Posted on Sunday, 23 September 2012
The search for the holy grail of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. As in Asimov’s ‘Robot’ novels, the techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave[florin]like labour from inanimate machines. Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain these machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.
