But AI is not on the verge of being introduced, it has been introduced into every sector of the economy possible, and the balance sheets are coming up wanting. Last year MIT conducted a study of over 300 firms and found that 95% of them saw no return whatsoever on their investment in AI. British firm PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in its 29th annual CEO survey that over half of respondents had seen no benefit from AI whatsoever, either in the form of reduced costs or higher revenue.

Despite these gloomy reports and increasing fears that the dramatic overvaluation of the tech companies tied into the AI boom is a financial bubble waiting to pop, the tech moguls are still demanding more investment. For the most part, they are getting that investment, whether into sprawling new data centers or the power stations to keep them online. While cultural backlash to AI “slop” is becoming more and more widespread, it is clear that the capitalist class still sees AI as the future.

In trying to understand why, it is important to disaggregate the hype of AI’s most shameless salesmen, like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, from the actual capabilities of the technology. Essentially at its core all of what we see called “AI” is just a series of mathematical equations whose parameters are set by a combination of pre-existing data and manual rules set by its designers. The process of “training” AI can be likened to feeding paper into a shredder that can then recombine the letters and words to form new sentences. The AI is “incentivized” to make “good” sentences, which tends to mean ones that look like a human could have written them. The same goes for photos, videos, or music: all the AI is doing is regurgitating something it was already fed.

Throughout the entirety of the process, then, human labor still plays the essential role. Humans need to make the works to be fed to the AI in the first place, because if AI is trained on AI generated data it begins to “rot” and produce increasingly poor results. Then humans need to design the mathematical procedures for the AI to be “trained,” and humans often have to intervene forcefully to prevent the AI from breaking the law (by relaying legally sensitive information like how to make explosives or creating images of illegal activity like CSAM). Then, to create the final generated product, the AI needs to be prompted to do so by a human, who needs to write the prompt in such a way that the machine gives them the output they want. The value that AI possesses is the value of embodied human labor within it.

This is plainly not what capitalists believe. They think that AI carries in it the same unique capacity that only human labor power possesses: the ability to create new value beyond that which it cost to produce it. Capitalists do not understand that, out of the portion of capital they advance for means of production, and out of the portion of capital they advance for labor power, it is only the latter that creates new value in excess of that initial advance. To them, it simply appears as a profit in excess of the total cost they paid. While AI’s mystification is particularly intense, the capitalist class has never understood this fact about any machine, or indeed about their entire mode of production: the origin of profit is in the unpaid labor time of workers.

It is no coincidence that AI investment and speculation took off in the last five years, in the wake of COVID’s disruptions and the growing power and militancy of the labor movement that emerged out of them. Capitalists are desperate for the next big technological innovation to save them from the contradictions of capitalism, as Mr. Andreessen himself admitted last month. “If we didn't have AI, we'd be in a panic right now about what's going to happen to the economy,” he said on a podcast, claiming that “declining population” (a racist dog whistle he uses alongside Elon Musk) and “slow productivity growth” would be the “real crisis” that AI is thankfully solving.

What he is facing up to is the idea that without populations of “surplus” human beings to form the reserve army of the unemployed, and with the rate of profit falling continuously as more and more capital becomes advanced and embodied in machines that merely transfer value and do not create it, that capitalists are dinosaurs living on borrowed time. As they look up at the meteor of class struggle and socialism plummeting towards them, they are conjuring phantasms and trying to breathe life into them with dollars and electricity. AI can be a useful tool, a means of production like any other, but it will not save capitalism from itself.

#WestLafayetteIN #IN #Commentary #Opinion #CapitalismAndEconomy #AI

Denver, CO – On July 26, Coloradans gathered outside Denver’s Union Station in a rally against software development company Palantir, which is complicit with apartheid Israel.

Palantir develops artificial intelligence used both by ICE to facilitate mass arrests and deportations and by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with programs like “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” used to target and slaughter innocent Palestinian civilians and families by identifying targets, tracking them back to their homes, and deploying bombs.

The protesters took aim at the Tabor Center, a skyscraper located in downtown Denver which leases out the 15th floor to Palantir to use as its headquarters. The event began with attendees painting signs with demands, which would later be taped to the sides of the building, with slogans such as “Palantir out of the Tabor Center.”

Protesters rallied around banners and handmade signs demanding an end to the forced starvation of civilians in Gaza, decrying Palantir’s role in facilitating war crimes, and denouncing the complicity of the Tabor Center in giving this genocidal company a place to call home.

During the event, speakers from local and national organizations spoke out about the evils of Palantir.

Feven Nebiyu with Students for a Democratic Society stated, “Where other companies provide advanced weapons for the IDF to attack innocent men, women, and children in Gaza, Palantir takes it a step further and removes the need for a human assailant at all, promising Israel the luxury of committing a handsfree genocide.”

After speeches, people hit the streets, marching from Union Station up the 16th Street Mall to Palantir’s headquarters. Once there, people took to the sidewalks with brightly colored chalk; arrows pointed to the building with slogans like “Palantir is watching you,” “Let Gaza eat!” and “ICE runs on Palantir and Palantir runs on genocide.”

Speeches from Terry Burnsed, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Democratic Socialists of America, as well as Eliot Howe, a member of Denver Anti-War Action, garnered huge support from the crowd as the emcee led enthusiastic supporters in chants like “Hey hey! Ho ho! These murderous tech bros got to go!” and “Palantir out of Denver!”

Howe stated, “The genocidal, military-outpost ethnic state needs money and weapons, after all! And the U.S. is a genocide profiteer through and through,” but ended on a note of hope, “We won’t let our city be the shelter for war profiteers like Lockheed and Palantir. We say Palantir, get out of here! Denver doesn’t want you here!” and, later, “Alone we can do very little, but together we can change the world!”

Moving to the other side of the building, demonstrators taped signs to the windows and added more chalk slogans to the sidewalks as they heard from Kacey Hicks, a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, who stated, “We have to organize the wrath and the might of the people to make sure that the billionaires in the ruling class cannot keep killing Palestinians with our tax dollars.”

Returning to the 16th Street entrance, people were unsurprised to see the immediate removal of their chalk art, scrubbed away by security and building maintenance, but they didn’t let that stop them from adding more in its place.

Garnering people and support along the way, protesters again took to the streets in the return to Union Station, boldly chanting, “We’ll be back, we’ll be stronger, you can’t hide it any longer!” referring to the crimes committed by Palantir. The people of Denver show no sign of slowing down in their fight to get Palantir out of their city and aim to continue escalation and make business as usual at the Tabor Center untenable until their demands are met.

#DenverCO #CO #AntiWarMovement #Palestine #Palantir #WeaponsIndustry #AI

The stock price rout was led by Japan, where stock prices fell 12%, the worst day since “Black Monday” in October 1987, when U.S. stocks fell 22%, the worst one-day fall ever. A particular factor in Japan was that the Japanese central bank raised interest rates last week, causing a sharp jump in the value of the Japanese yen.

Back in the United States, the so-called “magnificent seven” of tech companies, including Alphabet (parent corporation of Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (parent company of Facebook), Nvidia (maker of chip used in artificial intelligence applications) and Tesla have been leading the stock market higher for months.But on Monday, these stocks fell harder on average, as doubts about the profitability of AI joined with recession fears.

Falling stock prices are not a good predictor of a coming recession – in fact the biggest fall in October 1987 had little impact on the economy. But a sustained fall could affect spending by the wealthiest Americans, who own most stocks. As more and more working-class Americans have been cutting back on purchasing and turning to credit cards for necessities, wealthy Americans have kept up spending.

More worrisome is that many economic signs are pointing towards an economic slowdown that could lead into a recession. Claims for unemployment are on the rise. More and more credit card and car loan borrowers are falling behind on their payments. The manufacturing sector has been shrinking, albeit slowly.

#SanJoseCA #SP500 #S&P500 #Economy #Unemployment #Recession #Stocks #StockMarket #AI