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Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry

✍ Scribed by James Steinhoff


Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Year
2021
Tongue
English
Leaves
259
Category
Library

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✦ Synopsis


This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

✦ Table of Contents


Series Editors’ Foreword
Titles Published
Titles Forthcoming
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Automation, Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence
Your Means of Production
Revolutions
AI in the Real World
Machinery and Marxists
The Central Argument
Computing Machinery
Recursion
What This Book Is Not
Chapter Outline
Appendix 1: List of Interviewees
Bibliography
2 Labour, Capital, Machine: Marxist Theory and Technology
Introduction
Political Economy
Marx on Value and Labour
Marx on Machines
The Fragment on Machines
Marxism(s)
Soviet Marxism
Western Marxism
Labour Process Theory
The New Reading of Marx
Cybernetic Capitalism
Conclusion
Bibliography
3 Post-Operaismo and the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour
Introduction
From Operaismo to Post-Operaismo
Post-Operaismo
Immaterial Labour Theory
Human–Machine Hybridization
Abstract Cooperation
New Autonomy from Capital
The Technological Argument for New Autonomy
Conclusion
Bibliography
4 Industrializing Intelligence: A Political Economic History of the AI Industry
Introduction
The Historical Context
The Advent of AI Research
The AI Winter
Expert Systems: The First Era of the AI Industry
Strategic Computing: AI and the State Part I
The Decline of Expert Systems
The Rise of Machine Learning
Deep Learning: The Second Era of the AI Industry
Conclusion
Bibliography
5 Machine Learning and Fixed Capital: The Contemporary AI Industry
Introduction
Charting the AI Industry
AI Capital Composition
AI Tech Giants
AI Dinosaurs
AI Startups
AI Think Tanks
National AI Strategies: AI and the State Part II
AI Capital Concentration
Open-Source AI, Clouds, AI Chips
Labour in the AI Industry
Labour Composition: Race and Gender
AI Labour Organization
Conclusion
Bibliography
6 A Dark Art: The Machine Learning Labour Process
Introduction
The Machine Learning Labour Process
Stage 1: Data Processing
Stage 2: Model Building
Stage 3: Deployment
The Commodity Form of AI
Empirical Control
AI as Automation
The Automation of AI Work
Automated Machine Learning
Synthetic Automation
Other Forms of Automation in Machine Learning
Conclusion
Bibliography
7 New Autonomy and Work in the AI Industry
Introduction
AI Work and Human–Machine Hybridization
AI Work and Abstract Cooperation
AI Work and New Autonomy
Autonomy for What?
Conclusion
Bibliography
8 Conclusion: Harry Braverman Overdrive
Introduction
Theoretical Synthesis
Automation on Steroids
Optimism and Agency
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index


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