Notes on AI and the New Tech Faith

They do not mean to sound like Marx. Most of them have never read him. They have read about disruption, about scaling, about the promise of exponential returns. Yet when they speak of a world without work, of machines that think and learn, they echo him—these new prophets of code, these tech-bro evangelists of the algorithmic age.

Marx wrote that the means of production would someday outgrow the relations that contained them. He saw how the machine, invented to serve, would end by transforming the master. In the clean rooms of San Francisco and Shenzhen, this metamorphosis is nearly complete. The machine no longer takes orders; it anticipates them.

The AI developers talk about abundance as if it were a product launch. They say we are approaching an economy of plenty, where labor will vanish and creation will be effortless. It sounds utopian, but it is also eerily familiar. The same rhetoric once surrounded the steam engine, the assembly line, the computer chip. Every new technology has been introduced as liberation and soon enlisted in control.

Still, one should not scorn them. The builders of AI are not villains but believers. They look into the mirror of the machine and see salvation. They hope, perhaps sincerely, that intelligence itself might transcend greed, that automation might finally erase want. What they cannot yet see is how deeply capitalism is written into the code: how the data are owned, how the labor of millions—annotators, miners, gig workers—feeds the ghost in the server rack.

Marx might have smiled at their contradictions. He predicted this: the moment when technology could produce everything and yet meaning would remain scarce. The tech world calls it abundance; he called it the crisis of overproduction.

And yet, i can not not end with condemnation but with wonder. I ask: what will happen when these men, who measure the world in tokens and teraflops, finally meet the truth of their own creation? When they realize that their algorithms have not freed them from history but written them deeper into it?

Perhaps that will be the beginning of something new. For all their hubris, the tech engineers of abundance are unwittingly building what Marx once called the realm of freedom—a world where necessity is no longer the master of life. But freedom, as ever, is not granted by machines. It is chosen by those who learn to use them wisely.

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