Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, and the Logic of Harm: Toward a Critical Criminology of AI

This paper seeks to advance a critical criminology of artificial intelligence (AI) by exploring how AI technologies function as mechanisms of systemic harm under late capitalism. Moving beyond sensationalist concerns regarding malicious actors utilising AI for nefarious purposes, we interrogate how AI reconfigures labour, governance, and social control in ways that intensify inequality and erode worker autonomy. Drawing from ultra-realism, zemiology, and social harm theory, we introduce a new typology of AI-related harms: Datafication, Algorithmic Governance, Operational, and Existential harms. These categories reveal how AI operates not as a neutral tool but as a mechanism of pseudo-pacification that consolidates elite power while masking deepening exploitation. Through a thematic analysis of 224 sources, we demonstrate that AI’s telos—its intended good—has been corrupted by the capitalist logic of efficiency and control. We argue that criminology must urgently engage with AI’s embedded harms to remain fit for purpose in an increasingly automated world.