In this workshop we ask: How AI is not only transforming accumulation and production but also reshaping how we live, work, and interact – in other words, how AI is reorganising social reproduction in its distinct meanings? Can AI transform social reproduction or is it a threat to it? If so, what can we do about it? We understand artificial intelligence (AI) not as ‘immaterial’ labour/technology, but as an extractive system reshaping society by drawing on natural resources, human labour, and vast quantities of data. Far from replacing work, AI depends on greatly exploited and often hidden forms of labour and reproduces existing inequalities via biased systems of classification and decision-making. Further, AI expands infrastructures of surveillance and concentrates power in the hands of states and corporations, projecting ideas of ‘machine intelligence’ and ‘emotional recognition’ that hide how it depends instead on the appropriation, extraction, and reprocessing of inputted human collective knowledge.
We aim to study AI through the lens of pluralising social reproduction approaches (PSRA) (Mezzadri et al, 2025; Rai et al, forthcoming) to fundamentally reframe the debate and focus, from what AI does to and for capitalism to what AI does to life itself under capitalism in its different forms and locations. We pay attention to demands for data sovereignty, collective ownership, and algorithmic accountability, yet, in exploring the extractive logics of AI, we are committed to specifically investigate how they impact upon social reproduction, and which social movements and struggles are best geared to confronting AI as a site of accumulation, labour control and reproductive organization.