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P.S. I was not late what are you talking about
I was thinking about AI recently. It’s really easy to imagine a dystopian future with Robocop-style bots and intense surveillance but I don’t think it’s gonna be so easy to ditch the proletariat as a class .
Like, robot cops (not necessarily humanoid) would need batteries in order to be mobile. They would need to recharge every so often and a battery would be a really weak spot.
I think physical labor is gonna be done by human hands for a long time. Intellectual labor might be easier to replace.
Just thinking statically, that’s been the case a significant portion of the time. The whole thing about labor is it self-reproduces, self-maintains. That’s part of the picture of capitalist value extraction. Put in liberal-friendly terms, the McDonalds worker goes home and tries to recuperate for free. The self-checkout kiosk, on the other hand, costs money to maintain.
Dynamically or dialectically, these tech advancements cause deterritorialization of social relations and class definitions. And it’s difficult to predict how they’ll be reterritorialized.
The gutting/proletarianization of the imperial “intellectual” class is gonna have some ripple effects that, to repeat myself for lack of creative vocabulary, are gonna be difficult to predict. The service class as a whole is hard to replace with tech, but it has developed in tandem with, to serve, the salary class that’s currently being gutted. There’s fewer Disney adults paying for their burger suburban utopia where they can yell at minimum wage workers. There’s less and less money to recirculate within the service class.
More and more people fall out of the system (there’s a compelling argument that this is one of the material drivers of prison systems). But I don’t know what this growing class of people turns into once it reaches a critical mass. What percentage of a population can you sustainably imprison or execute?