Does Capital Dream of Artificial Labour?
Marcin Korecki, Cesare Carissimo
TL;DR
The paper treats Labour as timenergy, the commodified fusion of time and energy, embedded in Capital, and proposes an artificial-life framing of Capital–Labour dynamics. It defines Labour within a Cobb-Douglas production context as $P(C,L)=M C^{\beta} L^{1-\beta}$ and derives marginal productivities $mp_C$ and $mp_L$ to analyze incentives, highlighting an asymmetry: Capital tends to chase labour while Labour tends to chase capital. A multi-agent ABM using Q-learning evaluates how agents allocate $C$ and $L$ across processes, revealing that learning agents aggregate toward higher-elasticity, capital-intensive processes, thus illustrating Capital's organizational advantage despite theoretical symmetry. The study argues that Capital is an artificially alive system animated by living Labour and discusses implications for the future of automation, meaning, and the potential subsumption or survival of life within a capital-dominated regime. By providing a framework that links Labour subjugation to production incentives and multi-agent dynamics, the work extends prior characterizations of Capital as AI and offers a concrete computational lens on Labour’s role under growing automation.
Abstract
This paper investigates the concept of Labour as an expression of `timenergy' - a fusion of time and energy - and its entanglement within the system of Capital. We define Labour as the commodified, quantifiable expansion of timenergy, in contrast to Capital, which is capable of accumulation and abstraction. We explore Labour's historical evolution, its coercive and alienating nature, and its transformation through automation and artificial intelligence. Using a game-theoretic, agent-based simulation, we model interactions between Capital and Labour in production processes governed by Cobb-Douglas functions. Our results show that despite theoretical symmetry, learning agents disproportionately gravitate toward capital-intensive processes, revealing Capital's superior organizational influence due to its accumulative capacity. We argue that Capital functions as an artificially alive system animated by the living Labour it consumes, and question whether life can sustain itself without the infrastructures of Capital in a future of increasing automation. This study offers both a critique of and a framework for understanding Labour's subjugation within the Capital system.