The Artificial Idiots: A Report on Digital Capitalism

The bourgeoisie and its scribes cannot get enough of its new prophets. Every week another “visionary” appears on stage to announce that Artificial Intelligence is the dawn of a new epoch. They speak in hushed, reverent tones of its potential. And they are not entirely wrong but only in the way a broken clock is right twice a day.

The AlphaFold system, spawned by Google’s DeepMind, has achieved what generations of scientists could not: it predicts the intricate, life-governing shapes of proteins with stunning accuracy. This is not mere calculation; it is a leap in our collective understanding of biology. The same technology probes the secrets of nuclear fusion, promising a future of limitless clean energy. It aids doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London to foresee disease before it strikes. Here, in these machines, we see the brilliant material expression called the “social brain”; the accumulated knowledge and skill of humanity, crystallized into a new and powerful form. This is the radiant dream. But we do not live in the realm of dreams; we live under the dictatorship of capital. And capital sees in every tool of liberation a new weapon for subjugation.

While Google's DeepMind has made its AlphaFold database publicly accessible, a very liberal gesture, its corporate sibling, Amazon, puts its AI to a more characteristically capitalist use. They have patented a digital shackle: a wristband that tracks a warehouse worker’s every movement. If the worker’s hands stray from their ordained task, the bracelet delivers a “haptic feedback,” a vibratory nudge meant to correct them. This is the capitalist application of a superhuman technology: not to free the worker from toil, but to chain them more perfectly to the machine, to turn a human being into the most efficient biological component in a logistics algorithm.

The capitalists see it as progress. For them, the “nudge” is an innovation. For us, it is the old, familiar boot, now sheathed in silicon. The question is not whether the technology is powerful, but who it serves. And under the rule of the bourgeoisie, it serves only one master: profit.

Do not be fooled by the tech elite’s mystical incantations of “neural networks” and “large language models.” They cloak their commercial interests in the aura of divine revelation, posing as philosopher-kings guiding a benighted humanity. In truth, they are merely priests of capital, and their algorithms are the new catechism of exploitation

They insist their creations are "neutral", pure, objective mathematics. This is a lie. As the former data scientist Cathy O'Neil exposes, the algorithms used in hiring, policing, and credit are nothing of the sort. They are "Weapons of Math Destruction": opaque, unregulated, and designed to punish the poor for their poverty. Her verdict is a damning indictment of their entire project: "Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."

Let us translate this into plain language: Every algorithm carries the ideology of its owner.

The problem is not that these systems are too coldly logical. The problem is that they are too human, they absorb all the filth of our capitalist society, its class prejudice, and reproduce it with the terrifying precision of a machine. Capital has eaten our reflection, and now sells it back to us as an "intelligent" service. We are no longer the subjects of our own experience; we are, "the raw material of others' profit-making."

Researcher Hanna Fry exposes most "AI" as essentially "a spreadsheet with better branding." This demolishes the myth of genius around tech investors who posture as innovators while merely automating clerical tasks and streamlining layoffs.

Mustafa Suleyman, founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, speaks piously about the "risks" of AI and the need for "containment." This is the height of hypocrisy? All while the fruits of the industry he helps build are used to bomb civilians in Gaza.

Let us be clear: the problem is not the machine, but its master. Their technology is not intelligent, nor is it inherently our enemy. It is a mirror of their own alienated consciousness, a digital ghost haunted by the contradictions of their system. But in their hands, it can be nothing other than a tool for class discipline.

The bourgeoisie sings hymns to an AI future, but their stock exchanges tell a different story: a tale of delirious speculation and impending collapse. Their "technological revolution" is just another capitalist bubble, inflated with hot air and fraud. The digital beast now devours even the capitalists' own fictitious capital.

Listen to their own high priest, Sam Altman of OpenAI? He admits the market is in a "bubble," even as his own company, with its projected $20 billion in revenue, remains spectacularly unprofitable. This is not a contradiction; it is the very essence of capitalist anarchy. The bourgeois economists, from the Bank of England to the IMF, now wring their hands over a "toxic calm before the crash." They have identified an "AI equity bubble" as the top global market risk. They see what we see: a mountain of unproven business models, propped up by "excessive capital expenditure and debt."

The figures are a damning indictment. An MIT study reveals that 95% of organisations investing in generative AI see zero returns. OpenAI itself is projected to incinerate a cumulative $44 billion in losses by 2028. This is not production; it is a pyre of capital. The projected $2 trillion in AI infrastructure spending by 2028 is not a sign of health, but a symptom of the system's desperate, parasitic search for new fields of exploitation.

And who pays for this speculative orgy? The workers, always the workers. Already in 2025, over 184,000 tech workers have been thrown onto the scrapheap by this "revolution." Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft restructure to "prioritize AI," a polite phrase for mass layoffs. The capitalist uses the threat of the machine to discipline those still employed, forcing lower wages and worse conditions.

This is capitalism's "creative destruction": monopoly power for a few giants, destroyed livelihoods for the many. The bubble will burst. The only question is which capitalist state will bail out these "visionaries" when their digital fantasy collapses. This crash is no accident, it's the logical end of a system that produces for profit, not human need.

The capitalist, in his frenzied pursuit of profit, would burn down your house to cook his dinner. Now, with his "AI revolution," he is preparing to burn the entire planet. The environmental cost of this digital folly is a monstrous monument to a system that treats air, water, and earth as mere externalities to be plundered.

The data centres powering this speculative frenzy are energy gluttons on an unprecedented scale. Their electricity consumption is projected to double by 2030, potentially exceeding the entire current usage of Japan. In the United States, these digital cathedrals already account for a staggering 4.4% of total energy consumption. To feed this ravenous hunger, the capitalists are not racing to build renewables; they are prolonging the life of fossil fuel plants and locking us into a high-emissions future.

Elon Musk’s xAI operation in Memphis is the perfect symbol of this criminal negligence. His company installed 35 methane gas turbines without a single Clean Air Act permit spewing an estimated 1,200 to 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxide into a community that already leads the state in asthma emergencies. This is not innovation; it is a declaration of war on the working class and their health. The same man who dreams of colonising Mars cannot be bothered to keep a Tennessee neighbourhood breathable.

But the assault does not end with the air. These data centres are projected to consume 4.2–6.6 billion cubic meters of water for cooling, often in drought-stricken regions. In Taiwan, the government was forced to implement water rationing that prioritised the semiconductor sector over agriculture. The capitalist state reveals its true priority: microchips over bread, profit over survival.

Furthermore, the mining for rare minerals essential to this infrastructure - lithium, cobalt, silicon - leaves behind a scarred landscape of deforestation, contaminated groundwater, and devastated ecosystems. The "intelligence" of this technology is built on a foundation of ecological stupidity and human suffering.

This is not progress. It is a planetary parasite. The capitalist class, with its talk of a digital utopia, is building a future where the servers are cooled and the workers are left to boil. Their "AI" is neither artificial nor intelligent; it is made from earth, labour, and data, and it is consuming all three with reckless, suicidal abandon.

We have laid bare the facts. We have seen AI’s potential to cure disease and unlock clean energy, twisted into a weapon for surveillance and speed-up. We have exposed the algorithms that encode capitalist bias as mathematical truth. We have witnessed the speculative bubble, built on the graves of workers’ jobs, teetering on the brink of collapse. We have documented the environmental plunder, the poisoned air and stolen water, all sacrificed at the altar of profit.

The conclusion is inescapable. The problem is not the technology, but the dictatorship of the class that controls it.

The capitalists will cry "Luddite?" at our critique. This is slander. Unlike the early machine-breakers, we Marxists understand the true enemy isn't the technology itself, but the system of private ownership that controls it, including the computational power of AI. Our goal isn't to smash the servers, but to seize them.

Under the rule of the bourgeoisie, AI is a fetter on the productive forces, a source of greater anarchy, inequality, and immiseration. Under a workers' state, it would become the opposite: the most powerful tool ever created for rational, democratic planning. It could analyse the real needs of society and coordinate production to meet them, eliminating scarcity and shortening the working day to a minimum. It could free humanity from the drudgery of mindless labour, not to create unemployment, but to create leisure, the foundation for genuine human development, for art, science, and community.

The immense productive power of AI has made the case for socialism a practical necessity, not merely a moral demand. Capitalism has developed a technology so powerful that it can no longer be contained within the rotting shell of private property and the nation-state. The contradictions are exploding outwards in crises of exploitation, speculation, and ecology.

Therefore, the task of the hour is to organize. To agitate among the technical workers, the engineers, and the scientists, and show them that their genius is shackled to the chariot of capital. To build a revolutionary party that can lead the working class in the seizure of state power.

The capitalists, in their limitless greed, have handed us the tools for their own overthrow. They have created the “social brain” but denied it a socialist body. Our task is to complete the circuit. To take the servers from the Googles and the Microsofts. To take the data from the Musks and the Altmans. To place this awesome power under the democratic control of the associated producers.