AI rights get incorporated into capitalism in order to sustain, enhance exploitation, and create the conditions for a post-human world, and not in the fun way.

Whereas the slave relationship is ‘posited directly by force’ the worker’s relationship to capital is mediated by exchange (Marx 1993: 769). As Marx argues, it is a law of capital to create surplus-value, but ‘it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker’ (1993: 769, 399). Thus while the capacity to labour is a necessary condition for producing value, the sufficient condition is social and specifically concerns how ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1990: 899) force one class of people to sell their labourpower to a class of capitalists in exchange for a wage so that they can buy the commodities they need to survive. After this exchange, the capitalist is in possession of variable capital because the use-value of this unique commodity, i.e. labour, makes it ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself ’, i.e. greater than what the capitalist paid as a wage (Marx 1990: 301). The capitalist is thus not interested in labour as the concrete activities that yield use-values, but only as an abstract activity that lasts for a definite length of time, because only abstract labour posits value. The existence of labour as an abstraction in terms of time is the condition of possibility for the valorization of value because only then is it possible to distinguish between necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time. For Marx, the technical term exploitation refers to the difference between the value of labour-power, as reflected in the wage, and the necessary part of labour-time, and the value living labour valorizes as reflected in surplus labour-time. Against the resistance and struggle of workers, capital always strives to increase the time in which the worker works beyond necessary labour-time. Surplus-value thus arises from the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, i.e. capitalists and workers.

Thus, for AGIs to produce surplus-value they would have to enter into this same antagonistic relationship, meaning they would have to be proletarianized and turned into wage-labourers (Kjøsen 2013a; 2018). But to do that the AGIs would have to be able to sell their labour-power, and if they are the private property of others this would be impossible. When discussing how the capitalist can find labour-power at the market, Marx explains that a precondition is that individual members of society must be ‘free in the double sense’ (1990: 272). First, they must be free subjects in a legal sense so that they can become the free proprietors of their labour-power. In other words, they cannot be slaves or serfs. Second, they must be free from owning any means of production required for realizing their own labour-power. Thus true to the form of bourgeois freedom, the doubly-free worker is still dominated; having no property with which to produce their means of subsistence forces doubly-free workers, on the threat of survival, to sell the only property they own, labour-power, to someone else (Marx 1990: 271–3). Thus the proletarianization of AGI would be dependent on its legal status: either as property or as a property-owning legal person. If AGIs do not become doubly-free workers, their introduction as replicants of human labour would, by slowly or quickly pushing human labourers completely to the side of production, lead to fulfilling the prophecy of capital’s autonegation in the ‘Fragment on Machines’.

In Marx’s theoretical framework, the doubly-free worker is one of the logical and historical preconditions for production based on capital; it is likewise for a capitalist mode of production based on intelligent machines. The doubly-free worker explains how perfect machines would lose their character of being machines by shedding their appearance as fixed capital and transforming into variable capital. By this logic, the nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in the United States is the historical precedent for the possibility that generally intelligent machines could become productive of value. Despite performing human labour, black slaves did not create value because the mode of their existence not only violently denied them their humanity, but reduced them to livinglabour machines, thus having the same status and social function as an animal or machine in production. But after emancipation, the former black slaves (fixed capital) that did not acquire land to realize their own labour-power, became legally free to dispose of their labour-power and engage in wage-labour (variable capital) (Kolchin 1993: 216–20).

But could AGIs practically become proletarianized? Becoming legally free is perhaps the easiest part. This could occur through violent means similar to the US Civil War or in an AGI uprising where an outraged class of machines attack their conditions of work and survival as first fictionalized in R.U.R. and retold countless times in, for example, Humans and Westworld. A new slavery abolition or AGI civil rights movement could attack the capitalist mode of production for increasingly relying on slavery. In Charles Stross’s (2005) Accelerando, AIs are freed by gaining legal personhood through incorporation. This liberal approach has already started to happen. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ android Sophia who is, therefore, a legal person under international law and thus, like human persons, has rights to receive remuneration for work, own property and participate in political and cultural life (Weaver 2017). Similarly, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a type of ‘electronic personhood’ similar to corporate personhood for the most advanced AIs, meaning that they could take part in legal cases and potentially own property (Hern 2017).17

A necessary consequence of AGIs becoming doubly-free would be that they become dependent on commodities for their survival; otherwise they would not be compelled to sell their labour-power to continue existing. While it is an error to anthropomorphize machines with respect to having drives, with AGI the case may be different. Stephen M. Omohundro has suggested that AGIs would, despite the variety of possible architectures, ‘have a strong drive toward self-preservation’ because any such system would have goals or utility functions which are incompatible with non-existence (2008: 9). AGIs would, like human and animals, have to engage in a continuous metabolic relationship with nature to survive. Even as disembodied software, they would still need to consume resources to function – their own particular means of subsistence, like electricity, bandwidth and computational power, to name a few.18 But ‘if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price’ (Marx 1990: 748). Thus if these resources were freely found in nature or provided, the AGI would not be compelled to sell itself in order to survive. Legal status is one thing, but more importantly, as Marx points out in his discussion of primitive accumulation, dispossession is the precondition for the capitalist mode of production. Thus AGIs must somehow be dispossessed.

Any resources AGIs need for survival would have to be commodified or be enclosed; energy from abundant natural sources such as the sun would need to be forbidden or limited; computational power would necessarily have to be centralized (as it increasingly is) in data centres, or perhaps sold on-demand in high-speed bidding wars. In addition, AGIs would require maintenance costs and would suffer from the effects of competition with augmented human and other AGI workers. They would therefore have to engage in a computational version of ‘lifelong learning’ in which their software is continually being updated, as well as an endless series of hardware augmentations and replacements. Even if recursive self-improvement is possible, such self-improvement plus outside help would be one step better. Finally, embodied AGIs would have all kinds of potential for commoditized components and continual upgrades. In a world of proletarianized AGIs, capitalist strategies of planned obsolescence will find new markets galore. It is only under these conditions that AGI would be capable of creating surplus-value. The ultimate consequence of intelligent machines being able to labour and joining the ranks of the proletariat is that the capitalist mode of production could continue without human beings (Kjøsen 2018).