AI, Labour, and the Future

Behind the “miracle” of artificial intelligence lies a repulsive social relation.

The petabytes of data that humanity has accumulated through collective effort over decades of the internet were used by a narrow circle of corporations that managed to expropriate the wealth of social labour for the benefit of small groups of shareholders.

AI interfaces today are convenient, fast, and pleasant to use. They truly accelerate and simplify many everyday work processes. But the problem is that by improving our interaction with artificial intelligence—by correcting its errors—we simultaneously improve the model itself. And by improving it, we hand certain corporations the ability to:

reduce the number of employees,
lower wages,
intensify the rate of exploitation ,
carry out everything that is politely called “business process optimization.”

Have you already met time-trackers or "smart" cameras on your workplace?

The fundamental contradiction between the social nature of labour and the private appropriation of its results has become most evident in the development of large language models.

Corporate top-management eagerly convinces themselves and everyone else that “soon we won’t need programmers, designers, marketers, editors,” and any so-called “carbon-based” workers. This misanthropic ideology is absurd.

Why this ideology is absurd

The very existence of artificial intelligence became possible only thanks to the product of collective labour, accumulated by humanity over decades.

Today, when interacting with large proprietary models—such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, and other closed systems—every user contributes to their fine-tuning. But who will guarantee that tomorrow these same users will not lose their jobs?

Staff reductions under the banner of “productivity growth” mean that competition between workers in various industries becomes so fierce that people are forced to fight for the right to work:

for a lower wage,
under worse conditions,
simply to feed themselves and their families.

No one provides guarantees of employment.

No one promises guarantees of income.

No one compensates the labour invested in fine-tuning these models.

The imperfection of AI and the unpaid labour of correction

Professionals who work with AI daily know well: artificial intelligence is imperfect.

It makes mistakes constantly; it must be corrected again and again to achieve even a minimally acceptable result.

This is especially evident in software development.

The so-called vibe-coding—using AI to write code—can produce amusing demo-games that even children can make. But today it is incapable of creating fully-fledged applications that can be:

properly designed for scaling,
written from beginning to end,
reliably deployed on real platforms,
maintained and developed over years.

For this, the labour of an actual programmer is still necessary.

Continuous correction and refinement of AI-generated output is additional training of the models.

And this is labour.

Labour that still remains systematically unpaid.

Parallel to the development of AI, another technological layer has grown—blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledgers.

Combined with artificial intelligence, modern algorithms create tools for coordination among people who:

do not know each other personally,
live in different countries,
but are connected by a common economic incentive.

Blockchain provides, essentially, two key things:

Verifiability of contribution.
The ability to automate the distribution of rewards.

This radically expands the space of possible forms of self-organization. For the first time in history, we gain the technical ability to build institutions based not on trust in a private owner or corporation, but on transparency and collective verifiability.

But here arises the danger of techno-messianism: the temptation to believe that technology by itself will resolve social contradictions. It will not.

Why tokenized labour is not yet a new economic form

Today’s mechanisms of “tokens for contribution,” DAOs, protocol voting, and other forms of labour tokenization are not a revolutionary transition to a new mode of production.

The reason is simple: commodity production remains the unshakable foundation of the economy.

Unlike previous eras, labour today is a commodity, as are all products of labour.

Commodity exchange continues to:

separate producers from final consumers,
separate the worker from the results of their own labour,
divide producers among themselves and condition their competitive struggle.

As long as the means of production are in private hands, any use of blockchain will be just a technological overlay on the old structure:

private production,
production for the market,
competition among producers,
the division of labour and capital,
appropriation of surplus value for private interests.

No technology is capable of destroying commodity production on its own.

And, conversely, without abolishing commodity production, it is impossible to fully socialize the means of production.

We get a closed loop:

commodity production cannot be eliminated without public ownership,

but public ownership cannot be fully realized within commodity production.

This is why tokenization is only a primitive prototype, a first imitation of future institutions.

It:

does not abolish commodity relations,
does not abolish capital,
does not abolish exploitation,

but it creates an abstract possibility, a germ of future solutions that may one day allow society to:

forecast real levels of consumption,
plan volumes of production,
coordinate value-creation chains,
distribute the fruits of collective labour proportionally to real contribution.

But why is commodity production even an issue?

Commodity production is not a “neutral” form of exchange, as liberal economists claim.

It is the central contradiction of modern society.

Every commodity is created by a private producer who produces for the market.

They do not produce for a particular person, nor for a known demand. They produce blindly.

Meanwhile, consumption has a social character: needs are formed by countless people with different incomes, interests, and capacities.

There is no organizing bridge between private production and social consumption.

No one coordinates:

where there is shortage,
where there is surplus,
how much of which goods are actually needed,
where labour will be wasted.

Thus the capitalist produces at random, hoping that “the market will self-regulate.”

But the market does not regulate—it punishes.

If the producer cannot sell the commodity with surplus value, they go bankrupt.

If they produce less than competitors, they are pushed out.

If they misjudge the moment, they are destroyed.

2. Competition as a war of all against all

Producers do not strive to create an optimal structure of production for the benefit of society.

They strive to destroy competitors to seize their market share.

Practically, this means that each is forced to:

reduce costs at any price,
suppress wages,
cut safety and working conditions,
produce more than society needs, just to occupy the market.

As a result, society’s resources are spent chaotically and unevenly:

overproduction of goods that cannot be sold,
shortages of essential resources (medicine, housing, infrastructure),
millions of tons of goods destroyed due to overproduction,
millions of people losing their jobs due to falling demand.

This is not a malfunction of the system.

This is its normal mode of operation.

3. Crises as the “natural” state of commodity production

Economic crises are not anomalies of capitalism, but mechanisms through which commodity production restores its “equilibrium” by destroying:

enterprises,
goods,
infrastructure,
human lives.

A crisis occurs when too many goods have been produced that:

cannot be sold,
cannot be used,
often cannot even be disposed of without harm.

At the same time, there is a surplus of labour power that:

wants and is able to work,
but cannot find application,
because capital sees no opportunity to extract surplus value from it.

We face a paradox:

millions of people need goods,
millions of goods lie unused,
millions of workers are ready to produce,
but the economic system is paralyzed.

The reason is simple:

the goal of capitalist production is not meeting human needs, but extracting surplus value.

If surplus value cannot be extracted, production is destroyed—even if needs are dire.

Humanity deserves more

We already have technologies that allow us to:

forecast real needs,
calculate optimal production volumes,
coordinate people who do not know each other personally,
distribute resources transparently,
form trust algorithmically rather than through the power of capital.

But this remains only a possibility, not reality.

Commodity production remains the foundation of modern economics. Therefore:

the market remains chaotic,
production remains blind,
coordination is absent,
crises are inevitable.

Technology alone cannot eliminate commodity relations, just as the steam engine could not eliminate serfdom on its own.

To eliminate commodity production, different social institutions are required—institutions that only a deliberate collective will of society can create.

The world on the brink of a Third World War

The modern era is not only a technological turning point.

It is an era standing on the brink of a Third World War, already smoldering in various forms across the planet:

Ukraine,
the Middle East,
Africa,
the Caucasus,
South East Asia,
Latin America.

These are not “random local conflicts.”

They are parts of a unified global confrontation among financial-industrial monopolies, which divide the world, its resources, and its markets.

Today’s wars are not wars of nations.

They are wars of corporations, state-monopoly bureaucracies, and transnational capital, using states as instruments for expanding their spheres of influence.

The fuses are already lit; a full-scale fire is a matter of time and the next political crisis.

To discuss the future of technology while ignoring this political reality is to consciously close one’s eyes.

Why only the working class can stop the monopolies

The working class—in the broadest sense:

those who produce goods,
those who write code,
those who organize teams,
those who maintain infrastructure,
those who heal, teach, build, transport,
those who create real value,

is the only segment of society not interested in world war.

Workers:

do not own monopolies,
do not profit from wars,
do not participate in dividing markets and spheres of influence,

yet they are the ones who pay:

with their lives,
with their labour,
with their poverty,
with the destruction of their countries and the future of their children.

Monopolies, however, benefit from crises and wars:

every crisis intensifies concentration of capital,
every war destroys competitors,
every conflict opens new markets and sources of raw materials.

If humanity wants to avoid catastrophe, it must seek forms of global labour coordination that:

unite workers of all countries into common economic groups,
establish a shared interest: eliminating the power of financial-industrial monopolies,
place key infrastructures at the service of all people, not a narrow circle of owners.

New technologies as tools for future self-organization

Blockchain, distributed ledgers, decentralized networks, algorithmic allocation, transparent coordination models—these are not toys or buzzwords.

They are early, still primitive forms of international economic interconnection that:

allow people from different countries to unite without a state intermediary,
enable verification of each participant’s contribution,
allow production and distribution to be managed without the monopoly of capital,
allow new collective forms of ownership and governance to emerge,
turn each contribution into a measurable and rewardable quantity.

Today these are merely drafts of future productive relations.

But historically, such drafts have often become the beginnings of great social transformations.

Not to create a “new capitalism,” but to eliminate the power of monopolies

The historical task is not to build a “more honest capitalism” or a “moral AI-market” with the help of blockchain and tokens.

The task is different:

to deprive financial-industrial monopolies of their power over states and societies,
to transfer control over key infrastructures to society itself,
to turn modern technologies into tools in the hands of producers, rather than instruments of control over them,
to unite workers of all countries through shared economic interests,
to restructure production in the interests of all, not for the profit of the few.

This is not an abstract dream—it is a political necessity of an era standing on the edge of global catastrophe.

If the working class—programmers, engineers, teachers, doctors, operators, scientists, logisticians, builders, and all others who create the final product—learns to use modern coordination technologies, it can transform technologies and monopolies from instruments of enslavement into public goods for all.

Indeed, this is the primary historical role of technology in the 21st century:

not automation for profit,
not convenience,
not the marketing fantasy of “efficiency,”

but the creation of an instrument for the elimination of monopolistic power and the construction of institutions where the free development of each truly becomes the condition for the free development of all.

This is the true decentralisation humanity deserves.