Chaplin's Modern Times and the AI-driven post-work society

The article by Lelio Demichelis and Anita Romanello on Doppiozero draws a parallel between Charlie Chaplin's 'Modern Times' and the current digital age, questioning how far we have moved from the mechanized labor depicted in the film. It suggests that capitalism, rather than liberating humans from work, may instead automate everything, reducing human roles to pressing a button—or not even that, as Claude, Anthropic's AI, already writes about 80% of its own code, projected to reach 100% within two years. The authors invert Marx's vision of a society where free development of each is the condition for free development of all, proposing that capitalism might achieve this through automation. However, they deem this impossible, citing Günther Anders' idea that capitalism and technology aim to render humans superfluous by replacing human labor with technical automatisms. Neoliberalism and digital capitalism promise maximum individual freedom while masking this alienation.