In Marxist theory, capitalists create profit by extracting what’s called surplus value from workers—paying them less than what their time is worth and gaining the difference as profit after the commodity has been sold at market price, arrived at by metrics abstracted from the act of labour itself. So what happens when humans aren’t the ones working anymore? Curiously, Marx finds himself among the contemporary robotic utopianists in this regard.
Once robots take over society’s productive forces, people will have more free time than ever before, which will “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation,” Marx wrote. Humans, once freed from the bonds of soul-crushing capitalist labour, will develop new means of social thought and cooperation outside of the wage relation that frames most of our interactions under capitalism. In short, Marx claimed that automation would bring about the end of capitalism
Aurialie Jublin on 07 Feb 14"Une des conférences les plus attendues de Lift s'est penchée sur l'avenir du travail. Les progrès de l'intelligence artificielle et l'accès à de larges bases de données rendent les robots efficaces dans un nombre croissant de domaines. Déjà largement implantées dans le secteur de l'industrie, les machines pourraient conquérir celui des services d'ici à vingt ans"
