Capitalism as a Species of Automation

For many decades, full automation has been treated as a possible outcome arising from the incessant transformation of the world's labour processes.The recent massification of ChatGPT and generative AI technologies has exacerbated the speculative tendency to move freely between the sense that this future is possible, on the one hand, and that it is proximate, on the other.Increasing confidence that this impending trajectory is already secured has incited both popular literature and funding-round proposals that put dates and concrete numbers on the temporal distance between our present and its fully automated future.While many critics have noted that full automation is not a new idea, what is more crucial is that its earlier precedents did not belong exclusively or even primarily to science-fiction: the genuine belief that full automation was and now is right around the corner is not new, either.In "Capitalism as a Species of Automation," I study how and why the notion of full automation has become a recurrent threshold state used to periodize the collective presents of capitalist development.What if full automation has always haunted capitalism's proximate futures because automation is itself an anachronism?In this article, I contend that while full automation appears as a technical antagonism that repeatedly restages the replacement of human labour, it relates to capitalist development as a temporal antagonism defining the replacement of technology by technology.In demonstrating how the contradictions internal to capitalist development come to be reformulated as temporal dynamics animating technological development, I focalize automation as a privileged interpretant of the mechanisms through which capitalism accumulates and disaccumulates value.