source : benanav_2020
tags : [[automation]] [[artificial intelligence]]
The current mainstream discourse today is whether things like self-driving trucks will replace truckers
The main tenants of automation discourse are:
Those who believe that economic catastrophe as a result of automation is on its way donât think [[capitalism]] is going away, just that itâs shedding its need for a labor market
Left-wing adherents to this worldview believe that automation could bring about [[fully automated luxury communism]]
the use of technology to fully substitute human labor, rather than merely augmenting its productive capacities
Much of the existing debate surrounds whether or not present or near-future technologies are labor-substituting or labor-augmenting
Many automation theorists tend to see capitalism as a transitory stage, as the bridge to full automation, which in turn will be an era where no further automation will take place
Ideas of full automation have been present since at least 1832
Charles Babbageâs On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures in 1832, John Adolphus Etzlerâs The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour in 1833, and Andrew Ureâs The Philosophy of Manufactures in 1835âŠ
The appeal of the full automation argument is that modern capitalism is failing to provide enough jobs (and enough good jobs) for everyone to live comfortably
Something strange has occurred within the economy, leading to a low demand for labor, but it has not been caused by technological development
Benanav says that automation theorists are the [[utopians]] of modern capitalism
Benanav will advance four counterarguments:
The goal is a [[post-scarcity]] future, not necessarily a fully automated one
USA
| Time Period | Output | Productivity | Employment | |-|—|—|| | 1950â73 | 4.4% | 3.1% | 1.2% | | 1974â2000 | 3.1% | 3.3% | -0.2% | | 2001â17 | 1.2% | 3.2% | -1.8% |
Germany
| Time Period | Output | Productivity | Employment | |-|—|—|| | 1950â73 | 7.6% | 5.7% | 1.8% | | 1974â2000 | 1.3% | 2.5% | -1.1% | | 2001â17 | 2.0% | 2.2% | -0.2% |
Japan
| Time Period | Output | Productivity | Employment | |-|—|—|| | 1950â73 | 14.9% | 10.1% | 4.3% | | 1974â2000 | 2.8% | 3.4% | -0.6% | | 2001â17 | 1.7% | 2.7% | -1.1% |
We are headed towards a âgood jobâ-less future rather than a âjobâ-less one
In the 1970s governments began scaling back unemployment benefits to try and coax the unemployed back to work, as these welfare programs had not been designed for long-term high rates of unemployment
Higher rates of unemployment meant that employers could more easily break the strength of labor by hiring cheaper
Comparatively, itâs unusual that in the United States, even highly paid workers are just as vulnerable as their low-paid counterparts to potential job loss. This is due to at-will employment
Postwar and postcolonial development states sometimes had stronger labor protections than their European counterparts
In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, nonstandard employment became a major problem as early as the 1950s
This is the problem with the term ânonstandard employmentâ: it reveals the dream of global full-employment that never came to pass
The worldâs underemployed are mostly working in the service sector
The service sector has a difficult time automating, because they do not experience dynamic patterns of expansion. Expansion in the service economy occurs by simply hiring more employees
Services form a stagnant economic sector: they do not contribute to economic growth
The activities that remain services today are those that cannot be easily automated
The service sector cannot rely on price effects for expansion demand, i.e. rising productivity does not lead to falling prices and therefore increased demand, so the service sector will likely grow slowly over time
As underemployment rises, inequality will intensify
As time goes on, immiserating employment growth becomes self-reinforcing, where sectors of the economy expand by taking advantage of the underemployed and then come to depend on their continued availability
Over time, immiserating employment growth becomes self-reinforcing. Sectors of the economy expand by taking advantage of pools of underemployed labor and then come to depend on their continued availability. As thoughtfully depicted in Bong Joon-hoâs award-winning 2019 film Parasite, it begins to make sense for high-net-worth and managerial households to hire working-class households to perform more of the tasks they would otherwise do for themselvesâas tutors, domestic servants, drivers, childminders, and personal assistantsâsimply due to large differences in the prices of their respective labors.
As inequality has risen social mobility has fallen
The poor wonât get poorer as time goes on, but the poor will have less opportunity to leave poverty
The following sure sounds like the capitalism of Marxâs time:
These trends suggest that the apocalyptic crisis of labor market dysfunction anticipated by automation theorists will not take place. Instead, unemployment will continue to spike during downturnsâas we are seeing happen once again, and on a truly massive scale, in the present COVID-19 recession. Then, in the course of the tepid boom periods that follow, this unemployment will slowly but surely resolve itself into higher levels of underemployment and rising inequality. In Rise of the Robots, futurist Martin Ford says that his worst nightmare would be if the âeconomic system eventually manages to adapt to the new realityâ of labor displacement. But in truth, it has. As Mike Davis put it, the âlate-capitalist triage of humanityâ has âalready taken place.â48 Unless halted by concerted political action, the coming decades are likely to see more of the same: overcapacity in international markets for agricultural and industrial products will continue to push workers out of those sectors and into services, which will see their share of global employment climb from 50 percent today to 70 or 80 percent by mid century. Since overall rates of economic growth are set to remain low, the service sector will absorb job losers and new labor market entrants only by increasing income inequality, leading us further and further into the postindustrial doldrums.
Automation theorists believe that [[Keynesianism]] may solve the issue of a low demand for labor
Rapid post-war industrial expansion generated a high demand for labor on its own
Instead, as I have argued in previous chapters, rapid postwar industrial expansion generated a consistently high and stable demand for labor largely on its own. Public spending on education, healthcare and infrastructural development did not stimulate private investment; the former could barely keep up with the latterâs needs. More productive capacity came online after the end of World War II than ever before in world history. But precisely for that reason, international markets for manufactures quickly began to suffer from overcapacity, issuing in a reduced pace of capital accumulation and falling rates of output growth. The replication of technical capacities across the world undermined the conditions for further rapid expansion. The result was wave after wave of deindustrialization and a persistently low labor demand.
Debt-driven spending failed to stimulate high rates of economic growth, contra Keynes
Keynes believed it would make more sense, under conditions of economic maturity, to shrink the labor supply rather than stimulate labor demand
Capital throughout the postwar period had one tactical advantage to get its way: the [[capital strike]]
[[You canât fight capital with public spending]] in a [[New Deal]]-like manner. You must existentially threaten the existence of these firms with full socialization
Some other automation theorists as well as radical Keynesians argue for the implementation of [[UBI]], which, they say, would eliminate poverty and create a world of luxury where labor is absolute
[[UBI]] has its origins in the thought of [[Thomas Paine]], who believed that all adults should receive a lump sum of money at some time in their life
UBI proposals long predate the advent of the automation discourse. Some trace their origin to Thomas Paine, who suggested as early as 1797 that a lump-sum payment should be distributed to all individuals on reaching the age of majority.28 Paine justified this coming-of-age grant along classically Lockean lines, arguing that all land had originally been held in common but had since been divided up into parcels of private property. Rising generations were therefore unable to access their fair shares of humanityâs inheritance. For Paine, coming-of-age grants could serve as the cash equivalent of each personâs share in the common stock of the earthâand thus enable everyone to participate in the world of private property. In his proposal, which anticipates the concept of basic income, payments are not a way to create a post-scarcity world, but rather to secure the moral foundations of a private-ownership society.
[[Neoliberal]] economists such as [[Friedrich Hayek]] and [[Milton Friedman]] advocated for [[UBI]]
UBI is very heavily invested in by [[Silicon Valley]] as well as right-wing thinkers, who want to do away with [[public welfare]]
It is unlikely that a state and socio-economic system that wishes to preserve itself would ever provide a UBI so generous that it would undermine its existence
For UBI to work it would need rising productivity levels, as automation theorists already erroneously claim to be true
âUBI would empower workers without disempowering capital.â
Although the automation theorists are wrong, they at least have a vision for the future
Automation theorists do themselves a disservice by focusing on technological progress rather than the conquest of production
[[it is important for socialists to have a vision of the alternative]]
Marx et. al. believed that a [[post-scarcity]] world was possible through the active reorganization of social life, not through some weird trick
An influence on [[Marx]] was [[Ătienne Cabet]], an early utopian writer
âAbundance is a social relationshipâ
For a post-scarcity society to come into being, a literal cornucopia is not required. It is only necessary that scarcity and its accompanying mentality be overcome, so people can live, as More said, âwith a joyful and tranquil frame of mind, with no worries about making a living.â23 According to this perspective, abundance is not a technological threshold to be crossed. Instead, abundance is a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of oneâs existence will never be at stake in any of oneâs relationships. The steadfast security that such a principle implies is what allows all people to ask âWhat am I going to do with the time I am alive?â rather than âHow am I going to keep living?â24 Some will choose to follow a single idea to its end, others to periodically reinvent themselves. The main choice people will have to make is how to âbalance the goal of bettering oneself against the injunction to better humanityâ (as Captain Picard of the starship Enterprise tells a financial mogul, who had been cryogenically frozen in the twenty-first century only to be revived, to his horror, in a post-scarcity world).25
In such a world, there could still be sanctions to ensure that necessary work is actually undertaken. However, inducements to work would not take the form of threats of starvation, but invitations to cooperate. Economists have long recognized that hunger and homelessness are not the best motivators. Even in Kropotkinâs time, economists admitted that âthe best situation for man is when he produces in freedom, has choice in his occupations, has no overseer to impede him, and when he sees his work bring a profit to himself and others like him.â26 A bestselling writer on motivation recently rediscovered these same ideas: feelings of autonomy, mastery, and purpose are what generate the best work, not higher levels of monetary reward.27
The successful organization of a post-scarcity world would require that its denizens solve, to their satisfaction, the problems posed by the twentieth centuryâs socialist calculation debates. They would do so with the tools of the twenty-first century: utilizing digital technologies to coordinate their needs and activities by designing algorithmsâwhich process data and present alternativesâand protocolsâwhich structure decisions about alternativesâthat could be further modified and adapted over time in light of experience. Individuals would have to be able to use digital applications to articulate their needs and to transmit these to associations, while associations, in turn, would need to be able both to allocate resources among themselves and to figure out how to make do with the resources they are able to acquire, in a way that was fair and rational. Efficiency would no longer be an overriding goal of production, but producers would still have to be able to make reasonable choices among production techniques, based on the ease with which they can access different sorts of supplies. It would have to be possible, as well, to hold producers accountable were they to fail to meet democratically determined social standards. Again, there is likely to be no single best way to deal with these crucial problems.28
âOf course, the realm of freedom is about having time for both socializing and solitude, for engaging in hobbies and doing nothing at allââ/rien faire comme une bĂȘte/, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky.â30 Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adornoâs phrase is suggestive of a world in which material dispossession and the existential insecurity to which it gives rise have been universally abolished.â
âWithout a clear vision of this coming world, it is easy to get lost along the way.â