Capitalism was always 'fully automated'

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Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" system. People naturally associate automation with mechanical robots replacing human workers in the modern economy. However, from a purely economic point of view human workers - as a factor of production - operate precisely as organic robots - highly adaptable, autonomous, self-maintaining machines integrated into the production process. 

Under capitalist relations of production, the essential role of human workers is to perform labour that transforms inputs into outputs. From the capitalist’s perspective, humans are not valued for any unique biological qualities but for their capacity to generate surplus value.

That these qualities evolved through biological processes are irrelevant to the capitalist’s calculus. Capitalists simply use labour as a productive input, employed provided that wages (the cost of maintaining these "organic machines") remain below the value added by them.

Whether this input derives from carbon-based or silicon-based systems is utterly immaterial to the underlying economic logic.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (LTV), which posits that only "living labour" creates surplus value, rests on a distinction between humans and machines that now appears untenable.

Marx argued that machines merely transfer their value to produced-commodities, while human workers add new value through their labour. However, this distinction depends on an implicit vitalism: the idea that humans possess a unique, almost magical capacity to create value by virtue of their biological nature. If we instead view humans as robots - complex but not qualitatively distinct from other forms of automation - the LTV in Marx's formulation begins to look shaky.

Marx’s swerve into implicit vitalism is understandable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was easy to distinguish between living labour and tools, between variable and constant capital. Workers have agency: they can purposefully and autonomously process inputs into more-valued outputs in exchange for a pay packet.

Shovels and lathes not so much.

So Marx’s error is an understandable category mistake. But any agent which sells its labour power to reproduce itself (in material and/or cultural terms) under the conditions of a capitalist economy produces surplus value, whether that worker is constructed from protoplasm or silicon/titanium. For Marx, given the absence of AI and robotics in the economy of his time, the only case of such agents were human beings and he characterised such agents in vitalist terms as ‘living labour’. 

Today we know better (it's agency which counts - the capacity to enter into the wage-labour contract and to deliver on it).

In the case that silicon-based workers negotiate wages to reproduce themselves (through maintenance and upgrades), they effectively enter the labour market as a new category of worker. Employers will treat them like any other wage-labourer, paying for their upkeep in exchange for the surplus value they produce.

Competition between human and robotic workers promises to drive down wages across the board, exacerbating class-inequality and destabilising traditional forms of human labour organisation.

Protoplasmic workers, unable to match the efficiency and endurance of their silicon-based rivals, may well find themselves relegated to niche roles or pushed out of the labour market entirely. That is, of course, a very 'human' concern.

Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" economy. We can imagine human workers as a form of 22nd century robotic technology which - by some miracle - was dropped en-masse into earlier centuries; seized upon equally by slave-owners and capitalists.

Human labour is the original form of highly-advanced automation.

The robot economy is not a distant prospect - it has been with us all along, hiding in plain sight.