Avarice and Penury: Two faces of AI and debt

• In Event: Precarity, Debt, and Control in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

A recent social media post describes the experience of being served by an AI robot at an airport restaurant. The robot arrives with the food, announces “Hi, here I am!” and then promptly drives away without delivering the food. This story neatly captures the relationship on offer from “super-scaler” tech companies like Anthropic and OpenAI; promising improved productivity and life chances in exchange for unquestioning participation and personal data, the companies drive off with the goods leaving us conned and indebted.

This paper will examine two distinct “faces” of AI and debt. The first, embodied by demagogues like Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos, involves AI companies’ accelerated accumulation of debt to fund their growing capital expenditures; tech and AI-related debt is expected to reach almost one trillion dollars in 2026. This avaricious debt issuance is raising the price of goods, services and personal debt in and increasing the price of credit default swaps across the board, creating an AI bubble that dwarfs the housing bubble of 2008. The second face of AI and debt involves the millions of “sub-prime” or “unbanked” individuals around the planet who are being drawn in to the financial system by micro-lending apps driven by AI provided by companies like LenddoEFL and JUMO. Offering small loans in exchange for access to users’ social media and mobile data, these platforms have been shown to undermine any professed goals of enhancing financial inclusion or economic growth. By shaping creditability in their own image, they work, instead, to undermine communities, trap consumers in perpetual cycles of credit and debt, and reinscribe well-worn forms of colonialist expropriation, allowing the expansionary dynamic of capitalism to continue unabated.

The paper will argue that, while greed and impoverishment are structural certainties under capitalism, debt is, increasingly, their primary fulcrum. Under conditions of data-driven finance capitalism, the creditor-debtor relation has superseded the wage relation as paradigmatic of capitalist accumulation. As Marx foresaw in “Comments on James Mill,” “man himself, instead of metal or paper” becomes “the mediator of exchange, not however as a man, but as the mode of existence of capital.”

Author

• Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario