I’ve recently been thinking about LLM tokens and what it would mean if the only way that software could be written was through the use of tokens sold by an AI company (we’re not there, yet, and we might never get there, so this is just a thought experiment). In my head, this made tokens basically means of production, as they would be “the resources […] that workers [would] use in order to produce goods” to quote prolewiki. I would like to know more about this, see if it’s an idea that holds any weight, but I know very little about economics and Marxist theory, and I struggle to reason about what this could mean (or if it’s correct to begin with), so I was wondering if any of you had come across this idea or similar analysis before and could point them out to me.
I hope this is the right community to ask this, if not please redirect me!
Comrade the same could have been said of coal back in Marx’s day, or even its use today in the global south. And refusing to think about it or entertain contemporary questions doesn’t solve them, it’s putting our heads in the sand (the ostrich technique) and hoping the rolling storm passes over us unscathed. LLMs are means of production, many professionals are using them already in many different ways. Whether they lower the socially necessary labor time and rate of profit is not entirely calculated yet, but this isn’t necessary to count as MoP. And AI has entered our relations of productions already.
I have an essay here on the question https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI.