From the series Artificial Intelligence
In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature and in his unfinished essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
, Friedrich Engels outlined the evolutionary process that led from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens. The text stands out for the conceptual power of its materialist method, and from it we draw five fundamental concepts.
First, for Engels, the brain is a product of labour. It is in the dialectical relationship of mutual action and reaction with labour – made possible by the articulation of the hand freed by man's upright posture, the result of hundreds of thousands of years
of natural selection – that the brain evolved to perform the most complex functions and develop self-awareness. In turn, labour is an expression of the social relations at the basis of specific socio-economic formations across successive modes of production. Therefore, the brain is a social product, mediated by the hand that wields the tool, by labour that puts it in relation with the brains of other humans, and by the language made necessary by those relations.
Second, this relationship of upright posture-hand-language-brain, and the role played by labour in humanisation, is neglected by current conceptions and is also unrecognised by Darwinian evolutionists themselves. This is because the division into classes and the separation between manual labour and intellectual labour – in the latter's connection with the ruling class and its apparatus (schools, the Churches, etc.) – has led to the prevalence of the idealist conception that gives prominence to the brain and its representations.
Third, humanity has applied science to nature, and nature has thereby been modified through science, technology, and labour. But it has been difficult to go beyond the initial and immediate effects of this transformation, barely taking into consideration its secondary and long-term effects.
Fourth, and even more importantly, science has not been applied to the social consequences of labour and to its implications, from the division of labour to class struggle, thus depriving humanity of a vision of the wider, long-term effects of productive activity. Bourgeois economic science, i.e., classical political economy, has been unable to go any further. In order to regulate human labour activity according to a truly conscious plan, knowledge is not enough; an overturning of the mode of production and social order is necessary.
Fifth, the individual capitalist is concerned only with immediate profit, not with what will happen to the commodity or the buyer afterwards. The same applies to what will happen to nature and – we might add – to human nature itself.
Stephen Jay Gould, an innovator in Darwinian theory, perhaps goes too far in his scientific generosity towards Engels' work when he argues that his insights into the theory of evolution have been confirmed by contemporary developments in the field. Engels could only refer to the notions of the time, which were still in their infancy. For example, with regard to the unintended consequences of the relationship between man and nature, he cites a link between scrofula and the introduction of the potato, which is a clear mistake; this thesis was based on popular beliefs and would be disproved by scientific developments in biology and medicine concerning bacteria. Engels was writing in around 1876; there could be no science before science. Louis Pasteur had already laid the foundations of microbial theory, but Robert Koch's seminal discoveries on tuberculosis would only arrive a few years later.
What we can take from Engels' work are the fundamentals of the materialist method applied to the organic relationship between man and nature. This ultimately leads us to two key notions: that the brain is a social product and that the logic of capital, in the chaotic pursuit of profit by individual capitalists, has no awareness of the effects of its actions on relations between humans and on humans themselves, including their biological nature. However, what modern neuroscience adds, giving additional value to Engels' insights, is that to a certain extent the brain is plastic and modifies its connections based on the activity carried out by socially-determined individuals. So, not in a biological-evolutionary process in the strict sense, but rather in the social sense of the socially-determined activity of individuals, the brain changes. This change in neural networks goes hand in hand with the more general influence that social relations have on people, determining their consciousness, precisely by ensuring that the dominant ideology is that of the ruling class.
We need to investigate this in three ways.
Engels writes that the hand wields the working tool and enters into a dialectical relationship with the development of the brain – a seminal scientific insight. It is a question of understanding what happens when that hand is not holding a flint splinter or a stone axe but a mobile phone, and the mobile phone is equipped with artificial intelligence, thus a tool whose very nature is designed to enter into an intimate, organic, and direct relationship with the brain of the person wielding it.
The second line of investigation is that, under social relations dominated by capitalist chaos and the blind drive to revalorise individual fractions of capital, the effects of networked communication and artificial intelligence can only be understood as subordinated to this logic. This applies both on the anthropological level of the human condition – grappling with technology that affects the brain and the very principles of reality – and on the social level of class relations. Consider the restructuring of production and, in particular, the impact on intellectual and white-collar work, or the balance between business groups and fractions of the ruling class, transformed by the emergence of platforms and giants of information technology and services with an immense capacity for data manipulation.
Finally, relations with the State and the system of States – think of the military use of artificial intelligence for instance – and between groups and fractions of the ruling class must be investigated in this light. Where the discussion of the regulation of platforms and artificial intelligence arises, it does so as part of this confrontation within the ruling class.