Can Marxism offer a framework for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and the tech bros behind it?
This is not to suggest that Marxism is a viable economic system or a practical alternative to capitalism. It’s not. But Karl Marx was a heterodox economist before he became an ideologue, and some of his ideas are powerful tools for understanding economics, even if his overall program was a failure.
Let’s use some of those tools to understand the rise of AI oligarchs and the future of AI.
We begin with Marx’s main idea: the abolition of private property. How do tech bros feel about private property? They steal it. If you can simply take private property, then it’s not private. Marx would approve.
The AI gang does this by scraping vast amounts of internet content for use in training their large language models (LLMs). That material includes copyrighted books, magazine articles, academic papers, images, music and countless other forms of intellectual property (IP).
Do tech bros pay royalties? Do they pay licensing fees? Sometimes, but often they don’t. They take what they want like internet pirates, or the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.
In fact, AI models have used my nine books in their training sets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have paid me nothing. Anthropic offered to pay me $37,000 for some (not all) of my books. I accepted the offer, but I still haven’t received the payment. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about that before their IPO.
The point is that much of the AI crowd behaves no differently than the imperialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who exploited land, resources and human capital, including slavery, while paying little or nothing in return.
V. I. Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism.” But Lenin never met a tech bro. They put imperialists to shame.
Hellbound and Down 