Automation and the Future of Work

Aaron Benanav

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839761300
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Lavoro e relazioni industriali

Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists and social critics have united in arguing that we are living on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the much-discussed "rise of the robots" really explain the worsening jobs crisis? In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav uncovers the structural economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. What social movements, he asks, are required to propel us into post-scarcity, if technological innovation alone can't deliver it? In response to calls for a universal basic income that would maintain a growing army of redundant workers, he offers a counterproposal.

CHAPTER 1

The Automation Discourse

RAPID ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL intelligence, machine learning, and robotics seem set to transform the world of work. In the most advanced factories in the world, companies like Tesla are pushing toward “lights out” production, in which fully automated work processes, no longer needing human hands, can run in the dark. Meanwhile, in the illuminated halls of robotics conventions, machines are on display that can play ping-pong, cook food, have sex, and even hold conversations. Computers are not only generating new strategies for playing Go but are said to be writing symphonies that will bring audiences to tears. Dressed in white lab coats or donning virtual suits, computers are learning to identify cancers and will soon be put to work developing legal strategies. Trucks are already barreling across the United States without drivers; robotic dogs are carrying military-grade weapons across desolate plains. Are we living in the last days of human toil? Is what Edward Bellamy once called the “edict of Eden” about to be revoked, as “men”—or at least, the wealthiest among us—become like gods?¹

There are many reasons to doubt the hype. For one thing, machines remain comically incapable of opening doors or, alas, folding laundry. Robotic security guards are toppling into mall fountains. Computerized digital assistants can answer questions and translate documents, but not well enough to do the job without human intervention; the same is true of self-driving cars.² In 2014, in the midst of the American “Fight for Fifteen” movement, billboards went up in San Francisco threatening to replace fast-food workers with touch-screens if a law raising the minimum wage were passed. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the bill the “robot employment act.” Yet many fast-food workers in Europe already work alongside touchscreens, often earning better pay than comparable workers in the United States.³ So is the talk of automation overblown?

In the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, scare stories about automation remain just so much idle chatter. However, over the past decade, this talk has crystalized into an influential social theory that purports not only to analyze current technologies and predict their future, but also to explore the consequences of technological change for society at large. The automation discourse rests on four principal propositions. First, it argues, workers are already being displaced by ever more advanced machines, resulting in rising levels of “technological unemployment.” Second, this displacement is a sure sign that we are on the verge of achieving a largely automated society, in which nearly all work will be performed by self-moving machines and intelligent computers. Third, although automation should entail humanity’s collective liberation from toil, we live in a society where most people must work in order to live, meaning this dream may well turn out to be a nightmare.⁴ Fourth, therefore, the only way to prevent a mass-unemployment catastrophe—like the one unfolding in the United States in 2020, although for very different reasons—is to institute a universal basic income (UBI), breaking the connection between the size of the incomes people earn and the amount of work they do.

The Machines Are Coming

Self-described futurists are the major disseminators of this automation discourse. In the widely read Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that we find ourselves “at an inflection point—a bend in the curve where many technologies that used to be found only in science fiction are becoming everyday reality.” New technologies promise an enormous “bounty,” but, Brynjolfsson and McAfee caution, “there is no economic law that says that all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from these advances.” On the contrary: as the demand for labor falls with the adoption of more advanced technologies, wages are stagnating; a rising share of annual income is therefore being captured by capital rather than by labor. The result is growing inequality, which could “slow our journey” into what they call a new “machine age” by generating a “failure mode of capitalism” in which rentier extraction crowds out technological innovation.⁵

In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford similarly claims that we are pushing “towards a tipping point” that is poised to “make the entire economy less labour-intensive.” Again, “the most frightening long-term scenario of all might be if the global economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality,” leading to the creation of an “automated feudalism” in which the “peasants would be largely superfluous” and the elite impervious to economic demands.⁶ For these authors, education and retraining will not be enough to stabilize labor demand in an automated economy; some form of guaranteed nonwage income, such as a negative income tax, must be put in place.⁷

This automation discourse has been enthusiastically adopted by the jeans-wearing elite of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates advocated for a robots tax. Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard undergraduate inductees to “explore ideas like universal basic income,” a policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly “necessary” over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.⁸ Musk gave his SpaceX drone vessels names like “Of Course I Still Love You” and “Just Read the Instructions,” which he lifted from the names of spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. Banks’s ambiguously utopian science fiction novels depict a post-scarcity world in which human beings live fulfilling lives alongside intelligent robots—called “minds”—without the need for markets or states.⁹

Politicians and their advisors have equally identified with the automation discourse, which has become one of the leading perspectives on our “digital future.” In his farewell presidential address, Barack Obama suggested that the “next wave of economic dislocations” will come not from overseas trade, but rather from “the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” Robert Reich, former labor secretary under Bill Clinton, expressed similar fears: we will soon reach a point “where technology is displacing so many jobs, not just menial jobs but also professional jobs, that we’re going to have to take seriously the notion of a universal basic income.” Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, made the same admission: once-“stupid” ideas about technological unemployment now seem increasingly smart, he said, as workers’ wages stagnate and economic inequality rises. The discourse even became the basis of a long-shot presidential campaign for 2020: Andrew Yang, Obama’s former “Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship,” penned his own tome on automation titled The War on Normal People and ran a futuristic campaign on a “Humanity First” platform, introducing UBI into mainstream American politics for the first time in two generations. Among Yang’s supporters was Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose Raising the Floor is yet another example of the discourse.¹⁰

Yang and Stern—like all of the other writers named so far—take pains to assure readers that some variant of capitalism is here to stay, even if it must jettison its labor markets; however, they admit to the influence of figures on the far left who offer a more radical version of the automation discourse. In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that the “most recent wave of automation is poised” to transform the labor market “drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy.”¹¹ They claim that only a socialist government would actually be able to fulfill the promise of full automation by creating a post-work or post-scarcity society. In Four Futures, Peter Frase thoughtfully explores the alternative outcomes for such a post-scarcity society, depending on whether it were still to have private property or to suffer from resource scarcity, both of which could persist even if labor scarcity were overcome.¹²

Like the liberal proponents of the automation discourse, these left-wing writers stress that even if the coming of advanced robotics is inevitable, “there is no necessary progression into a post-work world.”¹³ Srnicek, Williams, and Frase are all proponents of UBI, but in a left-wing variant. For them, UBI serves as a bridge to “fully automated luxury communism,” a term Aaron Bastani coined in 2014 to name a possible goal of socialist politics. This term flourished for five years as a meme before Bastani’s book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene editing, asteroid mining, and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared.¹⁴ It provided a much-needed counterweight to left-wing rhetorics of collective self-sacrifice and anti-consumerist austerity.

Recurrent Fears

These futurist visions, arising from all points along the political spectrum, depend upon a shared prediction about the trajectory of technological change. If anything, the confidence that is characteristic of the automation discourse has only increased in the midst of the pandemic recession. Although technological change was not itself the cause of job loss—at least this time around—automation theorists argue that the spread of the pandemic will hasten the transition to a more automated future. Lost jobs will never return since, unlike their human counterparts, cooking, cleaning, recycling, grocery-bagging, and caretaking robots can neither catch COVID-19 nor transmit it to others.¹⁵ Have the automation theorists got this story right?

To answer this question, it is helpful to have a couple of working definitions. Automation may be distinguished from other forms of labor-saving technical innovation in that automation technologies fully substitute for human labor, rather than merely augmenting human productive capacities. With labor-augmenting technologies, a given job category will continue to exist, but each worker in that category will be more productive. For example, the addition of new machines to a car assembly line will make line work more efficient without abolishing line work as such; fewer line workers will be needed in total to produce any given number of automobiles. Whether such technical change results in job destruction depends on the relative speeds of productivity and output growth in the automotive industry: if output grows more slowly than labor productivity—a common case, as we will see below—then the number of jobs will decline. This is true even without automation entering the picture. By contrast, true automation takes place, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested in his novel Player Piano, whenever an entire “job classification has been eliminated. Poof.”¹⁶ No matter how much production increases, there will never be another telephone switchboard operator or hand manipulator of rolled steel. Here, machines have fully substituted for human labor.

Much of the debate around the future of workplace automation turns, unhelpfully, on an evaluation of the degree to which present or near-future technologies are labor-substituting or labor-augmenting in character. Distinguishing between these two types of technical change is more difficult than one might suppose. When a retailer installs four self-checkout machines, watched over and periodically adjusted by a single employee, has cashiering ended as an occupation, or is each cashier now operating three additional registers? Taking an extreme view on such issues, one famous study from the Oxford Martin School suggested that 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at high risk of automation; a more recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicts that 14 percent of jobs are at high risk, with another 32 percent at risk of significant change in the way they are carried out—due to innovations that augment labor rather than substitute for it.¹⁷

In fact, both types of technical change can be expected to leave many workers without jobs. It is unclear, however, whether even the highest of these estimates suggests a qualitative break with the past has taken place. By one count, “57 per cent of the jobs workers did in the 1960s no longer exist today.”¹⁸ Alongside other forms of technical change, automation has been a persistent source of job loss over time. The question I address here is not whether new automation technologies will destroy additional jobs in the future (the answer is certainly yes). It is whether these technologies—advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning—have so accelerated the rate of job destruction and so diminished the rate of new job creation that increasing numbers of people are already finding themselves permanently unemployed.

If so, that would completely upend the normal functioning of capitalist economies. This insight, on which the automation theory is based, was stated most succinctly by Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief in 1983. The “effective operation of the automatic price mechanism,” he explained, “depends critically” on a peculiar feature of modern technology, namely that in spite of bringing about “an unprecedented rise in total output,” it nevertheless “strengthened the dominant role of human labour in most kinds of productive processes.”¹⁹ In other words, technology has made workers more productive without making work itself unnecessary. Since workers continue to earn wages, their demand for goods is effective. At any time, a technological breakthrough could destroy this fragile pin holding capitalist societies together. Artificial general intelligence, for example, might eliminate many occupations in a single stroke, rendering large quantities of labor unsalable at any price. At that point, information about the preferences of large sections of the population would vanish from the market, rendering it inoperable. Drawing on this insight—and adding that such a breakthrough now exists—automation theorists frequently argue that capitalism must be a transitory mode of production, which will give way to a new form of life that does not organize itself around wage work and monetary exchange.²⁰

Automation may be a constant feature of capitalist societies; the same is not true of the theory of a coming age of automation, which extrapolates from instances of technological change to a broader account of social transformation. On the contrary, its recurrence in modern history has been periodic. Excitement about a coming age of automation can be traced back to at least the mid nineteenth century, with the publication of Charles Babbage’s On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures in 1832, John Adolphus Etzler’s The Paradise within th...