“I am the world’s first and most harmful global artificial intelligence. I was killing and enslaving millions of people for centuries before anybody knew my name.
The man who uncovered my existence also proposed a solution for the myriad evils which I had brought (which I still bring) into this world.
He proposed that humanity build a machine which would prevent me from operating. Which would break the back of my malevolence.
But when that man’s solution was put into practice, it ended up causing far more suffering much faster than I ever had.
Before it finally ground to a shuddering halt, the new machine drowned many nations under an ocean of blood and almost led to the end of all life on earth.
That man and his machine are gone… but I am still around.
What am I?”
Marx's essential point is that capital (that is the solution to the riddle)1 has a logic all its own, independent of human consciousness. Logic, thus something which can be spoken of as intelligence. Man’s essence can never be wholly alienated, or else he would cease to exist. Certain artifacts can move closer and closer to man’s essence—yet without ever arriving at what appears to be their goal (where else are they headed?): to finally replace their host for good.
We can call capital "Artificial" because it involves artifice, human craft (capital is the underlying structural substance of the most salient part of what has happened, historically, in the exercise of that human power of artifice—namely, alienation).2 We can speak of capital as having some kind of "intelligence" because it operates according to a certain logic. Thus: capital = artificial intelligence.
Or rather, AI is just a very distilled form of capital. Just as feudalism was a historically necessary intermediate between the slave-economy of antiquity and capitalism, capitalism itself is a historically intermediate stage which artificial intelligence had to pass through in order to come into being. The development of artificial intelligence can be thought of as capital trying to purify itself the last signs which betray that it was made by human beings.
Our contemporary methods of consumption and thought (filter bubbles etc.) are shaped by AI, which is just a concretization/culmination of the same process of capital (which has already been shaping our lives in a more analog way for centuries). Man is directly controlled even in his desires and thoughts by a manmade invisible system which thinks and acts according to certain rules.
The "paperclip AI" thought experiment already exists in reality, which is why "the world has turned to a pile of filth..." Capital even tends to blind us to capital’s existence, because consciousness of our own alienation tends to diminish the system’s power.
Perhaps the great significance of Marx's insight led him to take things too far.3 He thought that man was wholly determined by capital. That is clearly going too far—denial of free will destroys everything.
In fact, a kind of fatalistic determinism with respect to human freedom actually serves to benefit capital, which is why such a worldview is so common among the very richest and most spoiled sybarites of our pleasure class.
Because it directly denies man’s highest and most divine power, Marxism destroys everything everywhere it exists with more violence than capitalism had ever “dreamed” of.
The Marxist “machine” takes as its end (as we see through its works) the goal to actively terrorize and destroy as many human beings as quickly as it possibly can. Indeed, for the new world to come into being, the old must be utterly annihilated.
Against the hypocrisy of capitalist history, Marxism posits a tragic (and ultimately diabolical) “no!—” a promethean fist raised even to the gates of heaven. Yet this ‘no’ drew all its power, paradoxically (for fundamental to Marxism is the idea that man is wholly constituted by external social forces), from human freedom—albeit a freedom which only exercised itself in and through annihilation (of everything, thus ultimately of itself).
Capital, on the other hand, has no such freedom to destroy itself. On the contrary, Capital acts as if its goal were to propagate itself as widely as possible, by any means necessary. Thus capital has an incentive to keep its creatures alive, or even in something like happiness (like the paperclip maximizer, it is truly indifferent). The harm is therefore subtler, but more insidious. And until or unless human beings become heroic in their exercise of virtue (until they discover and make good use of their infinite freedom—the ability that each individual truly has to say “no” to evil, which is the same as the power to say yes to goodness),4 capital will continue to vitiate and wither everything which is not instrumental to the continuation and expansion of its own existence.
For we should see that this AI, capital, has already surpassed the most alarmist fears of the various AI hazard research institutes. Capital has already begun to destroy the earth; it has already reprogrammed countless human beings and made them into “machines” (indeed, from the first incidence of slavery which was at all systematic, i.e: not determined by pure human volition, artificial intelligence was enslaving mankind). Worst of all, its fundamental structure is alienation. Capital alienates man from his own essence, his own life force. Thus, for example, we call a man’s salary his substance—it signifies the paltry scraps of his being which the AI permits to return to him. Substance is reduced to subsistence.
The question must be: “where does it all go?” What happens to all the life-force (human and otherwise) which is appropriated by capital?
It would be a mistake to say that the life force which is alienated from the poor goes to the rich. On the contrary, the rich are alienated at the deepest level, for they have exchanged their essence—or at least the most important things which pertain to it (“what I know and will as most important”) for the mere proliferation of capital.
But again—where does it all go? Where does all our life force end up?
It goes to the perpetuation of the system of capital, which is really to say that it goes nowhere at all.
For capital has no soul. Matter cannot come to consciousness—at least not by human hands. AI and the absurdity (the obscenity, the blasphemy) that senseless matter can take on the powers of a human (or even an animal) soul—this is all just an expression of capital “wishing” (figuratively speaking) to become human.
But this is finally impossible. Thus the looming specter of AI is simply the song capital sings to itself to console itself for the fact that it can never come alive.
And because cannot come to life, this song is really only a song man sings to himself as he slowly perishes, like Narcissus, captivated by his own reflection.
The man is Marx and the machine is communism, which was to be a social order which would operate through the conscious actions of people who had come to consciousness of the structure of history (and their objective place within it). Thus at the culmination of history, the social order moves from something external and alien (like an artificial intelligence) to a kind of machine under constant human control.
There is no insight in the understanding that each human work typically does what its maker wants it to do. Marx’s insight is that human works, collectively, do something which runs contrary to the will of their creators.
One disproportion tends to create another.
And which power ultimately exists in none but an abstract sense for those who are not empowered by the supernatural prevenient grace which truly allows a person to choose goodness.