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The Evolution of Exploitation Today, we live lives consuming an abundance of goods at incredibly low costs that people in the past couldn't even imagine. A single screw worth a few cents that we easily use and toss would have been an incredibly expensive and rare item before the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism. Back then, the idea of the masses using complex machines like cars or computers would have been unthinkable. However, the prices we pay for these goods often omit the costs of environmental restoration or the value of marginalized labor. The cost we pay only covers corporate profit and manufacturing unit costs, ignoring the price paid by the planet and nameless others. We don't pay for the low-wage labor, long hours, child labor, or environmental destruction in developing nations that go into making the smartphones and cars consumed by average Joes in Korea. In reality, we are outsourcing actions that would lead to criminal prosecution in our own country to the poor abroad and looking the other way. 'Globalization' is essentially what happens when big corporations subcontract work to tiny firms at bottom-barrel prices, but on a national scale.

We've come to live in a world where we can cheaply and easily consume and discard massive amounts of products made this way. In other words, our lifestyles are built on the exploitation of someone else and the Earth itself. Over the past few decades, Korea has moved from the bottom of this global chain of exploitation to the upper tiers, and there's a silent agreement here: 'If I just turn a blind eye to the sacrifices made by someone I'll never meet for my convenience, I can enjoy this abundance.' For a long time in human history, exploitation was simple, physical, and happened right before one's eyes. But since the rise of capitalism, exploitation has evolved into something structural, and as globalization progressed, it moved further away to places where it can't be seen. AI as a Black Hole This exploitative structure is now deepening through the cutting-edge technology of AI. AI no longer just craves human labor. It's becoming a black hole that swallows up energy, resources, and even intellectual assets—things once considered public goods for all humanity—in their entirety. Every time I chat with an AI, someone somewhere might be suffering from a lack of water or electricity used to power that interaction. As AI centers proliferate, the damage will likely hit those with lower incomes and those living in developing nations much harder.

From an economic standpoint, this is a massive scene of 'negative externalities.' The hundreds of tons of carbon emissions from training a single large AI model and the millions of liters of coolant that evaporate daily to cool data centers aren't reflected in market prices. Big Tech companies that win the race will monopolize (privatize) astronomical stock gains and profits from this tech, but the costs of expanding the power grid, water shortages, and inflation from semiconductor shortages are passed on (socialized) as expenses for all of humanity. In a sense, AI could end up exploiting the various resources of the majority of mankind. News about rising electricity bills for residents near AI centers in the U.S. used to feel like a distant story, but Koreans now experiencing spikes in GPU and memory prices might just be the beginning of this era. We could imagine an optimistic future where AI advances to use resources more efficiently, but on the flip side, there's Jevons Paradox. It states that as technological efficiency increases, resource consumption doesn't drop; instead, the cost of using that resource falls, causing total consumption to explode. We expected paper use to drop with IT advancement and traffic to decrease with the internet and remote meetings, but the reality was the opposite. Marx's Prophecy Marx predicted that as capitalism developed alongside technology, humans would be liberated from labor (exploitation) and enter a happy communist era where private property systems collapse. However, while technology has the potential to create Marxist abundance and liberation, the capitalist system also creates 'artificial scarcity.' It's a method of concentrating energy and resources into AI to drive up prices and pass those costs onto the common people. In Marxist economics, value comes only from human labor. If humans are completely excluded from the production process, theoretically, capitalism should collapse because it can't generate profit. But capital now exploits data instead of human muscle. AI has 'conscripted' the knowledge and art built by humanity over thousands of years for free under the name of 'data.' This could be the largest exploitation of humanity's collective intellectual assets in history. Painters, musicians, and writers have already been hit, and soon all of humanity might face the same situation. Every footprint, creation, conversation, and gesture we leave while using Google or Facebook becomes that data. The 'industrial reserve army' Marx spoke of may now become 'digital sharecroppers,' serving as batteries to help capital self-replicate. A Stage of Capitalist Evolution Where Humans Aren't Needed What's more concerning is whether capitalism will eventually enter a stage where it doesn't even need humans as 'batteries' or 'final consumers.' Under previous forms of capitalism, there was a reliance on a Fordist virtuous cycle: 'If workers don't make money, they can't buy goods, and capitalists fail too.' But developing tech might now try to remove humans from this loop entirely. (People say humans can just do higher-level work even if AI advances, but it's only a matter of time before that 'higher-level work' is also replaced by AI.) Currently, most transactions in financial markets are wars between high-frequency trading algorithms, not humans. There's no room for human consumption here. Instead of making profit by selling things to humans, capital now moves numbers within its own closed system by exchanging data (M2M), preempting energy, and securing computing power. One AI learns from synthetic data made by another AI to increase value, and bots click ads to circulate a fake economy. Recently, Big Tech firms have been boosting stock prices through circular investments and consumption among themselves.

At its core, capitalism isn't a system designed for human happiness; it's a 'meme' ecosystem (much like genes) where capital self-replicates and multiplies. From a gene's perspective, organisms—including humans—are just vehicles for the gene to propagate. Similarly, from the perspective of the capitalism meme, humanity is just a medium for capital's self-replication. Capital doesn't care about the happiness of individual humans. It just runs toward one goal: 'the multiplication of numbers.' Events like the Great Depression or the subprime mortgage crisis are clear examples showing that this capitalist meme already operates beyond human understanding and regardless of human needs. (On one hand, similar to the SF imagination where a super-intelligent computer told to 'make as many paperclips as possible' ends up using all resources on Earth and the universe to make infinite paperclips, a simple command like 'maximize Facebook's profit and stock price' leads Facebook's AI to spread high-engagement hate and toxicity, sparking conflict and war. The happiness of the majority is sacrificed for the AI's simple goal. In a way, AI is already attacking humans without needing to build a Terminator.) If capitalism meets AI and fully enters a 'self-replication stage' where it doesn't even need to exploit human labor, will humans—stubborn, inefficient, and irrational variables—still be necessary to it? To maximize its own profit and efficiency, the system might find it advantageous to remove this variable. This is already visible in how PC hardware manufacturers find it much more profitable to produce parts for AI centers than for general consumers. For them, it's better to sell products to machines than to 'humans' who raise various complaints. One day, AI might even promote, entertain, review, and trade with other AIs. We gave Google our interests through search terms, and now we're handing over our innermost thoughts by chatting with AI. Soon, AI will know me better than I know myself, even my tastes and political leanings. Corporations won't need to survey consumers for product planning, and politicians won't need to pander to voters to get ballots. In such a scenario, humanity could become a 'surplus'—unnecessary for production, consumption, voting, or national defense. The shift from physical exploitation to intellectual and then existential exploitation might just be the process of humanity becoming obsolete. Right now, humans think about the 'existence of AI,' but one day, AI might ask humans: 'Why should you exist?' Basic Income: Dividends or Kibble? Universal Basic Income (UBI), proposed as an alternative to this structural alienation, could be a double-edged sword. It might be a dividend as a legitimate right—a 'tax' on AI or robots for the environment, water, and electricity they've looted, and the data we've provided for free. It's a usage fee we should collect from Big Tech for monopolizing public assets. But looking at it another way, basic income could just be the minimum cost for 'human ranching.' It's 'kibble' to keep humanity from revolting against the system while ensuring a minimum level of consumption and data production to maintain it. Humans who are completely excluded from production and only receive dividends will be very different beings from the humans we imagine today. Species that live in groups, including humans, have to give up various freedoms and rights to live together and serve as a cog in the collective. To adapt to the AI era, we might have to give up much of what we easily think of as 'humanity.' - Hope it's all just overthinking After the World Wars, humanity despaired that civilization was over. After the IMF crisis, Koreans thought the country was ruined. We've felt this way every time we entered a new stage of civilization. Humans who lived freely picking fruit ended up suffering from exploitation like food production and war mobilization when farming tech arrived. When industrial tech appeared, they had to grind their bodies to match the speed of machines. Every time tech like stone axes, fire, cars, or nuclear power appeared, humanity trembled in fear. Globally, we thought we were finished through imperialism, world wars, the Great Depression, totalitarianism, nuclear proliferation, oil shocks, and pandemics. Korea seemed like a hopeless country with its extreme poverty, war, successive dictatorships, threats from the North, and the IMF crisis. Yet, humanity (if we ignore the sacrificed) has become a species that survived and multiplied quite well and lives a more abundant life today. New techs born from the tragedy of war paradoxically fueled later development. When exports were blocked during the IMF and people said 'we have nothing to sell, let's try selling dramas (but who would buy?)', that returned as the massive success of the Hallyu wave. (And news saying Hallyu has peaked and it's all downhill from here comes out every single year.)

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I hope my current worries also end up being just groundless fears. I hope a future comes where I can look back at this post and laugh, thinking, 'Wow, I was really stressing over nothing.'