The leaders of many tech companies today seem increasingly convinced that superintelligent, society-transforming machines are on their way. This is, of course, not a new idea. Writing in 2015, literature scholar Gerry Canavan explored the way this concept has supported different political visions.
In the mid-twentieth century, Canavan writes, American science fiction often depicted societies ruled by computers as an analog for Soviet communism. In the 1967 episode “The Apple” from the original Star Trek series, for example, a computer known as Vaal rules a people kept in idyllic but primitive and unchanging conditions. Eventually, Captain Kirk destroys the god-computer, telling the locals that they’ll come to enjoy “what we call freedom.”
Canavan suggests that the moral here is “somewhat stunning”: that communism “might make you happy, but it won’t make you good.”
A more ambiguous take on benevolent AI dictatorship comes from Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short story “The Evitable Conflict.” It posits a world ruled by machines with perfect knowledge, for the welfare of humanity. One human character objects that humanity has “lost its own say in its future,” but another responds that this sense of control was always an illusion: “it was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand.”
Canavan suggests that machine overlords can represent capitalist forces as well as communist ones. As early as 1967, libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek argued that many of humanity’s greatest achievements were not created through deliberate planning or coordination but through “a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.” In this view, much like a communistic god-computer, the market directs resources and organizes human action according to its own logic.
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Twenty-first-century science fiction has played on this idea. For example, the 2005 novel Accelerando by Charles Stross imagines an alien virus infesting the economy, turning the “sufficiently complex resource allocation algorithms” that we call corporations into sentient beings. These newly aware companies’ high-speed trading of financial projects destroys the Earth itself, forcing humans to flee to the margins of the solar system.
“The crucial point to be made here,” Canavan writes, “is that this system is still functioning in perfectly Hayekian terms—humans are simply no longer the relevant micro-agents operating within it, rather corporate financial algorithms are.”
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Stross’s story is satirical, but Canavan notes that it’s almost a literal description of the high-speed algorithms that analyze financial data and make trades in microseconds. In some cases, these algorithms trick each other, leading to “wars” among them that have occasionally crashed markets. Similarly, corporations in the real world can be viewed as immortal, nonbiological organisms driven to grow, consume resources, and protect themselves.
In the face of this powerful force, some Marxist thinkers have argued for “accelerationism”—shifting the power found in algorithm-powered capitalism toward material abundance and ecological health. Science fiction visions in this vein, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, recast a Vaal-like god-computer as a force not for stagnation but for human flourishing.
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