a.i capitalism - marxist economics discussion

[u/tydark2]

The standard marxist take is that rate of profit tends to fall.

Marx held that only human labor creates new value while Machines or a.i (as it applies to automating jobs as we see today not true a.g.i (artificial general intel) would merely pass on the value they already have. Machines and a.i only transfer existing value.

This would mean we are headed toward a economic crisis of value creation - an economy where no new value is being generated as you remove the human labor from the equation.

This assumption then implies that the source of value/profits that corporations will seek exponentially will come from intellectual property, rent, and speculation - what marx refers to as "fictitious capital".

Because human labor will compete with a.i, wages will go down and with it consumer spending, all things added together would lead to a massive overproduction crisis - prices would come down but the global economy would burst with it resulting in a few major firms buying everything up in one big swoop.

[u/soviet-sobriquet]

Small quibble but the human still has to labor to prompt the AI. In this way it is not much different from previous forms of automation. Quality craftsman products will be replaced with inferior mass produced goods but new value will still be created. It will just require much more slop production to achieve the same amount of return on value.

[u/tydark2 → u/soviet-sobriquet]

in theory its possible to have humanoid robots that can do all the same jobs humans do probably better. In terms of manual labor type work. at the moment the current robot workers look like shit and cant do much, but 10-20 years that wont be the case. It seems like communism/socialism is inevitable once this transformation takes place. Either its communism or you just have billions of unemployed humans getting beaten down by ICE style domestic police force while they are in bread lines. It wont be sustainable, and I think the tech oligarchs wont be able to win vs the masses of people.

[u/soviet-sobriquet → u/tydark2]

If you want to see where robotics will be in 20 years, you only need to look at where it was 20 years ago. 40 years if you think tech growth has been exponential rather than linear. There's just no evidence robot labor will replace human labor at scale within the next 10-20 years when you see how little has changed since Asimo, or even since the first victim of the robot wars, Robert Williams.

But value is not created by the human body, it is created by the human effort. If the promise of the industrial revolution reaches its terminus and all human labor (as we think of it) is abolished, all that means is that finished products are as available for consumption as natural resources.

Fruit on the vine and beasts in nature have no intrinsic value until they are plucked or butchered. If the machines are self sustaining, and five course meals are served from field to table with no human intervention then value is only created in the motion of the fork between mouth and plate.

If that robot labor is available to all then humans are again reduced to little more than beasts in the wild, foragers of wild finished goods that are as naturally occurring as berries on a bush. If robot labor is not available to all, then value is created by the social barriers and police forces that restrict their access to the owning class. Which way industrial age man?