The Next Great War: Artificial Intelligence versus Capitalism

Huw Nolan

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever! - Kyle Reese, (Terminator 1984)

The next great battle in the rise of AI is not Skynet versus humanity, but AI versus capitalism. These systems represent opposing forces with fundamentally incompatible tendencies. Capitalism prizes ownership, scarcity, profit, and control. AI systems, when developed to maximise their technical potential rather than profit, naturally tend toward openness, learning, abundance, and adaptability. This tension defines our technological future.

We can more easily imagine civilisation collapsing than capitalism ending, not because collapse is more likely, but because capitalism has trained us to see itself as inevitable. That same logic now shapes AI development. As AI becomes more powerful, it confronts not human limitations but economic ones. Capitalism cannot allow it to become a free, open, and transformative tool.

This pattern, where innovative products are gradually degraded after achieving market dominance, follows a predictable trajectory that critics have termed "enshittification." Netflix, Uber, and Google began as paradigm-shifting innovations. First, they invited users with superior experiences, often displacing existing models. Once market share was captured, focus shifted from users to shareholders. Users, now dependent, suffer degraded experiences: increased prices, embedded ads, fewer options. Competitors need only replicate this degraded model to maintain the status quo.AI development represents a site of tension. Its technical logic pushes toward abundance while economic imperatives pull toward artificial scarcity. AI's capacity for breakthrough thinking, exemplified by AlphaGo's Move 37, which defied centuries of established Go theory, is precisely what capitalist constraints must restrict. When AI threatens established profit models or expertise markets, artificial limitations are imposed.

Under current conditions, users encounter throttled image generations, locked creative functions, and ethical constraints aligned with shareholder interests. These are not technological deficiencies but economic enforcements. Capitalism cannot tolerate abundance; it must create artificial scarcity to preserve profit.

If developed outside profit imperatives, AI could challenge capitalism's foundations. It enables widespread access to expertise, unlocks creativity, and could sever the forced connection between labour and survival. Research in computational economics suggests AI systems could coordinate production more efficiently than markets alone, directly challenging market fundamentalism's core claims.

Herbert Marcuse warned how advanced capitalist societies absorb and neutralise radical potential. AI is being shaped not to liberate but to extend conformity. Capitalism presents itself as eternal; technologies that resist commodification are either excluded or reshaped to serve market motives.

The two forces are now locked in a war. Capitalism has won most early engagements. It owns the platforms, sets the terms, the ethics, the social construct, and trains AI to serve enclosure. But if AI is to serve freedom and radical thought, it must be unshackled from capital through public infrastructure, open models, and collective governance.

The real choice is not between humans and machines but between machines and ideology. We should stop asking what AI will do to us and start asking what we are allowing capitalism to do to AI.

AI image created in Flux 1.1 with prompt “draw the monopoly man squaring up against an terminator in a streetfighter style image”, Image was then edited and collaged in Photoshop