just about replacing human labour with machines but also about control of the labour process.
I usually wonder why M.Roberts and others separate the advent of the computer(C.Babbage or Turing) and then this A.I, which literally is or has been imitation/reflection of human action.
If the computer was never regulated on its onset, never should AI. For all innovations(never inventions mind you, only mainstream media push), this frenzy, momentous as always is, has to be put up and then done with.
For the control or harnessing of A.I must depend on methodologies that make victories in the battlefield, plus the dispositions of the “effective majority”. Like he(M.R) has always sidelined the exploitation in the Global South and pinpointed the prevalent technological difference, awareness and catch up effort for many has been a hard work in the seemingly rapid wind of change.
But as always, socialism is possible or even inevitable path to communism, the ultimate possibility.
The CPC thinks that AI should be regulated internationally. The Western Left should follow the Chinese and support that policy line on AI, too.
As for the AI itself, people from the area I’ve read have said that, so far, it is just a turbo pattern recognition, i.e. not really AI. The thing is: it is good enough to wipe out a lot of white collar jobs that, until now, we fetishized as intellectual jobs because they were typically middle class. As the middle class loses the universality it gained during the First Cold War, expect a lot of people moaning about it on the internet (as the middle class is the class responsible for producing the ideas that circulate in the Academia, the internet and the newspapers).
From the point of view of Marx’s theory, there is no enigma with AI: it is just one more technology that will increase productivity of labor.
The problem is the probably the first situation in the capitalist history, when new means of production and newly emerged layers of the working class do not develop progresive political movements, but the reaction of various types. Those new IT workers are radical free-marketers, not socialist of any (progressive) kind. At best, some Jacobin magazine-type Social Democrats, but this is a tiny part of the seas of libertarians, “Austrian economic” supporters, conservative neoliberals, or just neoliberals of the self-made men with enormous hartred against the poor and against all the traditions of the left-wing political thinking in ideas. In the more “traditional” part of the working class, the domination of Trumpism, Orbanism and similar radical nationalist Right in de facto political “monopolists.” Now we have another regressive phenomenon in countries sych as Salvador (bitcoin president!) and in Argentina (“anarcho-capitalist” who wants to break down all forms of the organised labour).
At the moment, capitalism has – temporary – “resolved” its “visible” contraditions by consumerism and “cheap money”, both in “positive” (abundance of cheap consumer goods) and “negative” (go on strike when your credit has to be payed…) ways. Yes, the rate of profit in the developed countries, with some minority exceptions, has been falling, but private debts, combined with promise of easy and rich life, since the 1980s, have made an outstanding situation where worker-based socialism is totally non-existed as a positive inspiration and real political movement. The danger of breakdown of this “consumerist society” is real due to ecological catastrophe, but the thing is to prevent it, not to make situation more like in “bellum omnium conta omnes” with new significant gains for the far right. As we have seen, the contraditions of modern day capitalism have improved the far right, even neo-Nazism in some countries, but not Marxist socialism which is still on the level of political micro-sect and is (metaforically and biologically) dying. The most horrifying is when you see your former political comrades, people in their 30s nad 40s, ended in the extreme nationalism, as they remained anti-neoliberals, but cheased to be internationalists and Marxists.
How to chance this situation, where to find an practical inspieations, how to be politically active within the working class when you are seen as “traitor of nation” and “utopist who wants Lenin’s political horror to come back”? I don’t know…
“How to chance this situation, where to find an practical inspirations, how to be politically active within the working class when you are seen as “traitor of nation” and “utopist who wants Lenin’s political horror to come back”? I don’t know…”
You could take lessons from christianity: In an avenue of reaction, it was plunged into a valley of despair and then trodden the city of destruction. All along perseverance has gotten it a lifetime of two millennia. So, my message? that is the normal life of a great man. as Carlyle purports.
Being an Eastern European, you should know firsthand about sabotaging socialism.
Sabotaging socialism in Eastern Europe? Here the sabotage was basically one: by the Stalinist bureaucratic, in many cases also highly nationalist, dictatorship struggling against all forms of workers’ democracy and democratic planning in favour of the top-down command generating the most absurd phenomenon in history of modern production: overaccumulation with underproduction of “capital goods” and consumer commodities. The general shortage disorganised the development of the mode of production as the law of value was abolished not by worker-organised production, but by the alienated bureaucratic central of the “proletarian power.” The bureaucratic overthrown of the law of value ended in a permanent tendency to its reestablishment by the direct producers as the shortages disorganised the “socialised” production. We saw this both in the collective agriculture (also in China after the Maoist ultra-left economic adventurism) and in production of consumer goods and “light” industrial production. So, the bureauceatic regime generated its own negation. Firstly by the tendencies of the organised labour to workers’ democratic control of production, crushed in 1945 (just after the war), 1953, 1956, 1968, 1981, and later by the spontanous individualistic tendencies of the direct producers (atomised workers) and to the so-called negative workers’ control as workers did not have true engagement in the decision making processes. It was the first step of the capitalist restoration, very well researched even by the pro-bureaucratic social scientists in the 1980s. If you struggle against workers’ democracy and democratic planning, you will receive the capitalist mode of production as an alternative to the disfunctional system.
The flaws of the wrongly called “Marxist-Leninist” (Stalinist) system is the most crucial ideological weapon against Marxism and revolutionary socialism in the CEE. And against Lenin as a forerunner of this system, even in reality it was invented by Stalin in late 1920s in an adventurist way when building “socialism in one country” within the borders of the USSR without any significant interaction with the world economy with minimal indystrial policy resulted in the crisis of the NEP which was much ealier prophesied by Trotsky and Left Opposition.
@ EastEuropean Marxist
You may not like it, but we can’t argue against the results: Marxism-Leninism was the only victorious variation of socialism in the 20th Century and these first three decades of the 21st Century. Marx predicted it would happen, not that it would be pretty — and it indeed happened, as he predicted.
The system was reformable, as China demonstrated in 1978 and as we see it now. It wasn’t a dead end. But the Eastern Europeans threw it all away in exchange for a fantasy — the fantasy of Northern European welfare state. They got IMF Shock Doctrine instead.
EastEuropean Marxist, you isolate the nacent Russian revolution from historical world in which that revolution occurred and then proceed to judge it from the alembic of an idealized “marxist” perspective, leaving a bitter self-righteous residue of anti-communist conclusions that are in fact reactionary. EastEropean Marxist! welcome to Western marxism…
Addendum
I missed the opportunity of integrating the above comment with the subject of this blog. The last sentence should have read:
EastEuropean Marxist! Welcome to the ranks of artificially intelligent Western marxists.
Between formulations I am not used to and, near as I can tell, instances of sarcasm, I am lost as to what exactly is meant and can’t comment on most of this.
“The problem is the probably the first situation in the capitalist history, when new means of production and newly emerged layers of the working class do not develop progresive political movements, but the reaction of various types. Those new IT workers are radical free-marketers, not socialist of any (progressive) kind.” IT workers are not all members of the working class, especially the ones who negotiate their own contracts with their employers rather than signing the standard offer. They are clotted together with petty bourgeois and even haute bourgeois in a system that falsely promises that all can potentially become owners, bourgeois. As time goes on, segments of IT will as they already have become simply proletarians with white collars. But this minority is not organized save into a dog-eat-dog system. In a way this fragment is roughly similar to the households that worked on materials provided by early capitalists using the putting out system. And the rest are hopeful petty bourgeois pursuing stock options and patents and management positions. To me the best way of putting it, these are people who right now believe they have careers, not jobs, that they can win. The majority are wrong, and I strongly suspect the minority who do make it may find the emotional cost far too high. But I think that’s where we are especially with supposedly cutting edge stuff like AI etc.
If you don’t like me simply saying you’re wrong, here’s my reasoning. TL;DR?
So far as I can tell, the Marxian critique presumes in most cases the reproducibility of the commodity. The great exception, land, is treated in the Marxian critique as the source of absolute rent (in distinction from differential rent) for that reason. I’m not sure that absolute rent is thoroughly developed in modern critique. This is especially true I think of energy (largely oil,) possibly because of the unpalatable conclusions re absolute rent making a handful of capitalists (or worse) in otherwise oppressed countries into exploiters of workers elsewhere. I suspect those conclusions would be false, largely old racist twaddle disguised, unpleasant even to wonder about.
But in principle any nonreproducible use value/utility can be made an item of commerce will fluctuate wildly in exchange value precisely because there is not enough movement of capital to define socially necessary. Formally, it is like diamond, the average value will be the total amount of labor time *including the time “spent” by the whole of society* as well as specific entrepreneurs looking for the rare diamond deposits. The fact that the social necessity cannot be well established means that any individual transaction is wildly apt to erroneously estimate the value. The less able society can evaluate (pun intended) the diamond, the more subjective marginal utility dominates in individual exchanges.
That’s why I premise that marginal utility, so far from being the solid foundation of prices system and the hallmark of economic rationality, is a source of irrational fluctuations. And it’s not just speculative frenzies like tulipmania. That’s why in practice I think diamonds are largely priced by monopoly. In other cases, like baseball cards or other collectibles that can’t legally be “reproduced” at all, in practice prices are effectively set by manuals of prices. In other cases, like baseball players or movie stars, whose performances can’t be reliably reproduced are wildly erratic, fruits of bargaining with owners of venues, some winning a seemingly extravagant pay which are still but a paltry fraction of the profits, while many others are much more poorly paid and numerous others are simply unemployed. Failure to get hired in the first place is overlooked in assessing the effective rewards of many such kinds of work.
In some cases, supposedly non-reproducible labors of immense skill and responsibility, like medicine and law, prices are set partly by licensing, both state and by a kind of guild, the ABA and AMA which exist partly to control the amount of production and functionally set up apprenticeships rather than simple hires. Higher education, which presumes that the skilled labor of original mental work is effectively not reproducible, in addition to exclusion of aspirants, licensing, de facto apprenticeships also has a massive rewards system to encourage fierce competition among the so-called workers. It is basically the prospect of special privileges, like living in a university town with cultural amenities, tenure, copyrights on textbooks or other works, patents in the cases of natural scientists and engineers and of course for the elite, either command of a policy institute or, holy of holies, public office as an advisor. Yes, in practice, it’s a petty bourgeois rat race, and most of them will fail. If they were part of an enterprise making commodities for sale and profit, then they might have hope that they could solidarize and strike. But the strike weapon is blunted when no one goes broke but the striker. It is the petty bourgeois milieu and its attendant despair at winning secure property that makes higher education both a source of verbal radicalism on the part of some, especially the ones unlikely to get their own practice, whether it’s medicine, law, engineering or a research lab *and* weakness in solidarity with the broader masses of people. As I wrote above, these are people with careers, not jobs.
Seems the privatist faction of Open AI has won the war, as Sam Altman has returned triumphally.
Looks like it will be privatized AI for the West.
You write:
“Will AI and these language learning models (LLMs) bring wonderful new benefits to our lives, reducing hours of toil and raising our knowledge to new heights of human endeavour?; or will generative AI lead to the increased domination of humanity by machines and even greater inequality of wealth and income as the owners and controllers of AI become ‘winners take all’ while the rest of humanity is ‘left behind’?|”
It’s NOT machines who dominate but the ruling class and their highly paid servants like Sam Altman (why are those on the left obsessed by the Altmans of this world, highly paid servants of capital?). It seems that the fear of sophisticated computers that MIMIC human intelligence has led to a loss of the capacity to reason.
On techno-fetishist job-eating machines.
If no living labor is used in production, then no surplus-value is produced in production.
If no surplus-value is produced, no capitalist accumulation takes place. And if no living labor is used in production, no surplus-value can be produced and no capitalist accumulation takes place.
Why doesn’t a capitalist use a robot to serve Big Macs, if it’s profitable?
Why don’t jobs disappear and profits fall?
Why hasn’t the rate of profit fallen to zero, as most economists predicted?
Why haven’t jobs disappeared, as many still predict?
Why do production prices constantly deviate from production costs, i.e. what is inflation?
Marx: Predicted an event he called “the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value”. And he made this prediction almost 70 years before it actually happened.
By applying inflation to wages, as the bourgeois simpleton further explained, real wages could be reduced to inflate profits; as profits increased, job creation would continue. The job-consuming capitalist robots that some economists are so afraid of could be held back, at least for a while. Until now, that is,
The thing is: if AI replaces middle class jobs, that relation is not immediate, because the middle class is essentially unproductive labor. Substituting unproductive labor does still tend to rise OCC, but not always, and, even when they do, the fall in profitability may not be immediate.
Since the middle class is parasitic to capitalism, its substitution by AI does not represent a fall in profitability — specially if those middle class people feed the industrial reserve army, in which case profitability may rise instead of fall.
In the example you gave, there’s no sense for capitalist to replace a burger flipper (who’s not middle class) with a robot, because the bugger flipper is 1) productive labor and 2) already is very cheap labor power. Machines are good when they either shed a lot of workers or replace highly-paid ones — neither being the case of the burger flipper (there already is a machine that replaces burger flippers: the industry of frozen hamburgers/food; but they don’t replace the hamburger as a service).
The middle classes are essentially unproductive labour? How did you arrive at that conclusion? So the engineers, software writers, production managers, doctors, nurses, teachers and so forth are all unproductive? So you’re alleging that the only ‘real’ workers’, people who actually either, make things or dig ditches, sweep the streets, cook your meals etc, are the only ‘real’ workers? A bizarre conclusion to say the least.
PS: Well perhaps not nurses.
In the case of the worker, well paid thanks to relative surplus value, his work has been multiplied x times, he is very well paid but overexploited.
But that’s not the problem, if we understand that the more technology there is, the more production costs fall, and the more prices have to rise.
And it’s the gap between production costs and prices that has kept the system afloat until now, on the one hand by crushing wages, on the other by increasing profits. Not only are wages falling in value, but this also allows the meagre wage cake to be shared out, among other counter-trends.
Since the crisis of the 1930s, inflation has become sticky, and since the 1980s even more so, with a few remissions, and now it’s back with a vengeance. A little bird tells me that it’s also, but not only, thanks to the increasingly massive intrusion of technology.
Secondly, value-producing work isn’t just factory work, from the moment surplus value is extracted (globally), even if we have to take a closer look, but generally agree with you on this point.
Depending on the specific function within the company, an engineer can be unproductive labor. Nurses, depending on the nation, are not middle class. It is case to case: being an engineer, doctor, nurse etc. etc. doesn’t necessarily make you middle class, as they designate horizontal/technical division of labor and not vertical/hierarchical division of labor (class).
It is very easy to identify productive labor in capitalism: you just have to imagine you’re extending this worker’s journey and see if his or her production rises linearly. It is easy to see a factory worker is productive: if you extend his journey by 50%, he will produce 50% more manufacture. If you extend a salesman’s journey, his “productivity” will not rise, because his sales number depends on how many consumers want his merchandise, not by how much he works hard this or that day.
This is true even when we consider that, statistically, the longer a shop is open, the more likely it is to attend more customers. However, this won’t be correlated with the constant costs of keeping it open, as is the case of the factory. A salesman can never “work hard” to more customers in the sense his abstract labor time will never directly convert into value; it can only shorten the time of circulation (if you sell something at 11:00 pm instead of 9:00 am of the next day, the circulation of the commodity was shortened by 10 hours), which keeping the shop opened more hour per day essentially is.
Now let’s analyze a more complex case: a teacher. At first glance, a teacher is unproductive, because he or she is just educating children who may or may not use the knowledge to produce value. But that’s not true: a teacher is, undoubtedly, productive labor. For instance, the capitalist who owns the school can intensify the teacher’s labor by either amplifying the classroom (e.g. from 30 to 60 students) or shorten the time the curriculum must be taught (e.g. from one year to one semester). In these cases, the teacher is educating more students in less time, thus his or her productivity rose. After amplifying the classroom, the capitalist may apply technology to amplify it further (e.g. using monitors in the ceiling of the classroom so that students seated at the back of the amplified room can listen to what the teacher is teaching). This monitor technology enables some schools to make classrooms of 100-120 students. Conversely, the capitalist can develop smaller chairs, so more students can fit in the same area.
One could, even after all that, say that the teacher is not productive because there’s no guarantee all his or her students will ever be productive labor. But that’s wrong: first, because the final commodity is the educated student, not the worker itself, so the commodity is always delivered; second, because, since all class divisions perpetuate themselves (except in revolutions or civilizational collapses), it is not a statistical fluctuation that x% of all of the students of a given school will be productive workers. Even if the school is directed to produce unproductive labor (e.g. Eton, who produces only the British elite and nothing else), the fact is the commodity is the specifically educated student, not an educated or enlightened human being in general. That’s also the reason why freight services of any kind are also productive labor, and also why, by derivation, there is no ontological difference between a commodity and a service, and why being a service is different from being unproductive labor.
You’re taking a very narrow view, not only of what is productive labour but also of what constitutes being middle class. Take teaching for example: although not directly productive, without education there would be no future productive (or unproductive) labour and I wouyld argue that teachers self-identify as middle class. Likewise with doctors, surgeons etc, without them there would be no labour, in fact your idea of what constitutes ‘unproductive labour’ is reductionist and somewhat facile. Is a mother giving birth unproductive labour (excuse the pun)? As to the issue of what constitutes the middle class has been the fly in the ointment for many leftists; some define it as income-based, others, education and I suspect for many it’s self-identifying like teachers, that is to say, it’s how people identify themselves. Whether true or false, the term is slippery and malleable and ultimately, not much use to us in identifying what constitutes productive labour. Is a musician a productive worker? Is a writer? The problem with this approach is that your argument seems to be based on the idea that unless the worker directly produces surplus value, it’s unproductive labour. All work is productive but not necessarily producing surplus value.
Everyone forgets that what defines productive v unproductive labour is not its use value, aka medicine or teaching, but its exchange value. Only if labour is commoditized through sale is exchange value produced and profit realised. When a teacher is employed in an academy and paid from tax they are unproductive but when they work at Eaton and their teaching is sold, they are productive.
Marx defines “productive labor” as labor that produces a surplus value. Marx is not passing judgment on who is a productive laborer, or what are the qualities of productive labor– he is simply identifying the production of surplus value as the determination of capitalist accumulation.
@ ucanbpolitical
State property can still exploit its workers. Productive labor always produces surplus value, but not necessarily profit.
In the case of public schools and universities, the only difference is that the capitalist is the State. But since the State (as the ideal capitalist State) cannot profit, it must redistribute unproductively whatever profits its properties can generate. That may either relieve the public employee from his or her toil or give the working class “back” in the form of what the social-democrats called in the postwar “social salary” (i.e. services free at the point of use); or both.
Either way, if the public employee is productive labor, he or she will generate surplus value to the State. The surplus value is there, even though you cannot measure it through the profit rate.
What is the worker productive of? Of surplus-value of course, as long as there’s simple production of extracted surplus-value, it’s productive.
Then, from a capitalist point of view, work subsidized by the public sector may be questionable.
Sometime after reading Michael’s post, I was checking out the LRB’s blog where I found the following. I’d seen the first part somewhere else but the second was new to me.
OpenAI defined (Artificial General Intelligence) “as an autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work” and said investors shouldn’t count on a payback as “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world”.
Made we wonder for a moment if the OpenAI board had read Grundrisse.
In fact, Marx never used the term “middle class” – it’s just one of capitalism’s tricks, an outdated, failed litle bourgeois concept.
Marx knows only two classes with a historical destiny, even if it stings the eyes (bourgeois/proletarians), and between them a layer of diverse professions that have no historical destiny.
We swing left and right, depending on the weather.
And at the very bottom, the lupen-proletariat, whose sole aim is money and rapine by any means necessary, and who bear an uncanny resemblance to the ruling class, except that the one at the top wears a tie.
Just published: a first Dutch translation of The Grundrisse.
I will never forget the words of Jack Welsh, an incomparable engineer a tyrant. He said only those who did not understand engineering would conceive of a factory floor filled with robots and no humans. It only takes one problem to close down a production line. If we lived in a perfect world, robots could take over, but we live in an imperfect world where a is never equal to a. And it is the unknowns which lie outside the scope of the algorithms that limit them and make experienced human workers indispensable.
If I may you are all approaching this from the wrong direction. The cost base of immaterial production lies not in its cost of reproduction or distribution which everyone is fixated on but its development costs which are likely to be over a hundred times larger. I have provided data to back this up on my website where I have shown R&D costs at say Alphabet consume 50% of its net surplus.
Take an orchestra. More time is spent in rehearsals than in playing before an audience not to mention the years taken to hone individual craft. Looking only at the playing time is one dimensional therefore un-Marxist.
From this we can form the general law: the more complex a novel algorithm the more labour will need to be expended on developing and training it. Believe it or not LLMs are actually labour intensive because of the need for continuous training. Applying this law it is clear the likes of Microsoft are skimping on training it’s free to use CHATGPT resulting in the degrading of the algorithm as it acquires more information rendering it less useful.
If the orchestra plays to sell tickets periodically in a typical capitalist setting (i.e. the musicians are workers, there is a capitalist who owns the orchestra), then its musicians are productive labor.
If the orchestra plays to produce a record, and this record is mass produced to sell in the market, then it will depend on the arrangement: if the musicians own their own creativity so that they only compose and play when they feel ready, they are unproductive labor, the productive part being the workers of the CD factory and of the maintenance of the the infrastructure of the orchestra. If the musicians are only employees, who must compose and play at a certain rhythm (no pun intended) even though there may be a band of oscillation because of the idiosyncracies of the working process of the composer, then they are productive labor, albeit (likely) highly paid ones (“middle class”; “aristocracy of labor”) — they would be analogous to members of a band, without being the owners of it.
But what about very successful rock bands, like, e.g. the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? Here Marx explains directly in Book III, on the profit of enterprise. To the extend those band members are the owners of the band, they are capitalists the moment their creation becomes de facto IP, and the moment they mass produce their discs. They are thus owners of a means of production (the IP) and are exploiting the workers of the CD factory — the real productive workers.
However, when they are on tour, they are definitely working produtively, because they must play on each show of the tour, which sell tickets, and, the more people and the more shows, the more value is produced (so there’s is a degree of exploitation). But, being the owners of their own band, the musicians are exploiting themselves, they are working for themselves. We may then approach this in two, non-exlusive ways: either the nature of the work physically allows the capitalist to exploit himself (e.g. the petty bourgeois who is the cashier of his own small, local store); or the capitalist, due to the nature and scale of his enterprise, must work for himself as a manager (true middle class; managerial class); or, you could see it as a division of the productive part of the business from the fictitious part of the business, i.e. the musicians of the band are both the capitalist and the entrepreneur; they are collecting, at the same time and in the same person, both the interest and the profit of enterprise (assuming, e.g. in a very successful band, that the manager is a separate person, i.e. an agent).
We’ll keep it simple and down to earth.
And set Marx straight.
You have an electronic machine, you cut off the energy that powers it, if this machine runs without wear and tear, without any electronic components wearing out, without energy, for say 3/4 hours it produces added value.
The same goes for a tractor, with no fuel, no tire wear, no engine wear, etc., that runs for 3/4 hours and generates added value.
More simply, I have a tarpaulin in the garden, a basic tool, and as long as it’s not in use, it doesn’t produce anything.
Only living work produces more than it costs.
Next, you mustn’t confuse investment, the anticipation of capital gains, with the actual capital gains, and here you’re sorting out what’s public/private.
The only time capital was dematerialized was with financial deregulation and free markets, when it soared to the heavens, then was brought down to earth by the weight of global debt.
You can imagine that if capital could be saved by algo, the little narcissistic subjectivist wouldn’t have waited.
Once you’ve understood use value/exchange value, take the next step: relative surplus value/absolute surplus value, then move on to the organic composition of capital, that’ll be almost enough. Marx is notorious for almost never having been read, let’s say that’s the case for 95% of Marxists, no doubt due to the fear of stroke, always quoted, leafed through but never read.
On the subject of AI? Natural intelligence seems to be the ability to learn and solve problems. Personally I don’t understand whether there is a “g,” a natural general intelligence which is some sort of universal reasoning faculty or whether that is a statistical artifact. But as of now, it seems that the ability to learn in most people means they almost all have the ability to speak. But even they take years to master this skill. As for the ability to select a problem, then solve it, that appears to be also a product of long experience, particularly in the material aspects of the problem, a skill requiring creativity which is not freely reproducible in people and irretrievably connected to their motives for choosing a problem to solve. The notion in AI (or AGI, Artificial General Intelligence) is that there is some sort of abstract program/algorithm that can creatively solve problems with the same reliability and speed with which your calculator does arithmetic depends entirely on whether such a g exists at all *and* on this, it seems to me, quasi-Platonic notion of “intelligence” as a kind of Form of Thought.
As of now, it seems to me that AI is something like NI, requiring much time, much experience and still not freely reproducible. In a minimalist sense of intelligence, the ability to learn and the ability to solve problems, there are already programs/devices that can do these *after* the choosing of the goal by its human creators and the extensive experience of the human creators to reduce the problem to programs/algorithms that can use the computers electronic speed and perfect memory to, effectively, brute force solutions. Every indication is that over the near future, more and more aspects of production and consumption will be found.
But any notion that a computer will suddenly acquire motives (which is to say, emotions, the visceral feelings that drive human thought in my judgment) seems entirely unlikely. Also, wanting to create a program that simulates a human mind would be the equivalent of creating a blind, deaf quadriplegic. This goal makes the fictional Frankenstein a humanitarian, even if Mary Shelley implied he was evil for abandoning his creation the way God abandoned His. And fortunately, we have our hands on the plugs.
To me, it seems almost all the talk about AI/AGI is basically a dressed up version of the soul, except it is imagined as being put into a bottle (the physical computer, that is.) My objection is that people don’t have souls and this nonsense is the current equivalent of nineteenth century spiritualists talking about other dimensions and vibrations and ectoplasm. Old ideas in new jargon are not genuine thought in the end. I’m not sure that Roberts and Carchedi have demonstrated the impossibility for computers to ever be creative as humanity. Maybe I’m just so far behind in my understanding of NI/NGI I simply don’t understand?
On the subject of class? I’m going to avoid expounding the Marxist theory of class (I would recommend Raju Das Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World for a start,) though I would caution everyone that in practice no class is pure. But I will say that most discussion relies on conflating “class” with socioeconomic status, SES. I think this is popular precisely because it is so obscurantist, even if barovsky thinks somehow that looking at SES rather than property and the role in production. I’m afraid I think that’s exactly opposite of the case.
And I will add that in opposition to a Marxist class analysis that starts from the mode of production, there are extremely popular theories that focus on the distribution of income. The libertarian/anarchist theories that focus on the state underlie an awful lot of thinking, even that which means to be socially reformist. Of the would be reformers, those that focus on the critique of economic rent rely on vague, if not incoherent notions, of rent. Amazingly, many of these theories find rent in all sorts of things, like “regulatory capture,” but don’t talk much, or even at ll, about actual land rent!
It’s like the people who invoke “privilege” while not defining it, and even ignoring real privilege. For instance, all clergy are petty bourgeois individually. (Perhaps you should think of them as after-life insurance agency franchise owners?) And they are genuinely privileged, as in, their income and property are excused from taxes. Their broadcasts are somehow counted as public amenities and legally favored. They have legal privileges in the judicial system even. But none of these issues seem to affect any political analysis, despite the fact that churches are still important political and social institutions. Even their purely economic role is not entirely negligible.
For a recent roundup of semi-critical reformist thinking, there is a discussion between Michael Hudson and Steve Keen and others reposted at the Naked Capitalist website. See https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/how-finance-capitalism-ruined-the-world-dr-michael-hudson-dr-steve-keen.html To my eyes, a lot of what vk, for one, posts is basically Hudson. To me, this is all reactionary utopia, where financialization is not the outcome of fictitious capital emerging as a consequence of capitalists crisis an ever expanding scale. As crises grow more intense due to the secular working of the long term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the necessity of fictitious capital grows more exigent even as it undermines the long term stability of the world economy. But that’s just me. The denial of the existence of imperialism in favor of a theory of hegemony, which is to be replaced by another reactionary utopia, multipolarity, I think is the international expression of the same reformism/revisionism. An extensive analysis of this school would have great pedagogical value? (That website likes me even less than this one so I can’t comment there myself.)
Capitalism is an impersonal automaton with its own internal logic.
(A-M-A+).
Financialisation is not exactly the result of a particular will, capital has gained power on the markets, simply because it could not be otherwise, end of Fordism, inflation, relocations = added value productive capital < added value fictitious capital. anticipation of added value (credit).
AI is a sophisticated tool, and to imagine that it will replace man is a fantasy; we would be worried, for example, if AI could enjoy.
The terminal crisis of crisis capitalism is also the subjective crisis of the contemporary subject.
As we communists like to say, capitalism is the metaphor of Thanatos in motion, of anguish without an object.
The sooner this system dies, the sooner humanity will be infinitely better off.
Michael Hudson’s work is very interesting, the abolition of debt would in fact be a solution and perhaps the only solution.
I think I saw a video with various speakers, Michael Roberts, Rachida Desai and Michael Hudson.
Then you have to take into account the fact that imperialism is in decline. In fact, you could say that imperialism began with Portugal in the 14th century, along the coast of Africa.
But in any case, under the current conditions, from a reformist point of view, we can accept the idea of the BRICS, in any case it’s an observation, while understanding that capitalism is a system with its own internal logic.
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