From the series Artificial Intelligence
In his essay on the evolutionary process that led to Homo Sapiens, we saw how Friedrich Engels also links language to the chain of causes that, over hundreds of thousands of years, determined the evolution of the brain: upright posture, the hand, and labour
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"Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other
".
Therefore: "First labour, after it and then with it speech – these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man".
Though Darwinian evolutionary theory was still a pioneering science, Engels points out the distinction between the very long process of anthropogenesis on a biological basis, albeit mediated by labour, and the subsequent development of humanity exclusively through social determination:
"The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development". Here, we see the transition from human evolution as a biological-evolutionary process to being the result of social relations. In this latter process, language – both spoken and written – has an enormously expanded role to play, through two functions. First, as a tool for the social dissemination of knowledge, starting with work-related technologies and the division of labour itself. Second, as a means of transmitting these advances to subsequent generations.
"This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape", that is, it did not stop at the mere biological selection which, in the hand-labour-language-brain nexus, had led from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens.
This development, instead, "on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society".
The human brain and consciousness as a social product: this is the starting point for Amadeo Bordiga's reflection on "social work and speech", as illustrated in a 1953 text on the national question. The premise follows Engels' thesis:
"Every common human activity for productive purposes, in the broadest sense, requires a system of communication between workers for useful collaboration. Starting from the simple effort to hunt or defend oneself, for which instinctive expressions, a push or an animal cry, are sufficient. When, on the other hand, choices of time or place of action, or means (primitive tools, weapons, etc.) are required, speech arises, following a very long series of failed attempts and adjustments".
Bordiga effectively popularised these ideas by evoking the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as an illustration of this process. In the story, the Babylonian Empire is already a powerful State, with prisoners and forced labourers at its disposal for "colossal works" in construction and river hydraulics. The myth of the collapse of a tower that was intended to be so high as to challenge the heavens belongs to a common theme in many cultures – human presumption punished by the gods. Other examples include the theft of fire by Prometheus or the flight of Icarus attempted by Daedalus. The unfolding of the catastrophe, on the other hand, serves as "confirmation of the real natural process concerning the development of language".
"The countless workers, foremen, and architects are of different and distant origins, do not speak the same languages, do not understand each other. The execution of plans and instructions is chaotic and contradictory, and the construction, once it has reached a certain height, can only collapse due to errors caused by the confusion of languages, so that the builders are either crushed or scattered, terrified by the punishment of the gods". The subtext of the story is, in the view of Bordiga, that "you cannot build anything if you do not have a common language: stones, arms, levers, hammers, and pickaxes are not enough if you lack the tool, the instrument of production, provided by a single language and a single lexicon and formula common to all and well known". There is no doubt, he concludes, that for the materialist conception of Marxism, language is "one of the instruments of production".
One might add that, in the modern multi-ethnic concentrations of our class, mastery of language is part of class defence. Every worker and every volunteer in our language schools will confirm this.
In assessing the present-day irruption of artificial intelligence, especially so-called generative AI based on highly effective linguistic-probabilistic systems, the starting point is to recognise that what is at stake is the development of the productive forces
. The next step is to relate the critical aspects of AI – so hotly debated in the struggle between capitals who have a stake in it – not primarily to the intrinsic character of the technology itself, but to the fundamental contradiction between the development of the productive forces and capitalist relations of production
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