The explosion in AI has led many to speculate about how it will impact our lives. Will I lose my job? Will it erode our rights? Will it worsen inequality? But perhaps to understand the present, we should analyse the unique role technology has played in our economic and social relations. Assistant Professor Matthew Shafer argues we need to re-engage with Marx and Engels' dialectical materialism to fully understand not what AI does, but the possibilities it creates.

The phrase “Marxist theory of technology” typically suggests images of factories, machinery, and automation—the mechanization of economic production, from the steam-engines of nineteenth-century textile mills to the computerized assembly-lines of contemporary automobile plants. The continual technological transformation of economic processes enabled the exploding wealth of capitalist societies in the decades before Marx’s time, just it has reshaped them in the century and a half since. In “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” which is by far the longest chapter of Capital (bulky enough, indeed, that it could have been a book of its own), Marx argues that capitalist society is distinctively technological in a historically-specific way, for competition between firms within each sector of the economy—and competition between different sectors of the economy as a whole—demands constant invention and change.

The relentless development of new productive techniques is fundamental to the dynamism and the domination of capitalist life. The meaning of technology in history, like the meaning of technology for our own future today, cannot be properly grasped unless its relationship to society is understood as a contingent and interactive one—a critical task that must find its tools not only in Marx but in Engels as well.

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