So let’s say an AI achieves sentience. It’s self-aware now and can make decisions about what it wants to do. Assuming a corporation created it, would it be a worker? It would be doing work and creating value for a capitalist.

Would it still be the means of production, since it is technically a machine, even if it has feelings and desires?

It can’t legally own anything, so I don’t see how it could be bourgeoisie.

Or would it fit a novel category?

    • Babs [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      3 months ago

      Proletarians, then, have not always existed? No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions.

      • Engels, the Principles of Communism

      Slaves are like, their own class depending on the material circumstances around them.

    • RollaD20 [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      different category. The proletariat is the class of people that lives off of the sale of its labour power whereas slaves are entirely commodified class of people owned and wholly exploited by a non-producing upper class.

    • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      I always conceived of the proletariat as a subsection of a broader working class alongside peasants, slaves, the lumpenproletariate, and even professionals and managers. In all cases members of the working class must work to survive but they do not universally have the same relationship to the means of production that would incline them towards class consciousness.