Artificial Imagination

For Marx, the touchstone of labour and, therefore, the production of value is the human being. In Capital, he argues that labour is a condition of human existence and is an exclusively human characteristic, which he connects to the human faculty of imagination and creativity (284, 290). Moreover, the substance of value is abstract human labour. In Marx’s political economy, it is an axiom that only living, human labour can create value. The hypothetical emergence of so-called “strong” artificial intelligence (AI) with the same generality of human intelligence, however, challenges this axiom. What if an AI, say in android form, could all the things that a human being could do? What if AI could labour? And if AI could labour, would they be productive of value? Would AI be able to appear in other social forms than that of fixed capital? What would be the consequences of the possibility of non-human labour?
This paper argues that although strong AI undermines Marx’s argument that labour is exclusively human, the existence of such AI is compatible with the labour theory of value. The paper argues that AI could produce value and thus become exploited workers, but that this eventuality would lead to human beings becoming obsolete in the capitalist mode of production. To support this argument, the paper draws a peculiar passage from Grundrisse where Marx argues for the possibility of the “invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine” (766), considers the creativity of AI, stresses the social over the substantialist interpretation of value, and, argues that like individual humans, individual AIs can also be personifications of economic categories.