PERSON
Karl Marx
The philosopher and economist who gave the age of artificial intelligence its most exact vocabulary for the questions it most needs to ask—about whose labor produced the machine, who owns it, and what the machine does to the human being who labors beneath it.
Karl Marx is the analyst the AI age most needs and most resists. Born in Trier in 1818 and trained in Hegelian philosophy before turning to the concrete machinery of nineteenth-century capitalism, he built a framework for asking who owns the tools, where value comes from, and what happens to a human being when the product of their own labor is turned around and used to govern them. These questions are not historical curiosities; they are the precise questions that
large language models trained on humanity’s accumulated knowledge and owned by a handful of corporations make newly, uncomfortably urgent. His concept of the
general intellect—the aggregate scientific and social knowledge of the species, which in the advanced stage of production becomes embodied directly in the machinery—describes AI training data with uncanny precision: what the models contain is not the property of any individual but the collective cognitive commons of humanity, now enclosed