[D66] Capitalism and the artificial intelligence revolution

[A.O.]

(Hoe 'slimmer' de AI, hoe dommer de mens... Smart cities, dumb citizens.)

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/06/pers-a06.html

Capitalism and the artificial intelligence revolution
6 April 2018

Last month, over 3,000 Google employees signed a letter taking a stand
against Google’s collusion with the United States’ drone assassination
program, which has killed and maimed tens of thousands of people
throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Google employees demanded that the company end its participation in
“Project Maven,” a system of mass drone surveillance integrated with the
US drone warfare program, declaring, “We believe that Google should not
be in the business of war.” It called for the adoption of a policy
stating that “neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare
technology.”

Google’s collusion with the drone assassination program highlights the
growing integration of the major technology companies with the US
military, which, having declared a new era of “great-power competition”
with Russia and China, sees pressing Silicon Valley into its war plans
as the only way to regain its military power on the world stage.

Just as ominous is Google’s role in mass domestic surveillance and
censorship. In April, Google announced changes in its search
algorithms—implemented through the use of “deep learning” and artificial
intelligence technologies—to promote “authoritative content” over
“alternative viewpoints.” These changes led to a sharp fall in search
referrals to left-wing web sites by as much as 75 percent—with the World
Socialist Web Site a central target.

More broadly, Google, Facebook and Twitter have hired tens of thousands
of professional censors, many with backgrounds in the military, police
and intelligence agencies, to train and augment their artificial
intelligence systems to censor and police what people say and read online.

Central to both the military’s recruitment of the technology companies
and their partnership with the intelligence agencies is the rapid
development of artificial intelligence technology. Using the power of
artificial intelligence, Google is helping the US military to mesh
together drone footage to identify individuals and objects in a targeted
area.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared earlier this year that its “goal
with AI [artificial intelligence] is to understand the meaning of all
the content on Facebook,” as part of manipulations to the social media
giant’s News Feed.

The object of the military and intelligence agencies’ use of artificial
intelligence is the holy grail of every totalitarian regime: what the
National Security Administration called “total information awareness”
or, as its unofficial mission statement put it, “Collect It All, Know It
All… Exploit It All.”

This mission statement, which in another context would seem to be an
unhinged dictator’s megalomaniacal fantasy, is fast becoming an imminent
reality through the power of artificial intelligence.

In his statement to the World Socialist Web Site’s January 16 online
webinar, Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship, Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange warned of the immense dangers posed to humanity by the
misuse of artificial intelligence.

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control
machines and machines that control humans. Between the democratization
of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial
intelligence,” Assange warned. “Undetectable mass social influence
powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity.
The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and
political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a
subtlety that eclipses human capacities.”

The use of artificial intelligence for mass surveillance and war-making
is only one of the destructive purposes to which this transformative
technology is being used under capitalism.

Already, artificial intelligence is being used at Amazon warehouses to
track every move employees make. Amazon’s systems count how many times
workers go to the bathroom, and alerts foremen if workers stop to catch
their breath in the up to fifteen miles they are forced to walk during a
single shift. At companies such as Uber and Lyft, artificial
intelligence is used to push drivers to work longer and harder, often to
the detriment of their health and well-being.

But even more radical changes are on the horizon. As ride-sharing
companies and shipping lines rush to implement driverless cars, trucks
and boats, tens of thousands of jobs will be eliminated. The integration
of AI with robotics will extend the wave of mass automation that has
already displaced countless thousands of industrial workers into every
single field, from the building trades to food preparation, to custodial
work and retail.

According to a 2013 survey by Oxford University, nearly half of US jobs
will be destroyed by AI and robotics in just the next two decades alone.

Since the industrial revolution, capitalism has managed to transform
every development in technology into an instrument of human oppression
and butchery. The introduction of the cotton gin ushered in the
horrendous social misery of 19th century slums of London and Manchester.
The Spinning Jenny brought a resurgence of American slavery. The
airplane was converted—through the doctrine of “strategic bombing”—into
a method for killing civilians by the tens of thousands. And the nearly
limitless energy created by nuclear fusion was turned into a means of
destroying entire societies, and perhaps humanity itself.

But why should these technologies, which objectively create the
conditions for a massive expansion of the standard of living for
billions of people, be put to such horrendous uses? As the Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in 1926:

Technique and science have their own logic—the logic of the cognition of
nature and the mastering of it in the interests of man. But technique
and science develop not in a vacuum but in human society, which consists
of classes. The ruling class, the possessing class, controls technique
and through it controls nature. Technique in itself cannot be called
either militaristic or pacifistic. In a society in which the ruling
class is militaristic, technique is in the service of militarism.
(“Radio, Science, Technique and Society”)

In the hands of the ruling elite that controls society under capitalism,
every technological innovation becomes a cudgel: against the working
class and against countries they seek to conquer and suppress through
military violence.

In different hands, the same technology will produce different results.
In a socialist society, the artificial intelligence and robotics
revolution will create the circumstances for a massive elevation of not
only the economic well-being of the population, but also its cultural
life. The replacement of tedious and back-breaking occupations will mean
not mass unemployment and destitution, but rather greater leisure and an
expansion of workers’ opportunities for education, family life, and
cultural enrichment.

The automation of the building trades, and the expansion of additive
manufacturing (3D printing) to construction, will vastly reduce the
amount of labor required to build homes, schools and hospitals and
ensure excellent housing for all. The leveraging of artificial
intelligence in gene sequencing, drug development and analysis of
medical studies will result in unprecedented breakthroughs in human
health for the whole of humanity, not just the few who can pay for
soaring drug prices.

The roboticization of both farming and transportation will vastly reduce
the cost of food, ending malnutrition and ensuring a high-quality diet
for all—not the ruin of small farmers by agriculture conglomerates.

In holding out this prospect for humanity, Marxists base themselves on
the traditions of the Enlightenment, which drew a connection between
human progress in science and society. Just as men like Isaac Newton
were unlocking the secrets of nature, so too society could be rationally
understood, and, once understood, changed for the better.

This view stands in direct contrast to the middle class pessimists of
the Frankfurt School, who, in rejecting the Enlightenment, claimed that
the theory of gravity paved the way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
What demoralized intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Max
Horkheimer—who falsely claimed to be students of Karl Marx and whose
theories are still palmed off as Marxism at universities—ignored was
precisely Trotsky’s point: that “technique and science develop not in a
vacuum but in human society, which consists of classes.”

The question is: Who controls the means of production and thus society?

Two roads are open to humanity. The capitalist road offers a relentless
escalation of war, poverty, mass repression and totalitarian
dictatorship. The road of socialism offers not just the freedom from all
those horrors, but the liberation of all mankind from oppression and want.

Which road humanity takes will be decided through the class struggle.
Amid a growing strike wave throughout the United States, Europe and the
whole world, the most critical question is the unification of the
disparate struggles by workers in different industries and countries
into a common political movement for the socialist transformation of
society. Only then will the vast technological revolution on the horizon
be transformed into a revolution for human liberation, not human
enslavement.

Andre Damon