Will Automation Benefit Humanity and the Planet, or a Tiny Elite?

[Jimbo101]

Truth-Out.org (book excerpt)

We are at a crossroads that will determine our economic future. There is hope, but also the possibility of a turn into a state of oligarchical barbarism, Frase postulates. The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Four Futures.

Why, the reader might ask, is it even necessary to write another book about automation and the postwork future? The topic has become an entire subgenre in recent years; Brynjolfsson and McAfee are just one example. Others include Ford's Rise of the Robots and articles from the Atlantic's Derek Thompson, Slate's Farhad Manjoo, and Mother Jones's Kevin Drum. Each insists that technology is rapidly making work obsolete, but they flail vainly at an answer to the problem of making sure that technology leads to shared prosperity rather than increasing inequality. At best, like Brynjolfsson and McAfee, they fall back on familiar liberal bromides: entrepreneurship and education will allow us all to thrive even if all of our current work is automated away.

The one thing missing from all these accounts, the thing I want to inject into this debate, is politics, and specifically class struggle. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute has pointed out, these projections of a postwork future tend toward a hazy technocratic utopianism, a "forward projection of the Keynesian-Fordism of the past," in which "prosperity leads to redistribution leads to leisure and public goods." Thus, while the transition may be difficult in places, we should ultimately be content with accelerating technological development and reassure ourselves that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

This outlook ignores the central defining features of the society we currently live in: capitalist class and property relations. Who benefits from automation, and who loses, is ultimately a consequence not of the robots themselves, but of who owns them. Hence it is impossible to understand the unfolding of the ecological crisis and developments in automation without understanding a third crisis through which both are mediated, the crisis of the capitalist economy. For neither climate change nor automation can be understood as problems (or solutions) in and of themselves. What is so dangerous, rather, is the way they manifest themselves in an economy dedicated to maximizing profits and growth, and in which money and power are held in the hands of a tiny elite.

[truebluegreen]

1. I know! I know! I know this one! Pick me!

You know too.

[HassleCat]

2. The decline of unions.

Unions flourished when skilled workers were requiref, and the union system was instrumental in promoting standards of excellence in crafts and trades. Robotics, modular assembly, etc. make it possible to build many things with largely unskilled workers. Unions are no longer useful to the employer, so all the incentive is to get rid of them. With an exploding world population, globalizatipn, and free trade agreements, employers are free to cruise the world labor market, seeking lower wages and not worrying about skills or education. This does not look good to me, so my prediction is that automation will benefit those at the top of the food chain.

[Hoyt]

3. It's a big concern. In long-run, it won't go just to upper class and high-tech workers.

Upper class won't have anyone to sell to if poorer have nothing. They can't make it trading among themselves. We definitely need to figure out how to handle this - guaranteed income, better educated, proper taxation, etc.