If you read my blog post from yesterday, you know that I’m busy and don’t have time to write long blog posts this week; for today’s blog post, you can read the paper I wrote that was due yesterday.

My Homework for Your Reading Pleasure

This is a paper I wrote for my classical sociological theory course about the contemporary relevance of one of Karl Marx’s theories. The topic I selected was world domination by robots; I titled it “Robot-pocalypse.”

We’ve all seen it in science-fiction movies, and we joke about it all the time – the day that robots take over the world. Are we advancing our technologies at such an accelerated rate that before we know it, we are going to create a race of robots smarter than us? According to research done by Patrick Cox, co-editor of Technology Profits Confidential, the amount of technological advancement we have had in the past 50 years is roughly equivalent to that of the previous 5,000 years (“The Daily Reckoning: The Lightning-Fast Pace of Technological Advancement,” 2011). At this exponential speed, we will be creating new technologies within the next few years that we would have never even dreamed about a decade ago.

But is this concept of an over-advancement of technology something that came about recently as a result of people noticing that we might be dooming ourselves, or were we destined to face something along these lines anyway because of the way our society was built? Using the theories of Karl Marx, one can argue that because of the way the United States is structured in such a capitalist manner, the concept of robots taking over the world is not outlandish fiction, but instead is something that is very possible. In addition, Marx’s theories regarding the relationship between a worker and a machine explain what would cause us to become susceptible to falling to a robot army in the first place, and his theories regarding the emergence of communism explain the tipping point that causes us to finally lose control of our own creation.

I mentioned that we have lately been advancing technologies at rates never seen before. Why is this? According to the capitalist theory of Marx, a capitalist is called such because (s)he attempts to maximize his/her capital. An easy way of increasing capital is to find a deal when exchanging commodities with others such that the value of the commodity being given is produced with less labor-power than the value of the commodity being received.

Now would be a good time to define labor-power. Labor-power is the amount of labor that was put into creating a single commodity for exchange. Because it is difficult to find a method of describing many items with one common definition, we look at the source of the items – how they were produced. Labor-power describes the amount of time an individual invested in creating a particular item, averaged with all other instances of the creation of the item by all other individuals. All items for exchange have some sort of time invested in the process of producing it, so labor-power becomes a good way to define items in a standardized manner.

If a capitalist was trading with another capitalist, a fair trade would be defined as exchanging two items that have equal labor-power values. For example, if a capitalist offers an item containing one hour of labor-power, that capitalist should receive, in return, a different item that also contains one hour of labor-power. If the trade is uneven, it is in the best interest of the capitalist who is at a disadvantage in the trade to refuse it, as (s)he can produce the desired item his or herself, and have additional time left over to produce even more goods.

But what if it was not apparent from the trade that one capitalist was benefiting from the exchange? If a capitalist offers an item containing one hour of labor-power, (s)he is unlikely to receive an item containing two hours of labor-power. But, as stated above, the value of each commodity is determined by the average amount of time it takes for an average individual to produce the item. If the capitalist is able to create an item that is known to contain two hours of labor-power in only one hour, (s)he would successfully be able to trade it and receive, in return, an item containing two hours of labor-power. Overall, the capitalist would have effectively gained one hour of labor-power simply because (s)he was able to save one hour of production while making his/her commodity; this gain is them materialized through the process of exchange. Thus, it is in all capitalists’ interests to develop a means of production which allows the production of commodities within a shorter period of time.

In the search of this new means of production, capitalists experiment with tools and machines. There are limitations that humans have, both physically and mentally. For example, a capitalist might not be physically agile of mentally knowledgeable enough to expedite the production of a particular item. However, because the desire to make more money still persists, means of improving production efficiency are created, and machinery is born. Now, with machinery, instead of spending tedious hours constructing an item, a capitalist can set a programmed machine to do the work for him/her in a fraction of the time it took before. This is how we got started advancing technologies and constructing machines, and this is the reason why we continue to do so today.

Unfortunately, it is not only one capitalist who takes advantage of this method of efficiency, and before you know it, capitalists all over the nation are coming up with advanced technologies to shorten the time it takes to produce commodities. As mentioned before, the labor-power value of a commodity is based off of the average time it takes to produce the item; if many capitalists are saving significant amounts of time on producing goods, they, collectively, will bring down the average labor-power by an equally significant amount. Sooner or later, all the capitalists will neutralize the effects of their machinery because so many of them are using it. Afterwards, rather than a capitalist with machinery being at an advantage, it instead becomes a capitalist without machinery being at a disadvantage.

Like before, the motivation to continue making more money still exists. Now that machinery becomes a necessity rather than a luxury, capitalists turn to another source of income – workers. According to Marx’s theory of surplus value, by taking advantage of workers, a capitalist can create an environment in which laborers are receiving wages totaling less than the value of the output they are producing while working. For example, a laborer might receive $60 for six hours’ worth of work. However, from the capitalist’s perspective, the laborer is able to pay for his/her own work in only three hours. The laborer’s output in the remaining three hours goes straight to the capitalist as profit. Essentially, by employing a laborer, the capitalist makes $60 to pay the laborer and $60 to keep for his or herself.

There is a side effect to this system of work. In order to optimize profits, capitalists employ large number of laborers and exploit them to maximize personal gain. This leads to the workers becoming estranged because they are under constant control by capitalists and because they cannot keep what they create (which creates a disconnection between the action and reaction). This puts them in a situation where they feel dehumanized and vulnerable. On top of that, because of the prevalence of machines, laborers are frequently instructed to operate machinery as their job. Because of the complexity of the machines, they are able to run on their own at their own pace, and rather than the laborer controlling the machine, the machine now controls the laborer. This is the first sign of people becoming submissive to machinery.

Now we switch over to a more general view of the structure of society. According to Marx, a society will progress from one stage to the next through the advancement of the modes of production. As stated before, the advancement of modes of production is rapidly occurring as capitalists attempt to maximize their profits. Once the modes of production reach a particular breaking point, the society can progress to the next stage. This continues until the separation between the capitalists and laborers in capitalism becomes so great that communism emerges. In communism, the division of classes subsides and a single, large class forms. Marx states that a key component of this happening is the fact that the laborers must have a revolution after reaching a point where they have nothing to lose. Having nothing to lose implies that the laborers have already lost everything and have been stripped down to the extreme.

Once communism takes over, the capitalists are brought down to the laborer’s level. However, all the machinery that was created by the capitalists still exist in their previous state. In a hypothetical situation, it is possible that, in the near future relative to the modern day, capitalists create extremely advanced machinery with artificial intelligence. Looking at the current status of capitalism today, capitalists still have enough time to advance technologies such that this hypothetical situation is possible. Although the chasm in the distribution of wealth between the wealthy and poor is widening, there are still many people who would not choose to revolt because they still have possessions they can lose.

According to Marx, once this difference reaches a maximum (and, hypothetically, at that time, we would have extremely advanced machinery), the United States will revert to a social structure of communism. The capitalists will lose control of all their wealth and become a part of the new “regular” class.

But, the machines will not change.

Because the capitalists have been brought down to the level of the estranged, susceptible, and vulnerable workers, who have already been controlled by the machines for years, there is nobody remaining who can maintain control of the machinery, and a take-over by machines becomes inevitable with time.

In summary, the idea of machines and robots taking over the world is not an original idea from science fiction authors, but instead is implicitly outlined very clearly by the theories of Karl Marx. With the combination of the constant desire to advance technologies, the use and exploitation of workers, the submission of laborers to machines, the conflict among capitalists and laborers causing communism, and the continued retention of the level of technological advancement, a robot-pocalypse becomes a very real threat to our world.