In his 1964 call to resistance, activist Mario Savio had this to say

 “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus- and you’ve got to make it stop!”

Now, decades later, with the development of a physical and a social machinery which requires no human operators, the commanding heights of the capitalist economy at last have a response to Savio’s call for human disruption in the mechanics of capitalism.

Artisan, an AI development company, launched their ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ advertising campaign’ which incited waves of controversy. Signs and billboards were put up across San Francisco proclaiming that artificial intelligences “Won’t Complain About Work-Life Balance” and that “Humans Are So 2023”, and have now made it to London. People reacted angrily to these anti-human and anti-worker sentiments – which of course was the point.

Replacing workers with machines is an age old process in capitalism. The luddites were smashing spinning frames in the 1810s to save their jobs and we have seen entire industries come and go as new technology replaces workers or renders old production obsolete. AI is the latest version of this – but the sheer range of work that it might be able to do in a second’s processing time as opposed to hours of human labour is what makes it particularly unnerving for workers.

What is behind the drive to remove human labour, the crucial subjective element in the productive forces, from the economy? The obvious answer is profit. But Artisan (cynically) try to make the case for a kind of utopianism. The hope that automation might liberate workers from drudgery and toil has been fostered by leftwing thinkers since at least the time of Peter Kropotkin and Oscar Wilde, and Artisan seem to be publicly aligning themselves with this current of thought.

As a recent article by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, published on the artisan website, puts it:

[I]n the long run, the stop hiring humans campaign tagline will have more merit. Inevitably as more and more human productivity is taken over by AI, we should first see a 4-day work week. Eventually, we should live in a world where everyone gets UBI, productivity is driven entirely by robots, we’re all free to do whatever we want and you can truly stop hiring humans, but today is not that day. In my opinion, that day will in fact be utopia.”

The author is right to suggest that the abolition of work would represent the culmination of utopian thinking, but this can never be true if work abolitionism is driven by tech-billionaires and software moguls. Under capitalism AI is not a tool of liberation, but a means to maximise productivity while minimising the pernicious bargaining for higher wages, and the pesky interference of union organisers, that characterises an economy built on exploitative labour. Developments in AI are being driven by capitalist competition, and will only serve the interests of capitalists for as long as they control the production and distribution of wealth. In reality, AI threatens society with mass unemployment and falling wages, neither of which will ease the birth pangs of the utopian society of which Artisan claims to be the midwife. More than this, the removal of humanity from the workforce risks the elimination of creativity and imagination from the mode of production, and imagination and creativity are already sorely lacking in the misanthropic malaise of neoliberalism.

We have to challenge this view that technological change will lead to a better life- this will not be true for as long as we have capitalism and the profit motive. Austerity and poverty for the masses and low taxes and super yachts for the rich are what characterise capitalism in its current phase, not a world of plenty. And of course we have to remember the environmental impact of intensive data processing by AI servers.

A democratic planned economy, built on worker’s councils and accountable public officials, might indeed be able to direct automation towards the enhancement of human leisure and wellbeing. But this is not the world that Artisan and their ilk are building. Within a deregulated market, commanded by profiteering, self-interested exploiters (otherwise referred to as “innovators”) no incentive to serve the interests of the many will exist. What incentive to behave democratically and humanely can there possibly be, if immense wealth can be generated without any recourse to human activity, with no concessions to human needs? What incentive, for that matter, will people have to write songs and poetry, to paint, draw, and sculpt, when machines can do all the creative labour for us? The call to “Stop Hiring Humans” is nothing less than a plea to impose a monstrous fetter on the human spirit.

No press is bad press, and in commenting on Artisan’s add campaign I am, in my own small way, doing exactly what they want. But we need to grapple with the nuisances of work abolitionism. The idea has both extremely revolutionary and intensely reactionary potential, and as AI continues to advance, it will become an ever more prescient talking point. A planned, democratic approach to automation is possible, but not within the limitations that capitalism imposes. At its heart, socialism is the quest for a liberatory machinery, a way of organising productive technologies that will foster the wellbeing and liberty of all. The Left should take extreme caution when neoliberal privateers seek to co-opt this mission- their machine will be no less odious when humanity has been expunged from its operation.