Artificial General Intelligence, the Highest Stage of Racial Capitalism? Reading qntm’s “Lena” and “Driver” through the Lens of Asian-American Liberation Theology

In the short stories “Lena” and “Driver,” qntm depicts a near-future world in which the invention of whole brain emulation has given rise to the “workloading” industry, in which capitalist firms extract cognitive labor from “virtual images” of scanned human brains. Reading “Lena” and “Driver” alongside Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran, I argue that the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) by capitalist firms emerges from the economic system of racial capitalism, in which “to claim a racial identity or to have one claimed of you is to be submitted to seasoned processes of racial commodification, indexed racially for use and used with racist justification.” To this end, I compare qntm’s depiction of a post-AGI capitalist economy with real-world paradigms of racial capitalism, like the H-1B visa system, which has enabled many thousands of Asian knowledge workers to immigrate to the United States.