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Resources: Artificial intelligence

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The World Ecology of Living Labour
Insights from Artificial Intelligence
Larry Lohmann

7 August 2023
file iconThe World Ecology of Living Labor

Interpretation Machines
Contradictions of "Artificial Intelligence" in 21st-Century Capitalism
Larry Lohmann

13 July 2020

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this version of an essay published in Socialist Register 2021, is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

file iconInterpretation Machines

Penelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness
Larry Lohmann

29 June 2025

Confronting the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction, critics and other readers often resort to phrases like “distillation,” “economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,” “magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender, and recognition.

file iconPenelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness.pdf

Labour, Energy and the Colonial Geography of Artificial Intelligence
Larry Lohmann

24 August 2022

This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.

file iconLabour, Energy and the Colonial Geography of Artificial Intelligence.pdf

Cadenas de bloques, automatización y trabajo: Mecanizando la confianza

Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust
Larry Lohmann

15 August 2020

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.

Labour, Justice and the Mechanization of Interpretation
Trabajo, justicia y la mecanización de la interpretación
Larry Lohmann

3 August 2019

The biggest frontier of mechanization of the past ten years has been the automation, broadly speaking, of that particular type of human labour known as interpretation.

file iconLabour, justice and the mechanization of interpretation
file iconTrabajo, justicia y la mecanización de la interpretación

The Ecology of Trust Mechanization
La ecología de la mecanización de la confianza
Larry Lohmann

20 May 2019

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues.

Postcapitalism and Perpetual Motion Machines
Larry Lohmann

12 October 2017

In its never-ending struggles to get the upper hand over workers, business has often dreamed of perpetual motion machines: devices that could deliver work without workers or the fossil fuels needed to power the engines that discipline them. The dream can only ever be a dream, however. Not only are perpetual motion machines physically impossible. Even if they could be built, they would destroy capital itself. Business cannot do without the human and nonhuman activity that it coopts, degrades and exhausts in cycle after cycle, because it is the source of the value it seeks.