Artificial intelligence and power

I have been surprised by the lack of critical discourse around the politics of artificial intelligence. More specifically, what could be called the politics of expectation - our underlying mental models of how the social and economic world works, and how we think it ought to work or be organised. The capitalist class and those adjacent to them are salivating over the possibility of the massive returns that are expected from automating away large shares of so-called knowledge work (i.e. cognitive labour). Relatedly, a lot of online discourse has taken the form of a sort of lazy fantasising by some people who imagine an era of post-scarcity that will allegedly be ushered in by artificial general intelligence. There are several problems with this, among them the obvious question of who will pay for goods and services if there is a massive increase in unemployment, or what this would mean for democracy and the furthering of human rights. For good or ill, we all live in a fundamentally…