By Kamran Nayeri, September 22, 2026
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| Credit: SciTechDaily.com |
1. The controversy over Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation in the United States is essentially a dispute over how to balance two competing concerns: preventing serious harm from increasingly powerful AI systems while preserving innovation, economic development, and freedom to use the technology (The 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI). Participants come from a wide range of professions and social positions: AI developers, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, philosophers and ethicists, trade unionists, consumer advocates, and bourgeois politicians. Overall, about two out of three Americans say there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, with majorities across parties, genders, and age groups holding that view (Politico, September 16, 2026).
Thus, several overlapping AI concerns emerge.
A.
The "existential risk" debate
Leading AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and
Stuart Russell, as well as some industry leaders, are
concerned that sufficiently advanced AI could become difficult or impossible
for humans to control. This part of the controversy receives the most public attention.
B.
The "economic transformation" debate
Economists are asking a somewhat different question: Even if AI never
becomes superintelligent, what happens if increasingly capable machines perform
large portions of human intellectual labor? A 2026 statement involving
hundreds of economists and technology leaders specifically called for research
into the economic consequences of transformative AI.
C.
The "social and political power" debate
Sociologists, political scientists, lawyers and policymakers are concerned
about who controls AI, who owns the computing infrastructure, who benefits
economically, and how AI affects democracy and human rights. The UN's
independent scientific panel, for example, examines AI across economics,
security, human rights, democracy, autonomy, safety and governance—not merely
technical safety.
E.
The "regulation versus innovation" debate
Governments, technology companies and regulators disagree over how much
oversight is appropriate. Some AI executives are now calling for stronger
safeguards and coordination, while others argue that excessive regulation could
slow innovation and weaken national competitiveness.
There is no
doubt that socialists everywhere need to engage with the first three of these
concerns to address the current debate in a way that advances a socialist
vision and to consider whether and how AI would be part of a socialist future. There are other less prominently voiced
concerns with AI technology relevant to socialists such as:
·
Safety and catastrophic
risks: Supporters argue that sufficiently powerful AI could cause harm that
ordinary consumer-protection laws cannot adequately address. These include
sophisticated fraud and manipulation; autonomous cyberattacks; assistance with
biological or chemical threats; uncontrolled autonomous AI agents; accidents
caused by AI systems operating in critical infrastructure; potentially much
more serious risks from future, substantially more capable systems (see
“superintelligence” below).
·
Consumer protection and
misinformation: Generative AI can produce convincing false information,
impersonation, deepfakes, and synthetic media at enormous scale. Regulation can
require disclosure that content is AI-generated, restrict uses, and establish
liability for certain harms. The
European Union's AI Act, for example, contains transparency requirements
for certain AI-generated content and prohibits particular AI practices.
· Discrimination and fundamental rights: AI used for
hiring, credit, education, policing, immigration, insurance or healthcare can
reproduce or amplify discrimination contained in its training data or
deployment environment. Regulators therefore argue that some
applications deserve requirements for testing, documentation, human oversight,
and accountability.
· Labor and economic disruption: Another controversy
concerns employment. AI could substantially increase productivity while
simultaneously displacing some occupations or reducing workers' bargaining
power. This raises questions that go beyond "AI safety":
Should governments regulate particular applications, require employers to
disclose AI use, protect workers from automated decisions, or address the
consequences primarily through labor and social policy?
2. Marx on
automation
AI may
represent the final stage of the capitalist technological drive toward
automation. Karl Marx, whose vision of communism is a society of abundance with
an ethical view summarized as "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs," thanks to technological advances that reduce socially necessary labor time to provide ever more leisure time to develop human potentials (Marx,
1875). Marx analyzed the trend toward automation in the capitalist mode of production, driven by capital accumulation and competition
(Nayeri, 2018). AI seems the likely
candidate to replace humans in production and service tasks across the economy,
sustaining socialist and then communist societies.
However, as I argued in the same article, technology has historically been developed to expropriate wealth from nature by exploiting masses of working people, requiring alienation from nature and social alienation across civilization, especially in anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Thus, Marx's vision of a society of plenty and communism clash.
Instead, I have argued for Ecocentric Socialism (Nayeri, 2021), characterized by a much smaller human population living in largely self-sufficient ecovillages where all able-bodied adults contribute to producing the goods and services necessary for a comfortable life and human development. Ecocentric Socialism will value a culture of being and set aside the culture of having. It will critically examine technologies to ensure they do not undermine the rhythms of Mother Nature's life and respect for all other beings who are our kin. I
Socialists would also participate in current controversies over AI development much the same way as we have over the nuclear energy and nuclear power pushed by capitalist firms and
states.
The
existential threat of AI
Now, let’s
focus on the existential threat AI can pose to humanity. I'll summarize the
concerns of the above-named AI computer scientists: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua
Bengio, and Stuart Russell.
For half a
century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like
ChatGPT. Now he worries that AI will cause serious harm. Hinton quit his job at
Google, where he worked for more than a decade and became one of AI's most
respected voices, so he can speak freely about the risks of A.I. In an
interview with The
New York Times (May 1, 2023), he said that generative A.I. can already be a
tool for misinformation. Generative AI (GAI) is the type of AI that can create
new content based on input data. Hinto says that GAI could soon threaten jobs. Down
the line, it could even risk humanity. “It is hard to see how you can prevent
the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he argued.
Yoshua Bengio is
a Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and
deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that has
significantly advanced AI by enabling computers to learn and understand like
the human brain. It helps computers discover patterns in data independently,
leading to breakthroughs in image recognition, speech understanding, and
natural language processing.
“What worries me the most is the fact that we are collectively racing
ahead towards A.I. models achieving human-level or greater competence on most
cognitive tasks without knowing how to align and control them reliably. As A.I.
capabilities and agency increase, behaviors like cheating, manipulating, and
lying, for which we see early signs today, will increasingly pose significant
threats and could lead to catastrophic risks. I and several other renowned A.I.
researchers even believe that it is plausible that, if nothing significant is
done, the current trajectory could lead to the creation of superintelligent
A.I. agents that compete with humans in ways that could compromise our future.”
(Observer,
September 18, 2025)
Stuart Russell
is a British computer scientist well-known for his contributions to artificial
intelligence. Russell co-authored the authoritative textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, with Peter Norvig; it is used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. In a Guardian column, Russell cites the resignation of AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from
Anthropic. In his resignation letter, Coxon
expresses alarm over the prioritization of superintelligence development at
companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, stating that they are "gambling with
our lives". He emphasizes the lack of a safety framework and exit plans in
the race to create advanced AI systems, urging immediate action to address
these existential risks. The letter has sparked widespread discussion about the
ethical implications of AI development and researchers' responsibilities in the
field.
Russell comments
as follows:
“Recursive self-improvement leading to superintelligent AI raises the
risk of the irreversible loss of human control. The acceptable risk level for
loss of control is perhaps one in 100m per year, not the one in 10 or one in
five that the AI CEOs currently estimate.
“And remember “the complete absence of credible plans for controlling
superintelligent AI systems”. At some point, progress along this technology
path will halt, not because further progress is impossible, but because further
progress is untenable when the technology is intrinsically unsafe. Humanity has
a right to protect itself.
There is huge resistance to this conclusion. We have already sunk
trillions of dollars into the current technology path and plan to sink
trillions more. But the sunk cost fallacy is just that: if we double down on a
mistake, it’s still a mistake.” (Russell,
September 15, 2026)
There is no
doubt that working people, including socialists, must join the growing demand for
full and immediate regulation of AI technology currently being shaped by
private corporations that have poured billions of dollars into it. Their
interest is to plow ahead in the bid to become the first to possess AI
superintelligent systems that can control the world. Of course, they are
blinded by the fact that superintelligent AI systems may decide to dominate and
control, and even annihilate, humanity.
Thus, the anthropocentric
industrial capitalist civilization has now created a NEW EXISTENTIAL THREAT: AI
technology.
The dialectics
of negation of the negation in Marx’s theory, that is, the radicalization of
the working class and subsequent emergence of its self-organization and
self-activity to transcend world capitalism, has not yet materialized despite overripe
material conditions for socialism.
Meanwhile, the anthropocentric capitalist civilization has created the
social and planetary crisis that threatens much of life on Earth, including our
own species. Artificial intelligence is the most recent existential threat it
has brought to life.
To stop and resolve
these existential crises, working people worldwide need to transcend anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization and move toward an ecocentric
socialist future.
References:
Marx, Karl. Critique of the
Gotha Program. 1875.
Nayeri, Kamran. “Capitalism,
Automation, and Socialism: Karl Marx on the Labor Process.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. 2018.
_____________. "The Case for Ecocentric Socialism." Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. 2021.
_____________. "Socialism in the 21st Century: Why It Is Needed and Some of Its Salient Features." 2022.
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