Ikedinachi Ayodele Power Wogu

A Critical Review of the Politics of Artificial Intelligent Machines, Alienation and the Existential Risk Threat to America’s Labour Force

While an increasing number of scholars are growing weary about the troubling predictions about when Artificial Intelligent Machines (AIMs) will fully acquire the capacity of intentionality - the ability for AIMs to possess the similitude of human-like knowledge for processing data and the knowledge of what is right and wrong in their own eyes, to the detriment of mankind – there are scholars who argue that politicians and the powers that be in the American government, have blatantly disregarded the existential threats magnified in the works of scholars like Katja Grace and Kevin Drum who frankly portrayed with some degree of certainty, an era of job apocalypse among other dangers mankind would be exposed to when AIMs eventually take over. Drawing from the Marxian Alienation Theory, the authors examine the degrees of extinction and existential threat imminent on humanity and the justification and implications for politicizing the predictions made about when AIMs would take over man’s job. The ex-post facto research methodology and Derrida’s reconstructive and deconstructive analytical method was adopted for evaluating the degree of politicking at play among American politicians. The paper identifies the impending era of mass joblessness as one of the greatest tasks progressive governments and thinkers must grapple with in other to curb this threat. Policy makers and scholars of AIM research must quickly identify pathways for distributing the gains of robot labour, such that its operations will cease to be a threat to mankind.