Technology should serve humanity not dominate it

Bosses advance technology to get a competitive edge

Artificial intelligence (AI) is both terrifying and exhilarating. It threatens our jobs, it appropriates our creativity and it increases surveillance over us. But AI can also help diagnose cancer and make knowledge more accessible.

AI is the latest of many new technologies that offer the same contradictory possibilities. The long list of inventions which have transformed people’s lives include the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the computer.

Each new development is puffed by some as the future of the system while others predict unemployment and dehumanisation.

The Industrial Revolution was a huge step forward that made human labour more productive than any previous society could possibly imagine.

But technology also undermined the value of the things made by workers producing in the old ways. In 1811, the Luddite movement targeted the new machines that were undercutting old methods.

The working class radicals denounced the way in which machinery enslaved them, not freed them from long hours and arduous tasks.

Karl Marx wrote extensively about how capitalism created huge innovations that had the potential to create a world of abundance.

Technological change is not just about inventions—it is a central part of the capitalist system. Capitalism is driven forward by competition. Bosses are constantly forced to find ways to introduce new technology to make their workers more productive than their competitors.

Marx described how the capitalist system “by means of machinery, chemical process and other methods, is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process”.

“At the same time, it incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another,” he wrote.
But this new technology is not planned to address human needs—it is chained to the production of profit.

This means that innovation holds out a promise it can never deliver.

As Marx described it, “On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected.

“On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contradictions. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want.”

The bosses have no choice but to keep investing in new technology to compete, but this has adverse consequences for the system.

Marx identified labour as the source of value and capitalist profit. He distinguished between what he called “constant capital” or “dead labour”, and “variable capital” or “living labour”.

Constant capital includes fixed assets such as machinery and raw materials. Variable capital means labour costs and workers’ wages.

More and more investment flows into technology and machinery—constant capital—rather than variable capital. But the rate of profit declines because it is the exploitation of workers that generates new value. The first companies to develop new technology can make huge profits. But the more investment flows into constant over variable capital, the overall rate of profit can go down.

The bosses rush to invest in new tech—but tech bubbles burst and there is constant danger that new tech will quickly become old tech. For example, today China is threatening big tech in the US with much lower cost AI.

Bosses make huge investments in new technology. But this gives the workers who operate it enormous power. This power is the key to wresting control from the bosses and using technology to serve humanity, not to dominate it.