A few years ago, I decided to take seriously the question of whether robots would save us. In short, they will not. In the nineteenth century, Marxists considered the power of industrialization and automation, and Karl Marx himself thought the labor freed up by developing processes could serve the liberation of the working class. As I wrote at the time, roughly a century after Marx, Herbert Marcuse believed humankind was approaching a point at which this transformation was possible, given certain conditions. But those conditions never materialized. Instead, the capitalist class has ratcheted up every advance in automation — the latest being artificial intelligence and algorithms — to more effectively suppress worker rights, wages, and collective organizing capacity.

In the past, the technological edge enjoyed by bosses tended to pool around sites of actual production. But keeping with broader trends in the economy — the displacement of manufacturing by way of financialization — the machine invasion increasingly pervades the world of finance capital, too. Stock trading is well known for this, but a more recent alarming, and increasingly representative, case is robot landlords. The technology behind these robot landlords allows them to buy up and rent out property, turbocharging the process of housing commodification — a process that was well underway before now.

The growing technological edge in finance capital does not mean that we should give up on fighting for the power of machines as tools for worker liberation. But the fact is, the owners own the machines. This is where Marx’s vision for automated liberation gets jammed up. It only works if the workers have control over the tools that are used to oppress them. Now, as in Marx’s time, they typically do not. Capitalists hold factories, as it were, in the palm of their hand, leveraging computing power to dominate workers and markets alike.