The politics of AI

The politics of AI

Context:

• An Artificial Intelligence that can match human intelligence in all respects is unlikely because it is impossible for AI technology to replicate that which makes human intelligence what it is.

Worldwide spending on AI solutions:

• International Data Corporation, the market intelligence agency, estimates that worldwide spending on AI solutions will grow to $57.6 billion by 2021.
• The lion’s share of the investments is being made by the Big Five: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Financialization and globalization and digitization:

• Capitalism faced a crisis of profitability in the 1970s.
• Opinions differ regarding its causes, but the global elite had no doubts about the solution: financialisation and globalisation.
• Also known as the “neo-liberal turn”, it helped solve the problem of falling rates of profit.
• If financialisation and globalisation made it possible for corporates to tap into markets anywhere in the world, digitalisation gave them the means to do so.
• Uber is the perfect example of what capitalism wants to be when financialisation, globalisation, and digitalisation come together.

Platform Capitalism:

• Platform Capitalism is a business structured as platforms that are digital equivalent of oil rigs, ideally placed to mine the networked economy’s most valuable resource by inserting themselves between different sets of users, turning every interaction into a data point, and feeding it all into an algorithm.
• Platform businesses leverage their ability to scale-up the digitisation of a given activity to quickly build monopolies that, in turn, boost their ability to collect more data.

Conclusion

• The AI foregrounds two inter-related issues that citizens must consider carefully: data ownership and labour protection.
• So, contrary to neoclassical economic wisdom, AI cannot sever the link between labour and economic value, though it does substitute dead labour (capital) for living labour.