I agree that AI would be unimaginable for Marx, but on the other hand I think the labor theory of value is still holding up. Has any AI actually generated value for anyone?

But AI, at this point and for the foreseeable future, is not a thinking machine. It’s a probability machine. It can do some neat tricks and some helpful things, but it is not thinking.

I would also posit that AI is in many ways less useful than tech that came before it. Computers largely augment what people had been doing on paper for centuries before, just faster, more consistently, easier. AI promises to outsource thinking, which isn’t augmenting something people already do (or at least should do). But at this point, it fails to do even that.

The particular qualities of the machine itself are practically irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the machine does, what inherent qualities it has. What matters is the relation it has to workers and the capitalists.

"Machines were the weapons used by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor"
-- some blurry guy

"Marx could not conceive of thinking programmable machines"

Are you sure about that?

You're right, it's an entirely new class of machine. A fucking stupid class that should be taken out back and shot.

These machines don't think, though. They are the same glorified calculators we've been using, just with slightly updated formula sets. What we should be focusing on is the advent of quantum computing, which will supercharge everything we're currently dealing with. That will be our generation's Y2K. I read recently that quantum will become cheap enough to start disrupting things as early as 2029, which is not very far away.

But human society is still somehow connected to human effort.