UNLOCKED: /306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power

On Inhuman Power.

[Unlocked episode from Bungacast 'Reading Club', originally released 6 December 2022] 

Contemporary capitalism is possessed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) question – one of the few areas today in which capitalists still seem to have ambition. Why is this so, and is there something about AI that gets to the nub of what capitalism is, as a mode of production?

Is capitalism without humanity anything more than a dystopian Skynet nightmare? And would the creation of a surplus humanity still be capitalism? Would it be techno-feudal, or something else?

Reading:

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, Pluto Books