The idea that autonomous, thinking machines may one day destroy property, hierarchy and inequality is as old as western political thought. In Aristotle’s Politics, the philosopher cites a fantasy from the Iliad, in which machines begin to act independently of human direction, concluding: “If every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance … if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.” The dream that automation could inaugurate a classless society is also present in the writings of Karl Marx. In 1858 he imagined the replacement of intellectual property with “socialised knowledge”, which would merge into a “general intellect”, blowing the foundations of capitalism sky high.
Today this prospect has begun to haunt Silicon Valley. In July, Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, claimed China’s advocacy of open-source models of artificial intelligence might bring about “full AI communism”. For China, Ball complained, “AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure’.” This, he concluded, “strikes me as a dystopian hellscape”.
Though I relish Ball’s discomfort, I doubt the rise of rival Chinese models – Kimi, Qwen and Deepseek – heralds the end of capitalism. Rather, it is an attempt to counter one strategy for global domination with another. The US AI strategy – which is to hoard computing power, giving users access only via the internet – is designed to force the rest of us to use American software, cloud computing services and regulations.
The Chinese counterplay is to make the AI open source, allowing users to run versions locally on their own servers and to firewall their data from being exploited by a Chinese AI provider. Beijing gambles that if AI does indeed become a “general purpose technology”, the People’s Republic of China can win the battle for supremacy in the technologies built on top of it, such as brain-machine interfaces, bioengineering and what it calls the “low altitude economy” (the realm of delivery drones, and so on). Who wins this contest will determine the trajectory of information technology for the rest of the century.
But what if there was a third way? What if, instead of a contest between two flavours of hierarchical and unequal info-capitalism, we decided to shape artificial intelligence towards the ends Marx and Aristotle imagined? Large language models (LLMs) already exhibit the features of what Marx described as the “general intellect”: they are designed to embody and learn from every item of human knowledge ever produced.
Frontier models are already surpassing the output of some trained and experienced knowledge workers. And while we are all aware that this has begun to eliminate tasks and even entire job functions, few of us have understood what it is likely to do to capitalism. For now, of course, the monopoly positions carved out by the AI companies are making shareholders and the workforce very rich.
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