Something critical to understand about the proletariat’s relationship to AI is that AI isn’t the worker’s enemy, despite the efforts of the “creative class” to convince us as such. AI is simply a part of humanity’s evolution, one we cannot and should not wish away; and it’s the proletariat that’s capable of building the socialist system which can maximize AI’s usefulness, unlike the creative class which doesn’t know how to coherently respond to AI. Civilization’s progression is making the boutique labor aristocrats outmoded; for those who drive the means of production, this progress will bring unprecedented strength.
When the working class becomes in control of the state, and therefore in control of AI, it will make AI more fully embody the progressive role that it already has; this follows the revolutionary principle Marx described in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.” This is the vital piece of context behind all the ways AI is right now being used to hurt the working class: by its nature, AI is actually an ally of the workers.
When we understand this, we can figure out how to locate the counter-forces against our techno-dystopia, and to make allies out of these forces. Under our financial capitalist dictatorship, AI is being used to accelerate the rise in unemployment, a crisis which the big banks have explicitly desired to engineer; thanks to AI, companies can trap job-seekers in an endless cycle of fake applications, designed to grow the reserve army of labor and let employers reduce head count. This has countless domino effects; greater unemployment means fewer career prospects, most of all within the rural. The “youth drain” from the rural to the metropole increases, while poverty grows in both the countryside and the cities. Social cohesion becomes even more damaged, and the birth rate further drops.