Information and Capital: Elements for a Political Economy of AI
摘要
This chapter examines the capitalist application of artificial intelligence. We begin by arguing that the decisive factor in the labor process is not whether machines can be conscious, but whether they can be unconscious in a human sense. We then consider the role of information in the process of value creation. The generalization of AI as a labor instrument revolutionizes capitalist production by transforming information into a factor in production. Data comes to function as the immediate material of the labor process, enabling a progressive accumulation of redundancies within the communication systems in which these machines operate. This implies the potential for a generalized feedback of their outputs, which may be reintegrated into subsequent stages of their training. This tendency is described as a function of the dual character of information as a form of capital—a tension between fixed and circulating capital that unfolds into a contradiction between the role of AI in the spheres of production and consumption. For a specific class of AI applications, increased redundancy leads to a deterioration of performance. To counter this problem, competition among individual capitals may drive a new form of digital colonialism—the progressive transformation of new real differences, found across diverse cultures and ecologies, into computable differences, thereby injecting information as a means of correcting the effects of redundancy.