The Political Economy of FLOSS Innovation in Artificial intelligence
While recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose an unprecedented challenge to workers around the world, AI models are themselves products of human labor. Yet, at several stages of model creation, the relationship between time and value production loses its linearity. This decoupling also transforms how labor is subsumed. Capital needs to incorporate the totality of the general intellect into such models for them to work in a competitive way. This imperative renders traditional forms of labor subsumption ineffective. FLOSS, often regarded as the gold standard for transparency in software development, functions in this environment both as a tactic of resistance against Big Tech’s power, and as a mechanism for subsuming highly sophisticated labor that would otherwise remain outside the reach of capitalist exploitation.