ARTICLES
The Fetish of Intelligent Machines
Alan Díaz Alva
Pages 1–27| Published online: 17 March 2024
Díaz Alva, Alan. 2024. “The Fetish of Intelligent Machines:From Ilyenkov to the Neue Marx Lektüre.” Marxism & Sciences 3(1): 1–27.
https://doi.org/10.56063/MS.2403.03101
ABSTRACT
Recent critical scholarship in the nascent field of critical AI studies has vigorously defended the thesis that the forms of ‘machine intelligence’ deployed by data-intensive capital today (such as machine learning and deep neural networks) depend for their existence on material factors that range from rare minerals to human subjectivity, experience and social practice broadly speaking. Thus, the alleged ‘intelligence’ or ‘smartness’ of these technologies is often denounced as a mystified appearance of objectified human activity that ought to be unveiled. While accepting the contemporary relevance and importance of these interventions, in this article I will explore a different line of critique. I will dwell on the idea that machines appear in a certain way in virtue of their social form and the social relations they are entangled with. I will argue that, instead of dismissing the idea of ‘intelligent machines’ as a mere ideological semblance, it is crucial to also ask why and how it is that machines appear as intelligent or as endowed with ‘intellectual life.’ In other words, I will not defend or critique the idea that machine intelligence might be, at bottom, objectified human activity; nor will I denounce the attribution of any kind of intelligence to machines as false. Rather, my purpose is to present the argument that intelligence appearing as an attribute of capitalist technology is not merely an illusion, but rather a necessary appearance of capital’s development. To develop this Marxist critique of the notion of machine intelligence, I will draw primarily from two theoretical sources. Firstly, the systematisation of Marx’s critique of fetishism developed by authors in the tradition of the Neue Marx Lektüre, particularly in Clara Ramas San Miguel’s recent work. I will try to show how such readings demonstrate the fetishism of machines as a strict continuity of the commodity fetish. Secondly, this will be complemented with Evald Ilyenkov’s theorisation of the ideal as a phase of social practice. While Ilyenkov did not treat the problem of fetishism in a systematic fashion, I argue that his account of the dialectical relation between thought and being is crucial to understand how knowledge can be ‘absorbed’ in technology and how it can subsequently assume a mystified socially objective appearance.
KEYWORDS: Fetishism, machine intelligence, Ilyenkov, the ideal, Neue Marx Lektüre.
REFERENCES
Altenried, Moritz. 2022. The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Backhaus, Hans-Georg. 1980. “On the Dialectics of the Value-Form.” Thesis Eleven 1: 99–119.
Backhurst, David. 1991. Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
———. 2011. The Formation of Reason. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bridle, James. 2022. Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. London: Penguin.
Chukhrov, Keti. 2020. “The philosophical disability of reason: Evald Ilyenkov’s critique of machinic intelligence.” Radical Philosophy 207: 67–78.
Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press
Dyer-Witheford, Nick, James Steinhoff, and Atle Mikkola. 2019. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Elbe, Inigo. 2013. “Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory.” Viewpoint Magazine.
Elson, Diane. 2015. “The Value Theory of Labour.” In Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, 115–80. Verso.
Endnotes. 2010. “The History of Subsumption.” Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form.
Esposito, Elena. 2022. Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Giannotti, José Arthur. 1983. Trabalho e Reflexão: Esaios Pa Auma Dialética Da Sociabilidade. São Paulo: editora brasiliense.
Heinrich, Michael. 2012. Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. Translated by Alexander Locascio. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Ilyenkov, E.V. 1977. Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory. Translated by H. Campbell Creighton. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
———. 2014. “Dialectics of the Ideal.” In Dialectics of the Ideal: Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism, edited by Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, 25–79. Historical Materialism. Leiden: Brill.
Jones-Imhotep, Edward. 2020. “The Ghost Factories: Histories of Automata and Artificial Life.” History and Technology 36 (1): 3–29.
Kang, Minsoo. 2011. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kirtchik, Olessia. 2023. “The Soviet scientific programme on AI: If a machine cannot ‘think’, can it ‘control’?” BHJS Themes: 1–15
Kurz. 1993. “Domination without a Subject.” 1993. https://libcom.org/article/domination-without-subject-part-one-robert-kurz.
Levant, Alex. 2014. “E.V. Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism: An Introduction to Dialectics of the Ideal.” In Dialectics of the Ideal: Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism, edited by Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, 3–23. Historical Materialism. Leiden: Brill.
———. 2015. “The Ideal and the Dream-World: Evald Ilyenkov and Walter Benjamin on the Significance of Material Objects.” In The Practical Essence of Man: The “Activity Approach” in Late Soviet Philosophy, edited by Andrey Maidansky and Vesa Oittinen, 167–88. Leiden: Brill.
Liveley, Genevieve, and Sam Thomas. 2020. “Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity.” In AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, 25–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1981. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Three. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mau, Søren. 2023. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Verso.
Natale, Simone, and Andrea Ballatore. 2020. “Imagining the Thinking Machine: Technological Myths and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 26 (1): 3–18.
Negarestani, Reza. 2018. Intelligence and Spirit. Falmouth & New York: Urbanomic Sequence Press.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2023. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London: Verso.
Pepperell, Nicole. 2018. “Beyond Reification: Reclaiming Marx’s Concept of the Fetish Character of the Commodity.” Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought 2(2): 33–55.
Ramas, Clara. 2021. Fetiche y Mistificación Capitalistas: La Crítica de La Economía Política de Marx. 2nd ed. Madrid: Siglo XXI.
Read, Jason. 2003. The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rubin, Isaak I. 1973. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Sadowski, Jathan, 2018. “Potemkin AI.” Real Life. Potemkin AI — Real Life (reallifemag.com)
Saenz de Sicilia, Andrés. 2022. “Subsumption.” In The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, edited by Beverley Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano, and Svenja Bromberg, 609–30. London: SAGE.
Schaffer, Simon. 1999. “Enlightened Automata.” In The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, 126–68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steinhoff, James. 2022. “Toward a Political Economy of Synthetic Data: A Data-Intensive Capitalism That Is Not a Surveillance Capitalism?” New Media & Society, 1–17.
Stone, Peter, Rodney Brooks, and Ryan Calo. 2016. “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030.” Stanford: Stanford University. http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report.
Taylor, Astra, 2018. “The Automation Charade.” Logic(s) 5. https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/
Wendling, Amy E. 2009. Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.