Chapotraphouse

Actually, no, you can't just pick a quote out of the middle of Chapter 15 to make a point about AI. This section is about the natural development of consciousness of the workers, after spending a lot of time describing the objective and subjective historical factors that led to the development and adoption of machinery, and the way it works upon the working class, our bodies and our minds.

The passage does not mean, "don't blame machines (AI,)" Marx was not a moralist or a categorical analyst. This section covers some 200 years of history of industry throughout the globe, and continues with the organization of workers as a means to fight the capitalist (and the capitalist responses to such organizing.) Section 5 is conspicuously a section full of tables and factual accounting, not imperatives and conclusions.

"AI is just a tool, machines are indifferent" is the common perspective this image is supposed to lead us to. but this whole very long chapter begins with a detailed analysis distinguishing the tool from the machine. A theme that comes up often is how workers don't use machines in production, the machines, as private capital, use the workers.

No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse! Any employment of machinery, except by capital, is to him an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore, with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman. Whoever, therefore, exposes the real state of things in the capitalistic employment of machinery, is against its employment in any way, and is an enemy of social progress! Exactly the reasoning of the celebrated Bill Sykes. “Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is knowing in anatomy? And in addition a willing help at the festive board? If you abolish the knife — you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.”

-- Section 6

The footnotes to this passage continue to elaborate on the opportunistic and biased conflation of tools with machines.

If there is a summarized point to be made of chapter 15, it is that unchecked automation leads to the destruction of the minds and bodies of workers, which become composed of children and elderly, lengthening of the workdays, and dissolution of social stability by way of a division of labor driven by private profit seeking.

But it also goes into how this extreme degradation leads to the adoption of various laws and regulations on industry -- and how industry's ever-shifting nature essentially develops to a point where such regulations become practically irrelevant shortly after their adoption.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

-- end of sec 9

There is one major blindspot IMO: this Chapter does not account for real, blatant, total control of the political apparatus of society as we have in the USA and the West. Everything explored here is shown to be a somewhat "natural" outcome of development of technology and machinery based on the intrinsic logic of private property relations and capitalism. It does not cover the way AI is controlled by and being used by eugenicist accellerationists who have seized a monopoly of not only industrial production, but also political power.

So, no, this line is not about AI. It is about the industrial revolution that occurred in England between approx. 1650 until about 1860. Marx's analysis of industrialization is relevant, but IMO you can't cherry pick a line from this chapter to understand any modern circumstance, without confusing his views and the subject to an immense degree.