Abstract
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution marks the most consequential transformation since the great socio-economic and scientific upheavals of the Enlightenment and the industrial age. From algorithmic production systems, and sustainable development to ‘smart city’ planning, epidemiology, gene editing, cartography, policing, and AI-driven warfare systems, this paradigmatic shift has been voluminous in scale and scope and transformational in impact. Critically, this transformation is not an impersonal, asocial and apolitical process, a kind of Smithian technical ‘invisible hand’ operating autonomously beyond human interests and social relations. Nor is this acceleration uniform and metaphysical like a universal Heideggerian ‘Enframing’ of the world. This acceleration is also shadowed by a profound crisis in thought and practice. The deeper the scholarly and ethical uncertainty about AI’s trajectory, the faster and more recklessly capital and its techno-corporate vanguard produce, deploy, and impose it upon a war-ridden world already haunted by deep historical asymmetries of ownership, access, and power. This paper draws on a transdisciplinary materialist framework synthesizing STS, political economy, philosophy, and longue durée history of technology to examine the contemporary AI moment. It traces how the monopolization of computational infrastructure, the extraction of critical raw materials, the concentration of semiconductor fabrication and GPU clusters among a handful of state-subsidized corporate actors, the exploitation of labor, the colonial reproduction of unequal digital exchange, and the structural capture of governance by private interests constitute the material and superstructural foundations of the AI conjuncture. These are dialectically interconnected moments of a single, historically determined techno-societal system. Against techno-optimist utopianism and techno-pessimist fatalism alike, AI is a diachronic dialectical continuum whose character, direction, and distribution reflect the social organization, property relations, and democratic arrangements of the social body that produce and govern it.
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