Patna: Kevin M. Sanders, vice-president of People Programme International and Palmer Institute, US, on Wednesday alluded to the possibility of huge unemployment because of technological advancements in today's world.

"As things stand, it can be predicted that robots would replace human beings in the production process, creating huge unemployment in its wake," Sanders said during the Paul Lafargue Memorial Lecture on the last day of the Karl Marx conference organised by the Asian Development Research Institute here. The topic of his lecture was "Artificial intelligence and exponential technologies as fundamental game changers: What might the future hold?"

"The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself," said Kevin. "And this is exactly what the capital production is doing through the decades to maximise profit by means ethical and unethical, legal and illegal."

The delegate said the capitalist world was going through a significant phase through development in information and communication technologies, which would have huge implications on the way goods and services are produced across the globe.

Without naming any artificial intelligence companies, Sanders said for the past three decades, the world has been witnessing the rise of "digital oligarchs" in the information and communication sector.

Barbara Harriss-White, emeritus professor at Oxford University, drew attention towards petty commodity production in her special address on "Petty production and India's development". She said that it provides the core not only in agrarian and manufacturing production processes in India but also commercial and even (rural) financial sectors.

She said petty commodity production was persistent not only in South Asia but also in parts of Europe. "Marx did handle petty production but his treatment of it was scattered, not in one place. He used terms like peasant, household, craftsman to describe petty producer," Harriss-White added.

Peter Beilharz, professor at Curtin University, Australia, said Marxism needed to be rethought, reconstructed and reimagined to suit the modern times.

Peter Hudis, professor at Oakton Community College, and Tian Yu Cao, professor at Boston University, also spoke at the conference. Lord Meghnad Desai summarised the conference at the end of the event attended by participants from 18 countries.