A traditional Marxian view? Like N-weapons, AI poses 'existential threat' to human civilization

The other day, I was talking with YS Gill, whom I have known as an incisive analyst since my youth, when he, like me, was associated with the Communist Party of India (CPI). A passionate science activist committed to creating awareness of scientific thinking, he told me about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it would lead to mass unemployment. Predicting that AI would replace human intervention in India’s call centers, he estimated that about 70 lakh people would be rendered jobless.

Gill further stated that, in total, its implementation would result in approximately two crore people losing their jobs. This instantly reminded me of an Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad study, "Labour-force Perception about AI: A Study on Indian White-collar Workers", which reportedly found that as many as 60% of white-collar workers fear job loss due to AI’s introduction in Indian industries, while only 53% "hope" that new jobs will be created.

While Gill called AI "extremely dangerous" and even forwarded a note he had prepared to support his point, a software business executive—a close relative based in Bengaluru who was visiting Ahmedabad—while not doubting Gill’s claims, refrained from predicting the number of job losses. He remarked, "The process of replacing humans with AI in call centers has already begun."

However, he also stated that AI would bring "rapid strides in the economy" by making working with machines significantly easier—more so than what computers and electronics had previously achieved. "The time required to complete tasks will be drastically reduced," he opined, adding, "AI is, in a way, the next and higher stage of the Information Technology revolution."

Gill’s note, about 2,300 words long, suggested that despite having left the CPI long ago—like me (I left because its framework restricted my ability to freely pursue journalism)—his overall ideological framework remained, as reflected in the note, traditional Marxist.

Titled "The Development and Dangers of AI: A Comprehensive Analysis", the unpublished note asserts that, aside from nuclear weapons, no other invention has posed a direct existential threat to human civilization as AI does.

Tracing the origins of AI, Gill discusses how the concept first emerged in 1950 when British mathematician Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test as a way to determine whether a machine could exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. This was followed by the Dartmouth Conference of 1956, where John McCarthy first coined the term Artificial Intelligence. Despite a lull in research during the 1980s, a turning point came in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a series of matches.

However, according to Gill, the most significant AI development was the creation of the Transformer architecture, detailed in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need by Google researchers. This innovation revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) by allowing models to analyze entire sentences at once rather than sequentially, paving the way for large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT series and xAI’s Grok 3.

Gill predicts that the next major AI breakthrough, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—which may take about two decades to materialize—will have the ability to reason, learn, and adapt across various domains without human intervention. If achieved, AGI could perform any intellectual task a human can, from creative problem-solving to scientific discovery.

"Should AGI be attained, it might drastically alter the world economy and human labor," Gill argues. Initially, AI will augment human labor by automating tedious tasks in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and education. But as AI improves, entire jobs could vanish.

Predicting "widespread job loss" and "economic upheaval," Gill foresees a demand for new policies, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), to provide financial stability for displaced workers. He warns that countries like India, which rely heavily on outsourced work from developed nations—such as call centers, knowledge processing centers, network management, and software development—will be particularly vulnerable. Unlike wealthier nations, they may lack the surplus funds needed to implement UBI or unemployment benefits.

Here, Gill’s traditional Marxian perspective appears to become evident. He states that the relentless pursuit of profit is "the principal driving force of capitalism," which is "blind to the miseries of people thrown onto the streets when technological shifts occur." This raises what he calls "the typical Marxist question":

"If all or most workers are rendered jobless, who will buy the products and services mass-produced by intelligent machines? What will the oligarchs who own these intelligent production systems do with all the goods and services they generate? And why would they continue producing them if there are no buyers?"

According to Gill, human civilization has historically been marked by "wars, killings, and fratricide by coteries owning lands, resources, slaves, and serfs." He argues that in modern times, things remain largely unchanged, with global monopolies controlling vast wealth through manipulation, fraud, and military force to maintain their grip over billions of working people. A minuscule elite, he claims, rules the world, living in luxury beyond what historical monarchs and emperors could have imagined.

Despite comparing AI to nuclear weapons at the beginning of his note, Gill remains hopeful that the AI revolution "could become the final grave of finance capital and monopolies that hold modern society to ransom." However, he asserts that this would require a globally coordinated struggle for an equitable socialist society where all people work toward common prosperity in an environmentally sustainable manner—free from the reckless exploitation that has characterized the last 10,000 years of human history.

He underscores, "Only a worldwide socialist revolution can establish ethical standards and legal frameworks to ensure AI benefits humanity. Only then will it be possible to design AI that adheres to socialist ethics and the real human values of a future communist society. This will only be achievable if AI development is driven by a non-profit motive for the larger good of humanity."

After reading Gill’s note, I was left wondering: wouldn't capitalism adapt to the new realities brought about by the AI revolution, just as it has done in the past during times of crisis?

Here, I am reminded of Karl Marx, who—despite predicting the emergence of socialist and communist societies—acknowledged that much would depend on the development of productive forces, means of production, and their impact on modes of production and social relations.

Though it may not be fashionable to quote Marx (whom Gill appears to follow), he wrote in 1859 in "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy":

"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society."