What Karl Marx Got Right and Wrong About AI

The Grundrisse was a set of notebooks Karl Marx wrote in 1857-58 while preparing for what would eventually become Capital.

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There, in his scattered reflections, is a passage that now reads like an early theory of artificial intelligence.

"Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the automatic system of machinery... set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages."

Marx recognised that the defining feature of modern machinery would be intelligence. He saw that the trajectory of capitalism would push toward machines that absorb the skills, judgements, and actions of human labourers, reducing the worker's role to supervision, if that. The machine, he wrote, becomes "the virtuoso," performing with its own internal logic, while the human is demoted to "watchman and regulator."