ABSTRACT
The ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and existential threat in universities is usually based on a framing of threat that does not consider capitalism itself as a threat to humanity. The work of two prominent theorists of the existential threat of AI is used to explain how capitalism is negated or misinterpreted in such theories. Nick Bostrom's work on AI and existential threat does not engage with capitalist processes directly. Ironically, his work then affirms that AI needs to be proletarianised and become ‘wage labour’ if we are to avoid existential threat. Nick Land considers AI to be an ‘existential treat’ but his accelerationist position conflates capitalism with fixed capital. The failure to engage with Marxism in theories of AI and existential threat means that the way in which capitalist universities approach AI and ethics is inadequate. AI work in the university is often funded for reasons of profit or imperialist expansion.
