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Artificial Intelligence or Capitalisms Golden Tool

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Dieser Artikel ist Teil der Reihe Künstliche Intelligenz und Postwachstum.

“Degrowth is one the dumbest and most dangerous things we have had in a long time, and what we instead should be [doing] is massive and sustainable growth, and technology is the only way to get there” – declared Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) during an interview at the Italian Tech Week 2024. That same week he published an essay entitled ‘The Intelligence Age’ in which he explains how AI will ‘fix the climate’ and bring great prosperity to humans all over the world, thanks to ‘nearly limitless intelligence and abundant energy’.

The nexus between tech powers – Sam Altman as one great example of them – and the growth paradigm is a tight one, and Artificial Intelligence might be the best illustration of it. Indeed, AI is often referred by tech powers as a tool that can help solve climate change, which helps them justify why it should be so largely funded. It comes to no surprise that Sam Altman, epicentre of the future of AI, mentions degrowth as dangerous and refers to Artificial Intelligence as the tool that will ‘fix the climate’. Indeed, his entire business and power relies on keeping economic growth as a corner stone of our economies, and AI might turn out to be the perfect tool for achieving that.

Indeed, governments and private companies all over the world are considering AI as one of the most important technologies for sustaining growing economies. This is clear from many official documents such as of the 2030 Digital Agenda of the European Union, in which the EU sets the goal of having 75% of all EU businesses make use of Artificial Intelligence/Big Data/Cloud technologies by 2030 [1], and argues that “A massive scale-up of investments […] is necessary […] to allow the EU to develop critical technologies in a way that fosters its productivity growth and economic development in full coherence with its societal values and objectives.” (p.4, bold by author).

It’s also clear from the inflated growth estimates made by private companies such as consultancy firm PwC who estimated in one report that AI will lead to an increase of 14% of global GDP by 2030 or an equivalent of 15.7 trillion of dollars, which they then concluded to be the biggest commercial opportunity for our current economy [2].

Are tech leaders, governments and private firms right to consider AI a growth driver? Very probably. Artificial Intelligence might well be exactly the growth machine that they are hoping it would be, for as long as they chose to keep pushing it in that direction.

AI’s Growth Mechanisms

Artificial intelligence can indeed stimulate economic growth in many different ways. AI on the one hand shares the same growth mechanisms as many other technologies: it can increase productivity as well as consumer demand. AI is for example used by retail companies as a route planner, thereby reducing product delivery time and leading to an increase in productivity. AI can increase consumer demand notably by creating new markets such as the market for digital assistants like Alexa, which simply didn’t exist before AI algorithms such as speech recognition were developed.

On the other hand, AI also has unique mechanisms which make its possible contribution to economic growth greater than other technologies [3]:

The automation of “typically human” capacities: Artificial intelligence is at its core aimed at imitating and automating human intelligence. It is therefore the one technology that might be able to automate tasks such as communication, cooperation or perception that have for long been considered unique to human behaviour [4]. ChatGPT has clearly shown how far certain communication tasks can be automated, and the same is to be expected for tasks such as perception with advances in IoT technologies, etc., which could accelerate all kinds of processes and thereby increase productivity.

Going a step further, before products are made and sold, they have to be created in someone’s mind. And that idea-generation step takes time. If AI can accelerate the generation of ideas, products can be made faster, thereby generating growth. Companies already started using AI in this way, such as the ultra-fast fashion company Shein that trains machine learning models to scan through social media feeds in order to detect trends in real-time and generate design ideas based on these trends, allowing them to release 2000 new items on average per day on their website [5]. The capacity of AI to accelerate the generation of ideas and new knowledge is one of the key characteristics that could differentiate its economic impact to that of other digital tools [6].

Finally, compared to typical machines in industry that lose their value over time due to depreciating conditions or increasing needs for reparations, some machine learning models can increase their contribution to productivity over time if fed with a continuous data stream. AI as self-learning capital therefore means that a one-time investment can lead to a technology that gets continuously better at its intended task, thereby increasing its contribution to productivity over time, which can in turn generate rising growth [7-8].

Of course, confidently asserting that AI will in the end drive growth is a task of another magnitude than listing the potential mechanisms in which it could theoretically do so. Indeed, actually driving economic growth is a matter of many more political and social choices than theoretical mechanisms. What is however certain is that the contributions of AI to economic growth will not be left to chance. They will be the result of active pushes, notably by actors such as government of industrialised countries. Just like any other technology that is capable of increasing productivity, choosing what this productivity increase will be turned into is an active political choice, and under the growth paradigm, the choice is easy: turn it into more production -> turn it into growth.

Capitalism’s Golden Tool

Our world is crippled with crises: ecological, economic, political etc. There are people for whom the current system has been lucrative – including influential tech leaders – and these people hold power. In the face of these crises, they will take up any tool they can to ensure the system’s continuation. In that way, AI offers capitalism an enticing lifeline: it can generate growth while being framed as a solution to some of our global crises such as climate change.

There is indeed a common discourse between the EU, the United Nations and The World Economic Forum that AI is expected to contribute to sustainability and to a prosperous future [9]. The European Commission for examples wrote in its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence that “Digital technologies such as AI are a critical enabler for attaining the goals of the Green Deal.” (p.2) [10].

When Artificial Intelligence is referred to as a contributor to sustainability while simultaneously acting as a growth machine, I argue that AI becomes ‘capitalism’s golden tool’ the technology that will allow the existing power structures to stand in place just a tad longer. And great tech leaders, such as Elon Musk who has recently been appointed within Donald Trump’s administration, will have the golden seats.

Highlighting and refusing the growth-driving applications of AI

While the high water and electricity consumption of AI (specifically of the large machine learning models) have started to be mentioned in the media and politics, the role AI plays in generating environmentally destructive growth and in reinforcing existing capitalist structures has so far not been talked about much. Highlighting the growth driving applications of AI such as turbo-designing clothes to increase consumption is therefore a first step in opposing the further development of such applications. However, most probably only a change in economic paradigm could divert AI from its growth-accelerating effects. Which is why we need to think bigger.

An Exercise of Collective Imagination

A paradigm shift means re-imagining the core of our system, from a growth-based economy to a post-growth economy, but it also means re-imagining every single sector of our society, including technology. I want advocate for an effort of collective imagination to re-imagine what (digital) technologies could look like if we work towards an economic paradigm in line with degrowth.

When thinking about a new paradigm, we will have to be critical of the tools that have been developed and pushed under our current destructive system. Indeed, tools such as Artificial Intelligence might have never been developed under another system, so it is important to question whether they are worth being repurposed.

The effort is therefore that of radical imagination. If you try to imagine a radically different system; one that thrives to ensure a good life for all within planetary boundaries; what kind of digital technologies, if any, would you imagine for your family, your school, your workplace, your community? Do you leave a place for machine learning models? If so, what purpose do they serve?

 

References

[1]  European Commission. 2021. 2030 Digital Compass: The European way for the Digital Decade.

[2]  Rao Anand, Verweij Gerard, & Cameron Euan. (2017). Sizing the Prize – What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?

[3] Meyers M. 2023. A Degrowth Perspective on Artificial Intelligence – Analysing the Appropriateness of Machine Learning to a Degrowth Context. Master’s thesis. ETH Zürich.  https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000622669

[4] Dyer-Witheford, N., Mikkola Kjøsen, A., & Steinhoff, J. 2019. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (J. D. Hobart, J. Hands, & T. Jordan, Eds.). Pluto Press.

[5] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/shein-statistics/

[6] Aghion, P., F. Jones, B., & I. Jones, C. (2019). Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth. In The Economics of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 237–282).

[7] Gersbach, H., Komarov, E., & Von Maydell, R. (2022). Artificial Intelligence as Self-Learning Capital. CEPR Discussion Paper , No. DP17221.

[8] Lu, C. H. (2021). The impact of artificial intelligence on economic growth and welfare. Journal of Macroeconomics, 69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2021.103342

[9] Francisco, M., & Linnér, B. O. 2023. AI and the governance of sustainable development. An idea analysis of the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. Environmental Science & Policy150, 103590.

[10] European Commission. 2020. White Paper on Artificial Intelligence: a European approach to excellence and trust.

Marion Meyers is an Msc Graduate in Science, Technology and Policy from ETH Zürich. Formally trained as a data scientist at Maastricht University, she is now interested in using her technical background to investigate and discuss the ethical, social and environmental issues with digital technologies and their associated infrastructures. She won the journal GAIA’s 2024 best student paper award with a paper derived from her master’s thesis entitled “A Degrowth Perspective on Artificial Intelligence - Analysing the Appropriateness of Machine Learning to a Degrowth Context”.

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