The Cyberzombies paradigm extends a theory of artificial intelligence grounded in Marx’s concept of dead labor. AI systems are proprietary infrastructures that animate accumulated archives of human cognitive work. I call this dead cognitive labor.
Texts, research, images, video, code, audio, datasets are just some examples of this dead cognitive labor. These artifacts of dead cognitive labor are extracted, stored, reorganized, and then re-activated. These systems appear autonomous. But they are really just dead cognitive labor reanimated under conditions of concentrated ownership.
This cyberzombies paradigm reframes debates about automation and creativity by situating AI within a longer history of labor expropriation and capital accumulation.
Click the menu to find examples of how past human thinking and creativity can be kept at work inside machines as cyberzombies. Poets and Authors, Scientists, and Chemists.
Craig Van Pelt 