Staggering impact of artificial intelligence and Internet of things
Eric Sommer 11.12.2023 13:38
Humanity’s productive forces have increased enormously since the industrial revolution began 220 years ago. But the capitalist system within which these productive forces have developed is incapable of handling them effectively. Out-of-control wars, growing impoverishment, climate disasters, pandemics, and the danger of uncontrollable artificial intelligence systems bedevil our world.
These are global problems and threats to our existence. They cannot be eliminated or handled by a capitalist system based on different capitalist nation state governments, and different corporations competing with each other for profit.
The competitive capitalist class which sits atop this system is organically incapable of the necessary global co-operation, planning, anc co-ordination to address these global problems.
Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things
Amid the current threats to our existence is the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. Global capital is restructuring based on digitizing and integrating AI into all aspects of economy, society, and personal life but has no means to control it.
The internet is morphing into the “internet of things’ (IOT) which increasingly includes artificial intelligence (AI). Five billion people and 20 billion entities of all types are already online and interconnecting and “interacting with each other’and with AI’s with 500 billion projected to do so within the next five years.
Governments, corporations, militarism, education, health care systems, cities, buildings, factories, stores, offices, science labs, vehicles, farms and farm animals, robots, machines and devices of all kinds are going online and relying on internet technologies and increasingly on artificial intelligence.
These connected objects live simultaneously in both the physical world and the internet and AI world. They interact with their physical surroundings through sensors and “actionators’, and they talk with other online cyber objects including people in a networked world nexus.
Every worker — and the entire world working class — is also compelled to function within and as part of the IOT and increasingly within artificial intelligence. A new human type — the cyberhuman — emerges as workers must interact simultaneously with the digital world and the physical world around them, on pain of isolation and irrelevance if they do not.
Artificial Intelligence
The arrival of digital AI on our planet is arguably one of the most important event in the history of human beings on this planet. Until now we were without doubt the most intelligent creatures on the Earth. But AI is nothing less than the arrival in the world of an alien intelligence, one not like us but able to simulate our level of intelligence and quickly pass beyond it.
Already employed from factories to self-driving cars to online marketing to medical diagnosis, AI is now developing rapidly in publicly-accessible forms. It is integrating into every area of daily life and work involving mental or intellectual activity.
Publicly-accessable AI’s can now attain scores as high as 155 in standard IQ tests, placing their intelligence above 99.9 percent of human beings.They also attain high test scores in academic fields from chemistry to math to history to law, and without previous specialized discipline-specific training. Moreover, fine-tuning for a specific discipline or skill-set can raise the level of an AI’s abilities to that of a human professional.
Post-labour Economics:
In their competitive struggle for profit individual capitalist enterprises must pay for labour time and strive to reduce it to the minimum Telephone operators were therefore replaced by automatic switches; secretaries by word processors; and farm laborers and farmers by tractors and farm equipment. Artificial intelligence takes this process to a qualitatively higher level.
Historically, labour-replacement by mechanization allowed workers displaced from one sector to move, albeit painfully, into another new sector. But when the specialized technologies of the past are supplanted or replaced by AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and by general purpose robots infused with AGI, new economic sectors are automated as they are born.
In each work sector AI integration takes place in three stages — little or no use of AI, use of AI to supplement or render more efficient existing forms of human labour, and replacement of that human labour by Al.
COMMENTAIRES:
Bien entendu, les canadiens, les quebecois ne se sentent pas vraiement concernes car ils se situent dans la tranche des 0.1% qui ont un QI > 155. Je veux specifier ici, que ce sont les cadres superieurs qui ont cette presomption.
