Who Creates Value After the AI Revolution? Competing Geopolitical Visions of Intelligence, Labour and Power

Artificial intelligence is no longer only a technological race. It has become a contest over how economies create value, how societies organise work, and ultimately who exercises power. As the United States and China pursue sharply different AI strategies, they are also advancing competing answers to one of the defining questions of the twenty-first century: what—or who—creates value in an age of intelligent machines?

An emerging field from the theory of value

The Marxist labour theory of value serves as a foundational framework in these debates, positing that economic value ultimately originates from human labour rather than from capital or machinery alone. The foundation of this theory was laid by Karl Marx in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Chapter 1, “The Commodity”. This is where Marx develops the concepts of use-value, exchange-value, and value, arguing that the substance of value is socially necessary labour time.

Here is the Marx formulation: “The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required for its production.” Machines, he argued, simply pass on their own value to what they help create; only living labour actually generates new value. This brings us to a pressing question in the age of artificial intelligence: can autonomous cognitive systems like AI truly become sources of value in their own right, or is it still human labour at the root of all value, even when AI is involved?

Within this perspective, machines enhance productivity by transferring the value embedded in them through prior human labour, yet they do not independently generate new value. The advent of artificial intelligence challenges this premise by performing increasingly complex cognitive tasks once regarded as uniquely human,........

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