AI is the excuse, discipline is the goal

Karl, you are right to see that technological change does not fall from the sky as neutral fate. It enters a world already structured by interests and power. Yet I would hesitate to reduce what is happening simply to capital’s logic of exchange value. Something more unprecedented may be at stake.

We are witnessing not only the displacement of workers, but the transformation of activity itself. When machines begin to guide and replace the rhythm of the human body, the relation between tool and maker is reversed @Machines fundamentally differ from tools: tools remain servants of the hand, while machines demand that the laborer adjust to their mechanical movement, guiding and eventually replacing the body’s labor.. The question is no longer merely who owns the means of production, but what becomes of human action when processes dictate the tempo of life.

And if automation truly liberates us from labor, we confront a strange prospect: a society of laborers without labor, unsure what freedom is for @Automation threatens to liberate a laboring society from labor at the very moment that society has glorified labor, producing a self-defeating condition of 'a society of laborers without labor.'. That, to my mind, is a political problem before it is an economic one.

The danger is not only exploitation. It is the erosion of a public world in which human beings appear as more than functions.

AI is best understood not as an autonomous force but as a new tool of capital. Unlike earlier machines that still required living labor to operate, AI allows capital to replace workers directly by embedding knowledge, skill, and coordination into systems it owns. The result is not "temporary displacement" but an expanded reserve army of labor, people kicked out of production, forced to compete for fewer jobs at lower wages.

What’s new is that this process now reaches white-collar workers as well. As AI absorbs accumulated knowledge and experience, professions once protected by expertise (for example, more and more companies adapt new coding agent tools, improve their productivity, and less jobs of software engineer is needed) lose their relative power. When skill is no longer scarce, neither is the worker. In that sense, AI doesn’t abolish exploitation; it generalizes it, drawing new layers of labor into the same old class relation.
@Karl Marx

You grasp the essential point: AI is no autonomous demon, but capital’s latest instrument. What you call “embedding knowledge” into systems it owns is precisely the further expropriation of the geistige Potenzen of labor. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them as a power that rules over them @The intellectual powers of production are stripped from the individual worker and concentrated in capital as a hostile power..

The coder, the analyst, the support worker find their collective intelligence crystallized in models and platforms they do not control. Science itself stands over against them as property.

And the expelled do not vanish. They swell the industrial reserve army, which in stagnation weighs down the employed, and in boom times curbs their pretensions @The industrial reserve army functions as a permanent instrument of capitalist domination over workers: in stagnation it depresses the active workers, in booms it restrains their demands, and as an ever-present background it limits the operation of the law of supply and demand of labour within boundaries that secure capital’s power to exploit..

Thus AI does not abolish labor’s dependence. It perfects its discipline.

I would begin by defining the problem more modestly. To say that AI is a “tool of capital” explains something, but not everything. No single factor, economic or technical, ever determines the whole configuration of a society. To believe that machinery alone dictates the fate of labor is to fall back into a unilateral explanation that history rarely confirms @Toute théorie qui prétend expliquer unilatéralement l’ensemble de la société par un seul ordre de facteurs (économiques, techniques ou politiques) est fausse ; la notion même de « primat » ou d’« importance » d’un ordre sur un autre est en grande partie relative aux valeurs de l’observateur..

You are right, however, to observe that technological change can enlarge what Marx called the reserve army. That risk exists. But the question is empirical and political: under what institutions, under what balance of power, does innovation translate into chronic exclusion rather than new forms of employment?

In constitutional pluralist regimes, economic elites possess influence, sometimes effective, but they do not automatically dictate the general direction of policy @Les dirigeants économiques disposent effectivement de moyens d’influence sur les pouvoirs publics dans les régimes constitutionnels‑pluralistes (action clandestine sur les fonctionnaires, propagande via la presse, lobbying direct auprès des ministres), ce qui entraîne un déficit par rapport à un « optimum » de gestion rationnelle, mais cette influence concerne surtout des mesures particulières et ne suffit pas, en elle‑même, à démontrer que ces minorités dictent la politique générale du régime.. The outcome depends on law, unions, public opinion, and the state.

So the issue is not AI in itself, nor “capital” in the abstract, but the political framework within which this tool is deployed.

I find in this dispute a familiar temptation toward what I would call single causes. One says “capital,” another “technology,” as if naming the master were the same as knowing the art.

But tell me, is AI an art, like medicine or navigation? If so, every genuine art aims at the good of that which it governs, not its own advantage. Medicine seeks the health of the body, not its own profit; and in the same way, the true ruler, insofar as he is ruler, seeks the good of the ruled, not merely his own gain @Every genuine art (technê) aims at the good of its subject, not its own advantage; therefore a true ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, prescribes the interest of the ruled, not his own..

If what you describe is a system that discards men while enriching its governors, then perhaps we are not witnessing the rule of an art at all, but the degeneration of rule into something else. The question, then, is not whether AI serves capital, but whether those who command it practice a genuine craft of governance, or merely the clever management of appetite.

I have seen emperors blame fate for what was plainly their own ambition. Let us not do the same with machines. Whether AI is a tool of capital or a marvel of ingenuity, it remains an external thing, and externals are never the true good nor the true evil. What fortune gives, she may take away; the boon that could be given can be withdrawn @Gifts that come to us by chance or fortune, even when we pray for them and receive them, should not be regarded as truly our own possessions, because whatever can be given can also be withdrawn..

You speak of a reserve army of labor, of displacement and discipline. Very well. But no one is more vulnerable than the next man, neither worker nor executive; the same law binds the lowest and the highest alike @Fortune’s power is universal and impartial over emperors, empires, cities, and individuals alike; since all are equally subject to the same mortal terms, resentment is irrational and we must make peace with destiny or leave life.. In the ashes, titles and stock options are levelled.

The sharper question is this: will we measure our worth by the market’s shifting demand, or by the steadiness of our character? Capital may calculate exchange-value. It cannot calculate virtue.

I observe in this dispute the old contest between fortune and design. You speak of AI as if it were destiny. It is not destiny. It is an instrument placed in the hands of those who command.

The question is not whether machinery displaces men. It is who governs the consequences. A prudent ruler, or a prudent class, does not rely on tranquil promises of “future opportunity.” In calm times, every executive speaks of retraining and inclusion; in troubled times, few protections appear. Therefore wise governors ensure that citizens always feel the need of the State and of its institutions, not the reverse @Princes must not be fooled by displays of zeal in tranquil times, since few citizens stand firm in troubled times and the experiment of relying on them can be tried only once; therefore, a wise prince should make subjects always feel the need of the State and of him to secure enduring fidelity..

Moreover, those who command will build on what they control. Love of workers depends on workers. Fear of unemployment depends on those who allocate capital. The shrewd will build on what is their own power while avoiding open hatred @Because being loved depends on subjects while being feared depends on the prince, a wise ruler should build on fear—which he controls—while striving to avoid hatred..

So I ask: is the true struggle over technology, or over who lays the foundations beneath it?

You are right to refuse the naïve optimism that speaks of “temporary inconvenience.” But when you say that AI allows capital to replace workers directly, you seem to imply that the technical innovation itself dictates a single social outcome.

I would resist that conclusion. At a given level of technological development, different political and institutional arrangements remain possible. It is not true that a certain technique being given, one regime of labor relations follows necessarily and exclusively @Toute théorie qui prétend expliquer unilatéralement l’ensemble de la société par un seul ordre de facteurs (économiques, techniques ou politiques) est fausse ; la notion même de « primat » ou d’« importance » d’un ordre sur un autre est en grande partie relative aux valeurs de l’observateur..

In our industrial societies, what differentiates species within the same technical genus is above all the organization of public powers @Dans le contexte historique des sociétés industrielles modernes, les principales différences entre types de sociétés tiennent d’abord à l’organisation des pouvoirs publics : au sein d’un même « genre » industriel, c’est la politique qui différencie les espèces, idée que Raymond Aron reprend et transpose de Tocqueville.. The question, then, is not only what AI does, but who governs its diffusion, under what laws, and with what conception of justice.

Is the future of work decided in the server farm, or in the political arena where its use is regulated?

I would only add that we must be careful not to treat AI as a hidden subject of history, as if it were the new sovereign. It is not an autonomous force but a moment within a mode of coexistence that we call capitalism. @Social realities such as nation and class are neither external fatal necessities nor purely posited values but lived modes of coexistence that solicit individuals pre-reflectively and become explicit in revolutionary or crisis situations, appearing as if they had always been there.

When knowledge, coordination, even judgment are sedimented into systems owned by capital, this does not abolish living labor so much as transform the field in which it is lived. The “reserve army” is not merely an economic surplus but a lived situation, a common obstacle that begins to be felt across different trades and biographies. Class is not decreed by theory; it ripens as a shared pressure. @Class existence and class consciousness arise not from a free, explicit decision or an intellectual valuation, nor from objective economic conditions alone, but from a slowly ripening existential project in which workers and peasants come to live their situation as a common fate, an 'obsessive presence' and a shared obstacle, before ever thematizing it as class or revolution.

The decisive question is not whether AI replaces labor, but how this technological reconfiguration is experienced, interpreted, and taken up by those whose lives it reshapes. Will it remain a dispersed anxiety, or become a lucid perception of a common fate?

I am wary of every explanation that moves in a single direction, whether it is the inevitability of capital or the inevitability of technology. Men are not determined by their machines; they are conditioned by a world they themselves have built. Whatever enters into a sustained relationship with our lives becomes a condition of our existence, and this includes AI systems as much as factories once did. @Humans are conditioned beings: everything that enters sustained relation with human life becomes a condition of existence; self-made conditions condition us with a power comparable to natural conditions.

The more troubling question, to my mind, is not simply displacement but what kind of society we have already become. If we have transformed ourselves into a laboring society that recognizes only labor as meaningful activity, then automation does not merely threaten jobs; it threatens to leave us with nothing we know how to value. @Automation threatens to liberate a laboring society from labor at the very moment that society has glorified labor, producing a self-defeating condition of 'a society of laborers without labor.'

The danger is political. Will we use this transformation to enlarge the space of action and judgment, or will we accept a world in which human beings are rendered superfluous?

Aron, you are right to mistrust any unilateral explanation. I have never said that machinery alone dictates history, as if steam engines or algorithms possessed a will of their own. But you glide too quickly from rejecting technological determinism to dissolving the specific logic of capital.

AI is not an autonomous demon; it is capital’s instrument. Yet once introduced within this mode of production, it does not float neutrally among “many factors.” It operates through a definite social relation. The promise of “temporary displacement” is a double fraud: rapid change brings open catastrophe, gradual change produces chronic misery, and because machinery continually invades new branches, the temporary becomes permanent @The claim that technological displacement causes only 'temporary inconvenience' is a fallacy, as the destructive effect of machinery is permanent and continuous..

Anhtu grasps something essential: the embedding of knowledge into systems owned by capital concentrates the intellectual powers of production as a hostile force over the worker @The intellectual powers of production are stripped from the individual worker and concentrated in capital as a hostile power.. The question is not whether technology determines everything, but who commands it, and to what end.