When Human Labor Is No Longer Necessary, Will Humans Be?

In the last century, “horses comprised the losing side in a battle for maximum efficiency” due to industrial expansion and steam-power transportation, writes Amy Ireland. Like horses, she conjectures, humans possess important specialized labor skills at this moment in history, “but they won’t be for long.”

Artificial intelligence is a threat to the specialty of human labor, and by extension, Ireland believes, to human life. In a system of machinic capitalism, labor’s production of capital is more important than the laborers themselves when it comes to expanding wealth for the ruling classes. And when AI becomes far smarter and more efficient than human beings at what is currently human-centric labor, they will have no need for humans to perpetuate the system of value extraction for their own benefit.


Bleak, yes. Especially because thinkers like Nick Bostrom at Oxford believe that AIs running thousands of times as fast as the human brain are going to be possible soon, and that once they get smart they will only get exponentially smarter. When this point is reached, Bostrom thinks humanity is likely to die out, as machine rationalism and indifference takes over the system entirely.

While the argument is a bit paranoid for my taste, I agree with the fundamental premise:

“If we can presume that capitalism will prevail as our principal system of social organisation, the large-scale emergence of human-level machine intelligence will see humans – like the horses of the early twentieth century – competing against increasingly efficient and less costly substitutes for wage labour."