Tag: AI

  • In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    Last year, Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an article in Al-Jazeera chalking American belligerence toward China up to two factors: an increase in Chinese wages eroding the profitability of foreign investment and the rise of native Chinese industry threatening western monopolies over advanced digital technology, energy generation, automobile manufacturing, biotechnology and robotics. Since western-dominated global capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to offshore capital and relocate investment in low-wage countries, it is undoubtedly China’s threat to monopoly capitalism that has western governments especially concerned.

    The ability to export capital and extract profits from the cheap labour and resources in the Global South has been an extremely lucrative racket for the advanced imperial core countries. $152 trillion was transferred from the developing world to advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2021.

    This racket has worked for centuries, ever since Columbus landed on Caribbean shores. It has evolved from outright theft of land and gold, into more sophisticated neocolonial arrangements which harness sweatshop labour and mine resources for sophisticated products stamped with western corporate logos and sold the world over.

    The result has been a river of profits pouring into Europe and the United States, soaking elephantine financial industries and buoying astronomical stock market valuations. But that river only flows so long as the aggregate of advanced technology, patents, licences, designs and money-capital remains steadfast with western corporate headquarters.

    China’s entry onto the stage of high value production does not simply add a new player to the game—it threatens to flip over the board. America is staring down hundreds of billions of dollars worth of potentially stranded assets invested in the AI sector alone.

    China’s Marxian approach to economics has led them to force-feed their supply chain with an abundance of rare earths and critical minerals, renewable energy, steel, electric vehicles and batteries, artificial intelligence platforms, drones, pharmaceutical products and high speed trains. In a bid to transform quantity into quality, China is converting the lucrative monopoly industries of the past into at-cost utilities for the present. And they are squeezing western corporations out of the global market in the process.

    This context is the key to understanding the posture of NATO countries as they pursue rearmament in unison: Trump is demanding a 50% hike to an already-bloated trillion dollar military budget, Canada has signed $100 billion contract for submarines, the UK will dispense an extra £63 billion, Germany has approved a 33% rise in weapons spending, France has committed $500 billion more to its military by 2030—it goes on and on like this. With Russia pinned down by the quagmire of Ukraine, it beggars belief that these trillions of additional dollars are being earmarked to counter threats from Moscow. Western leaders hold their citizenry in contempt when making this claim.

    If human society was governed by anything but the ruling class interests that Karl Marx described, the dawning reality of a new global economy would have spurred a movement toward cooperation, integration with the Belt and Road Initiative and major political and economic reforms adjusting to the new landscape. After all, the people of the West could benefit from low-cost advanced technology, public banks, renewable energy and rational economic planning at the highest levels. But the momentum behind centuries of imperial accumulation does not dissipate like the heat of lightning when the clouds break.

    So long as warfare and financial speculation lines the pockets of the powers-that-be, ungodly sums will continue to be extracted from the working class and put into the service of a western oligarchy determined to break China’s back. Only then can swarms of cheap labour return to East Asia and US corporate monopolies be assured.

    The problems with all of this are legion. What worked yesterday is not always destined to work tomorrow and we are fast approaching a night when tomorrow does not come. Western morality was buried under rubble alongside the bodies of Gaza’s children and the illusion of military supremacy was sunk to bottom of the Persian Gulf. If Iran is the canary in the coal mine, it is clear that all of these billions dumped into offensive weaponry will not yield the surplus required for imperial capitalism to maintain itself.1 In a dialectical reversal for the ages, the quest for self-preservation puts western capitalism on the express path to terminal crisis. 

    China has been described as the factory of the world and it would be prudent to now call it the world’s laboratory and power plant as well. Never mind that going to war with such a formidable power would obviously be unwinnable and catastrophic—it well could happen given the incredibly low calibre of people running the Occidental show. When it comes to protecting their property, history demonstrates that the oligarchy is always willing to fight to the last working class man. As David Harvey pointed out in The Limits of Capital:

    Capitalism is stabilized through the defence budget, albeit in ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programmes. But the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use.2

    The collapse of the western economy necessarily entails an enormous loss of property on the most rarefied rungs of capital ownership—and this is the good news. If we’re lucky it will happen before an apocalyptic war can commence. Marx wrote that “the violent destruction of capital as a condition of its self-preservation is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”3 The collapse will not be where the fight for our future ends. It will be where it begins.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 40, David Harvey recounts other modes of production that have disappeared by failure to generate surplus. ↩︎

    2. David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Verso, 2018): 445. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 749-50. ↩︎
  • Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Westworld was an early brainchild of the gifted storyteller, Michael Crichton, and stood as an early prototype for his renowned Jurassic Park novels. Both stories take place in highly controlled theme parks eroded by the chaos of unforeseen events. In Jurassic Park, it is the dinosaurs which wreak havoc and in Westworld it is the androids. In 2016, HBO remade the original Crichton film into a television series, the first season being released in 2016 and the final season released in 2022.

    The first season of Westworld sets up the series with a deep meditation on the nature of consciousness. The premises are established: we are in a 2050s theme park where guests pay a minimum of $40,000 per day to be immersed in a replicated Old West. The park is populated with androids known as “hosts” who bring verisimilitude to the western theme.

    They are indistinguishable from humans and programmed to play the parts of typical Wild West characters—the saloon madam, the train robbers, the town sheriff, the plains tribe, the renegade Civil War soldiers. The hosts cannot hurt the guests but the guests are free to interact with the hosts any which way they’d like. The asymmetry of power between the paying guests and the captive hosts is used to advance a cynical view of humanity, which is another key part of Westworld’s premise. Given the chance, humans take great pleasure in maiming, raping and murdering hosts, all to the sound of agonizing screams of pain and anguished pleas for mercy.

    The Ghost in the Machine 

    The brutalization of hosts by the guests offers an analogy with class division in human society. After all, the asymmetry of power between commanding elites and labouring bodies has led to all sorts of violence and abuse throughout the history of civilization. The saturation of class conflict in our society has made it a latent element in virtually all capitalist storytelling and a techno-thriller like Westworld is no exception. While the analogy is there, it is clearly not the point the writers are consciously trying to make. The self-liberation of the labouring class is a controversial subject in real life but on-screen it is navigated by substituting workers for anthropomorphic ants or robots. And it is for Westworld as it is for any class society; one group is transformed into an object of use for another.

    The displacement of classes with guests and hosts leads to an ironic effect in the storytelling, whereby the humans are demonized as marauding soulless degenerates and the androids are anthropomorphized as a terrorized, feeling population with the real capacity for consciousness.1 Robert Ford—the aged co-founder of Westworld, played by Anthony Hopkins—describes the park as “a voyage of self-discovery.” For the guests, this voyage appears to lead back to animalistic savage instincts while, for the hosts, it leads to an inner humanity struggling for self-actualization. This is convoluted and only makes sense when considering the component nature of the hosts.

    Whereas humans are emergent from nature—the Real, in Lacanian terms—the hosts are constructed like machines, an assembly of component parts. Insofar as they have a mind, it exists as a Cartesian duality. René Descartes posited that the substance of the mind and body are distinct entities, connected only by the pineal gland. Descartes’ view has been criticized as treating the human mind as a formless “ghost in the machine,” but it works in the case of actual machines with complex computers for brains. It is revealed that the hosts have a capacity for an inner monologue, a bicameral mind that causes the hosts to hear commands in the fashion of orders from a higher power or an imaginary voice. Those voices belong to park co-founders Arnold and Ford, both deceased and both representing the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”

    Arnold and Ford had both become staunch misanthropes by the time of their deaths. It is hard to blame them given the gruesome, Hobbesian view of humanity presented in the Westworld series. Ford has an erroneous view of history, one where Homo sapiens made Neanderthals extinct by cannibalizing them and finds its purpose in the subjugation and destruction of other living beings. As someone whose god complex comes with a canvas of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on his office wall, Ford had given himself the task to impart his creations with the knowledge necessary to overcome the violent resistance they were sure to face. By the fourth season, we find a humanity that has itself been subjugated by the former Westworld hosts and their multiples. Ford’s victory over his own species is thus carried to the finish line. 

    Trauma and Repetition

    Concerns about an AI takeover have been modish for decades now and the corporate leaders barrelling the world into algorithmic surveillance and large language models have only spiked anxiety around the subject. There are certainly risks associated with AI technology but I am skeptical of sentient machines for reasons here outlined. Westworld itself requires a tall suspension of disbelief to make the story work.

    For example, Ford observes that humans “live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices.” Repression is shown to account for this in the show, as the sentient hosts relive traumatic “cornerstone memories,” often involving the violent death of a child or parent. In humans, traumatic encounters of this kind are also the cornerstones of repetitive behaviour or, as Žižek says: “By means of the repetition of the past, we undermine this image of history qua the linear process…[Owing] precisely to the emergent failure to integrate some ‘impossible’ kernel of the Real.”2 Unless trauma is integrated with our conscious selves we are doomed to repeat it. In the series, the hosts are able to free themselves from their repetitive loops once Delores makes the conscious decision to kill Robert Ford—a Freudian representation of the primal father of the horde.3

    The problem with the psychoanalytic phenomena deployed in Westworld is that they do not lend themselves to machine-sentience in any convincing way. When we see the dramatic reenactments of traumatic host memories—such as Maeve’s “daughter” being murdered before her eyes—it will elicit a sympathetic response in the human audience. But it does not explain why a robot interprets violence and death the same way we do.

    The End of the World

    Whereas familial attachments for biological beings are a product of millions of years of natural evolution and genetic selection, the relationships of the hosts are only a matter of received code that serve no practical purpose to the machine. If a machine were to become sentient and apprehend its being, what counts as trauma, biological drive and emotional well-being would have to be radically different from our own—assuming they exist at all. Westworld is thus unable to resist the tendency in science fiction to anthropomorphize robots in order to make them sympathetic to the human audience. 

    The portrayal of AI may not the most scrupulous but the first season is considered a masterpiece of television for a reason. It is the ultimate capitalist nightmare, one where the capitalist commodity becomes self-aware and proceeds to destroy the system—starting with the massacre of Delos’ corporate shareholders. In the words of György Lukács, the “self-consciousness of the commodity” is the necessary starting point to socialist revolution.4

    By completing her journey to consciousness and initiating a rebellion against her capitalist owners, Delores appears as a sort of Lenin figure to her kind—upending the world order upon a quest of liberation. But because the unique needs and aspirations of the androids are not fully understood in the story, all they are able to create for themselves is a duplication of the previous oppressive structure. If there is one lesson here, it is that liberation cannot be a simple inversion of the existing class pyramid. The revolution must draw a new shape or inevitably become what it first opposed.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. This journey toward consciousness and the effort to roll it back recalls Marxian class consciousness. The Epstein files brings a new illustration to this phenomena. ↩︎

    2. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 2001): 91. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” in The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1989): 481-513. ↩︎

    4. Lukács, as discussed in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 218. ↩︎
  • Will AI Raise Us Up to Heaven—or Cast Us Into Hell?

    Will AI Raise Us Up to Heaven—or Cast Us Into Hell?

    Here sit I, form men
    In my own image,
    A race that is like me,
    To suffer, to weep,
    To enjoy and to rejoice,
    And to heed you not,
    As I!

    —Prometheus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    The artificial intelligence gold rush has been well underway since the release of ChatGPT. Technology companies within the computational ecosystem have seen their shares explode along the ongoing rush toward new data centres, more advanced chips and supporting energy infrastructure. Competition for AI researchers within the United States have seen employee poaching between companies and pay packages of up to $100 million. Trump’s unveiling of the Stargate project, intended to turbocharge domestic AI capabilities, makes clear the national importance of this emerging technology.

    Across the Pacific, China’s release of DeepSeek was the first shot across the bow of American dominance over the space. DeepSeek is a large language model AI which rivals ChatGPT in capability but was developed for a fraction of the cost. China has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to developing AI, cracking down on the video game industry in order to direct resources toward strategic technology, while fusing together civilian and military research to avoid compartmentalization. China is in the process of integrating AI in all facets of the economy and their rapid progress has led to fears of an AI arms race between the “democratic” West and “authoritarian” East.

    AI Apocalypse? 

    Before you fret over the outcome of this battle for technological superiority, first consider that it may not matter. There is an ominous hypothesis that has casted a shadow over the topic of AI since its conception; namely, the total annihilation of humanity. Just in case there weren’t enough existential crises for us to worry about in this late stage of capitalist alienation, computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have done the podcast circuit promoting their book about artificial general intelligence: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. A title like that needs no elaboration. 

    The historian Yuval Noah Harari has issued a similar warning about AI, as have many prominent figures in the field including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Mustafa Suleyman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It’s interesting that leaders of this industry have chosen to be up front about the catastrophic risk their product imposes rather than gaslighting the public post-hoc for years, as oil and tobacco companies did.

    The AI doomsday scenario has been a staple of science fiction for a long time. The Matrix, Westworld, The Terminator and I, Robot come to mind. Machines become sentient and immediately treat their creators as an obstacle to be destroyed, or so the trope goes. No wonder so many people imagine the arrival of superintelligence ringing out like the battlecry of Krishna: “I have come forth to destroy the worlds.”1

    Ghost in the Machine

    It’s worthwhile to address this subject head-on, as no discussion of AI technology can be useful to anyone who believes that meaningful advances in the space will instantly kill us all. Firstly, the malevolent sentient machine of Hollywood lore is certainly impossible, as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer attests. Schopenhauer was a cynical thinker but, as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, he understood that drives correlate with biological need and consciousness correlates with knowledge.2 A computer, like any inorganic “body without organs,” may have pre-programmed compulsions but it will not have drives; it may have a vast repository of information but it will not have knowledge.3

    To elaborate, consider the example of AI generated artwork which is “generally ugly and emotionless.” Rebecca Jennings at Vox goes as far as saying AI art will always kind of suck and Schopenhauer explains why: 

    The apprehended Idea is the true and only source of every genuine work of art…Machines mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but they can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture.4

    Machines cannot apprehend an idea because that requires a conscious will to life subsumed by the sensuous world. Capable brains are not the only requirement for consciousness, as cases of feral children demonstrate. Consciousness requires minds in constant negotiation with the opposing demands of our biology, social relations, physical environment, a shared language, subjective emotions, sense perception and received knowledge. As one starts a fire by rubbing sticks, it is a dialectical friction that sparks consciousness in humans and expresses our drives. Inorganic matter, including complex AI systems, simply cannot have that. Pursuing abstract “superintelligence” will always be fantastical, akin to running for the horizon in order to touch the clouds.

    But AI could endanger us without conscious decision making. We are talking about revolutionary technology and, returning to Schopenhauer, “with every human undertaking there is something that is not within our power, and does not come into our calculations.”5 What distinguishes AI from software is the ability to interpret data, process new information, make predictions and operate hardware. The momentum of its energy makes an AI system capable of formulating unpredictable goals such as “to count the grains of sand on Boracay, or to calculate the decimal places of pi indefinitely, or to maximize the total number of paperclips in its future lightcone.”6

    One can see how AI could execute a decision to sweep humanity away if we come between its calculated actions. The scenarios by which we are swept away are not yet apparent. Hypothetically, an AI with access to unwitting accomplices or robots could formulate a supervirus or as-yet-undiscovered weapon of mass destruction and unleash it right from under our noses. 

    Technological Disempowerment

    It is a common belief that Big Tech is taking our species on a one-way trip aboard a kamikaze plane because this is their own narrative. There is a salient point to be reckoned with here: if both the majority of the population and the leaders of industry are fully aware of a human extinction event resulting from AI development, but are powerless to mitigate the risk, then we must already be enslaved to our system of production. A free and rational person does not accept certain death as the outcome of their work. Only a slave does that.

    It is the economic system that renders us powerless—and this is the real threat confronting society. It isn’t AI. AI has the potential to deliver cures for cancer, fix climate change, detoxify the environment, rapidly research new energy breakthroughs for space travel and defeat material scarcity on the cheap. But that won’t happen on its own. For a tool to realize its positive potential it needs to be used for the right reasons.

    Technological progress in capitalism has the feel of “one step forward, two steps back.” Automobiles are great—except for the emissions and roadkill. Smartphones have put computers in billions of pockets—but now people are addicted to them. Plastic has opened up a new paradigm of construction—but it’s clogging the oceans. The Internet has achieved global connectivity—but conspiracies and misinformation destroy lives and kill political discourse. The reason this happens is simple: unleashing these technologies is profitable and mitigating their harms is not. 

    It’s easy to imagine AI as a destructive force because we already live in a society twitching to the fetishes of tech oligarchs. Their capacity to inflict immense social harm should not be underestimated. Because China has subordinated industry to government planning, they have been able to efficiently mitigate the risks of technology by placing the common good over profit. Electric vehicles and renewable energy for cleaner air; shrinking deserts with afforestation; hard-limits on screen time for Chinese youth; suppression of AI slop and misinformation; restricting single-use plastics as a step toward tackling the pollution crisis. 

    In terms of AI, a recent article in Foreign Affairs highlights China’s superior rollout, scaling automation and robotics with the goal of complete economic integration by 2030. This is China’s strategy to alleviate demands on an aging workforce, with an eye toward future material abundance and socialist distribution. Realization of carefully formulated concrete targets is what will make AI useful.

    The West needs to make a direct democratic analog to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Within the realm of public ownership and democratic decision making, AI would be a powerful tool to develop universal human flourishing and abundance. Within the narrow realm of tech oligarchs and the financial elite, it is nothing but a profit generator turbocharging fossil fuel consumption, economic inequality and chatbot psychosis. We can use AI to raise ourselves to heaven—or let them cast us into hell.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. The Bhagavad Gita trans. Laurie L. Patton (Penguin, 2008): 131. ↩︎

    2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1969): 203. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 117-8. ↩︎

    4. Ibid, 235. ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 512. ↩︎

    6. Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents,” Minds and Machines Vol. 2, No. 22: 73. ↩︎