The lineages of AI—from the Turing Test to OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, Microsoft’s MAI-1 (Thinking 1), Alibaba’s Qwen, and Google’s Gemma—are flooding the new frontiers of AI development with multi-agent teams and workflows that solve complex problems while upholding the rent-seeking market of AI companies and their platform-capitalist system, which is deepening a culture worse than techno-feudalism at the cost of labour and labourers. Digital medievalism and its brutal, profit-driven AI regimes are not an option for human happiness and progress.
All technologies—and the input and output models of AI and all its generative designs—are based on the creativity of labour. It is the human hand and head that produce all technology to empower and emancipate human beings from tedious and boring work. However, current AI platforms and their ownership use the creativity of labour like disposables. This system uses human labour and discards it according to the needs and desires of platform capitalists without empowering labour. This is the fundamental problem of AI-led knowledge traditions, which are extensions of the duality (input and output) of Eurocentric knowledge traditions that promote a culture of profit at the cost of people and planet. The causal relationship between input and output follows Eurocentric knowledge traditions; therefore, AI models have yet to understand and analyse the conditions and contexts of different issues confronted by the majority of working people across the world and to predict solutions that change those conditions and provide alternatives for permanent solutions to issues of inequality and exploitation.
The science of causality based on Eurocentric knowledge traditions ignores various contexts and conditions while developing AI models based on the world digital library, which is a repository of European languages, contexts, and conditions. It does not engage in detail with people and their problems across the world and their cultures, languages, and societies. This is the context in which one can imagine socialist AI, both in the form of skills and in the form of knowledge traditions, to ensure collective foundations of knowledge for collective welfare and empowerment. Socialist AI is more natural and normal than the current neo colonial rent seeking approach to AI led by platform-capitalist systems that exploit labour and nature at the same time and are unsustainable in the long run.
The languages, codes, numbers, algorithmic models, and mechanical designs used in current AI are not products of AI companies and their digital-capitalist systems. Human beings’ interaction with nature and their immediate environment produced signs, languages, numbers, and codes to express, interact, and communicate with each other. So, human beings are the owners of all languages in their different forms. Human creativity is central to the growth of all technological developments and innovations; therefore, human beings are the direct owners of all forms of knowledge, which should serve human beings in their path of progress. However, there is no difference between the mill owners of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution during 18th century and AI companies controlled technological revolution today. Stealing human labour and nature for profit is central to both the Industrial Revolution in the past and the AI revolution at present.
However, a Luddite rebellion is neither an alternative nor an option. Socialist AI is about reclaiming the power of labour over its own products, power, and creativity. It is about reclaiming and changing the system that separates labour from its own products and creative power, so as to realise the full potential of labour for its own empowerment. As human beings produce all forms of technology and technological skills and knowledge traditions, it is natural that human beings collectively need to control AI technology in terms of its ownership, control, function, and distribution. This demands dismantling the knowledge market that promotes the buying and selling of knowledge, in the form of skills, as commodities. Collective control of AI in terms of its development, distribution, and redistribution can only ensure AI-led technologies in the service of human beings and the planet.
AI companies do not produce knowledge; they do not add value but control the processes of production and the pricing of products to generate profit. They create new forms of bondage—‘like, subscribe, and share’—to generate rent-seeking revenue, even after consumers buy their packages, which are shaped by different generations of technologies and by consumers’ ability to access them according to their purchasing power. They coordinate, collect, and control human creativity and treat the technologically advanced workforce as disposable, while their crony-capitalist networks help to create regimes, institutions, and processes of technological accumulation with the support of the state, governments, laws, and judiciaries compliant with the requirements of AI regimes.
In a socialist AI regime, by contrast, there is no limit to human creativity, as human beings themselves control their own labour and creativity. This non-separation creates the conditions for the end of human alienation from themselves and from their own labour. Therefore, socialist AI is natural and normal, whereas digital and platform-capitalist systems are designed to exploit human beings and nature together. Digital medievalism and its brutal, profit-driven AI regimes are not an option for human progress. This system is neither normal nor natural but imposed on people by market forces who manipulate human beings with their propaganda to normalise the unnatural system of AI companies and their regimes of accumulation at the cost of human beings.
In this context, socialist AI needs to create emancipatory conditions to accelerate egalitarian human freedom, happiness, leisure, and pleasure—conditions in which human creativity flourishes without hindrance, discrimination, or exploitation. Socialist AI can also facilitate the decolonisation and democratisation of knowledge and the deepening of citizenship rights and freedoms, thereby empowering labour and celebrating its creative power. Socialist AI is the sustainable future in which AI serves all human beings and equally serves all other living and non-living beings on the planet.
