Eptic Journal – Call for papers: Artificial intelligence through the lenses of Marxism and critical thinking
NEW DEADLINE to submissions: 24 March, 2024
Editors:
James Steinhoff - University College Dublin
Jonas Valente - Oxford Internet Institute
Rodrigo Moreno Marques - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Artificial intelligence is a subject that has been increasingly popular in academia, in public debates, among authorities, and in mass media. Therefore, different knowledge fields have been dealing with it, pushing the debate out of the limits of exact sciences and computer science.
In the fields of the humanities and social sciences, artificial intelligence has been analyzed through different approaches, such as power relations (Dyer-Whiteford et al., 2019), the limits of autonomy and its relation to humankind (Davies, 2008), the impacts on the relations of production (Benanav, 2020), the adverse effects such as in discriminatory practices (Benjamin, 2023), and the automation of human activities in areas such as law (Pasquale, 2019) and education (Zhai et al. 2021).
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that a significant part of these approaches, far from the critique of political economy, falls under the traps of fetishism (Marx, 2013, 2014, 2017) and does not reveal the essential aspects hidden in the manifestations of the phenomenon. But there are exceptions, such as the works of Dyer-Whiteford et al. (2019), Lindgreen (2023), Steinhoff (2021), Gong (2021), Yi (2020), Cole et al. (2022) and Verdegem (2021), among others. However, these kinds of efforts need to be further expanded. It is urgent to adopt Marxist thinking and the arms of critique to unveil and analyze the social form that artificial intelligence assumes as an instrument of capital, as well as an instrument of alienation and estrangement of human labor, of labor instruments, of fruits from labor, and, ultimately, of human essence (Marx, 2004).
In this vein, Eptic Journal (ISSN 1518-2487) invites authors to submit articles to the Special Issue entitled Artificial intelligence through the lenses of Marxism and critical thinking. We will receive submissions that deal with the following subjects:
- Labor and social relations in the realm of artificial intelligence.
- How artificial intelligence affects working relations and capitalist exploitation in different sectors of the economy.
- Aspects of formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor under capital in the context of artificial intelligence.
- Impacts of artificial intelligence on the technical division of labor and on the social division of labor.
- How economic agents design and/or adopt artificial intelligence techniques.
- Policies concerning the development and use of artificial intelligence.
- The struggles in the sphere of regulation of artificial intelligence.
- How the process of production and distribution of value and wealth are affected by the adoption of artificial intelligence.
- Dependence and economic subordination of periphery countries in relation to countries that lead the design and use of artificial intelligence.
- Artificial intelligence as a capitalist instrument of economic, symbolic, and political power.
- Impacts of artificial intelligence in communication and culture from Marxist and critical perspectives.
- Ethics challenges in the field of artificial intelligence from a critical perspective.
- Resistances and possibilities of use of artificial intelligence as an instrument to face the capital order and its sociability.
The focus of the Special Issue will be theoretical and empirical analyses based on the critique of political economy, as well as Marxist and critical thinking. Submissions guidelines and further information are available at: https://periodicos.ufs.br/eptic
