Still Think Robots Can't Do Your Job?

Essays on Automation and Technological Unemployment

Riccardo Campa

• Publisher: D Editore
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788894830200
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Robotics
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Is Artificial Intelligence qualitatively different from other means of economizing the use of labor? Are we on the edge of a jobless society? If yes, are we ready for it? These are a few of the questions discussed in this collection of academic works. This book traces a brief history of the concept of technological unemployment; proposes a short-term scenario analysis concerning the relations between automation, education, and unemployment; analyzes the most recent literature on social robotics; examines the possible futures generated by the development of intelligent machines; shows the relation between automation and unemployment in an Italian case study; considers the impact if machines become effective pursuers of knowledge or even conscious; and addresses the role of serendipity in the development of science and technology.

Chapter 1

Technological Unemployment: A Brief History of an Idea

1.1 Generalities

The concept of technological unemployment is regaining momentum in the discourse of economists and economic sociologists. However, when analyzing the debate, what is most surprising is the substantial absence of agreement on the very existence of technological unemployment as a phenomenon. Some observers present technological unemployment as a sprawling monster that is completely subverting the global economy, while others conclude that this picture is just a mirage of doomsayers. Since reputable scholars are engaged in the debate, we cannot simply blame the polarization of narratives on the incompetence of one or the other school of thought. Even if the definitions of technological unemployment provided by different sources do not differ particularly, it has become evident that the terms contained in these definitions may assume different meanings depending on the theoretical perspective.

Unemployment is a phenomenon studied by both sociologists and economists. As Tony Elger (2006: 643) remarks, “[s]ociologists often focus on the experience and consequences of unemployment, leaving economists to analyze causes. […] However, consideration of the underlying processes that generate these patterns of unemployment exposes continuing controversy among economists, for example between neoliberal, neo-Keynesian, and neo-Marxist analyses of the political economy of contemporary capitalism. Thus, economic sociologists have to adjudicate between these different causal accounts [...]”

Unemployment is a complex phenomenon. “Economists distinguish between frictional unemployment, involving individual mobility of workers between jobs; structural unemployment, resulting from the decline of particular sectors or occupations; and cyclical unemployment, resulting from general but temporary falls in economic activity” (ibid.). To this list, one can add technological unemployment.

The Oxford Dictionary of Economics defines technological unemployment as follows: "Unemployment due to technical progress. This applies to particular types of workers whose skill is made redundant because of changes in methods of production, usually by substituting machines for their services. Technical progress does not necessarily lead to a rise in overall unemployment” (Black 2012: 405). As one can see, it is a concept that already includes a theory, since it puts into causal relationship two distinct phenomena: technological progress and unemployment. The disagreement between the different schools of thought mainly concerns the existence of this causal relationship.

Technological unemployment can be studied at different levels of the economic system: at the level of individual actors, companies, productive sectors, countries, or global economy. That at least one individual has lost his job because the employer or the customer has purchased a machine that can accurately perform his/her duties is a fact that can hardly be denied. Similarly, it cannot be denied that entire companies have been automated and this process has resulted in a drastic reduction of employment inside the company. As well as it cannot be denied that, owing to technological innovation, entire economic sectors have been largely emptied of their workforce. The transition from traditional agriculture to intensive agriculture, through the use of agricultural machinery, herbicides, fertilizers, fungicides, etc., has led to demographic emptying of the countryside. The evaporation of jobs in the primary sector of the United States of America offers impressive numbers: in 1900 41% of the population was employed in agriculture, a century later, in 2000, only 2% of Americans still worked in same sector (Wladawsky-Berger 2015). A similar phenomenon was observed in the secondary sector, or manufacturing, at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In the United States, the ratio between employment in the factories decreased from 22.5% in 1980 to 10% today and is expected further decline to below 3% by 2030 (Carboni 2015). Similar situations can be observed in other industrialized countries, including Italy (Campa 2014a).

This emptying of whole sectors of the economy was accompanied by a migration of the workforce from one sector to another. A first migration was observed from agriculture to manufacturing, a visible phenomenon because it also led to a massive migration from rural to urban areas. A second migration of the labor force, less visible but equally significant, occurred from the manufacturing sector to the services sector (Campa 2007). Overall, at least so far, the increase in productivity in individual sectors has not resulted in the emergence of a permanent and chronic technological unemployment on a global level. This does not mean, however, that technological unemployment – at least as a temporary or local phenomenon – does not exist.

It should also be clear that the reabsorption of the unemployed into the economy has been possible thanks to two main levers: the first is free market, which enabled the birth and development of new sectors of the economy; the second is social and industrial public policies. The fact that both forces are at work is often obscured by the fact that observers are largely divided into two tribes: those who worship the Market as an almighty God, and those who attribute an analogous divine character to the State. Only those who do not profess either ‘religion’ can see that many factors have contributed to dampen the phenomenon of technological unemployment. Private entrepreneurs have created manufacturing industries and used the cheap labor flowing from countryside to city, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. New enterprising capitalists have created service companies to redeploy manpower pouring out from factories, in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, trade unions and socialist political parties, through tough political and labor struggles, have succeeded in achieving steady reduction of working hours (even a halving of working hours, if we consider the period from the nineteenth century to the present), retirement and disability pensions, paid holidays, paid sickness, maternity leave, and other social rights, which on the whole have forced private employers to hire more workers than they would have hired in a laissez-faire capitalist regime.

Moreover, the idea that the equilibrium of a national economy is assured by the Invisible Hand is belied by the fact that employment crises have sometimes been resolved by the mass migration of workers from one country to another. This means that it is not written in the stars that capable private entrepreneurs and creative people who create new jobs, new companies, or even new economic sectors must continually rise. If they do not rise, if there are no social and cultural conditions that permit them to arise, the unemployment crisis generated by the introduction of new technologies can become chronic and irreversible in a specific geographical area. Finally, other forms of public intervention, such as industrial policies, have contributed to cushion the phenomenon. For instance, the creation of public manufactories, the nationalization of private companies, public contracts (just think of the incidence of military spending in the United States), wars, crime (the prison population in the US now exceeds two million individuals), as well as the creation of millions of jobs in the public service – jobs that are sometimes unnecessary and therefore constitute a permanent masked dole.

If you consider all these aspects, some of which are ignored by economic theory, it seems difficult to deny the existence of technological unemployment. Somewhat different is the question of whether it is a significant phenomenon on a global scale. From the psychological point of view, being replaced by a machine is certainly a big concern for those who lose their jobs, even temporarily. But the issue begins to acquire political relevance only if the proportion of individuals affected by the phenomenon is likely to disrupt an entire economic system. Throughout history, different moments when the phenomenon of technological unemployment has assumed critical proportions were observed. In these periods, the idea of technological unemployment has gained major relevance in the public debate.

1.2. Luddism: The First Reaction

Notoriously, a rather critical moment in European history was the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and not only for bloody political revolutions that accompanied the transformation. In the so-called feudal system, the creation of work did not constitute a problem , because social mobility was minimal. Children inherited the job of their fathers. The children of the farmers knew that they would be farmers themselves, or serfs. The children of the artisans learned their profession in the workshops of their fathers. The eldest son of an aristocratic family inherited the family estate, while his younger brothers were initiated in a military or ecclesiastical career. Daughters would be wives of men chosen by the father, or nuns. Beggars, robbers, vagabonds, prostitutes, and adventurers formed exceptions to the strict rule. In the Middle Ages, others were the economic concerns: wars, epidemics, famines. A serious problem that could arise was rather labor shortages as a result of these phenomena.

With the transition to capitalism, previously unknown problems arise: in particular, overproduction and unemployment. The introduction of machines in the production system and social mobility disrupt the traditional conception of work and life. To many, it appears inconceivable that someone willing to work cannot find a job. So much so that the first reaction of the political authorities is to limit the use of the machines where cause unemployment. Even mercantilist Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who gave great impulse to the industrialization of France by the creation of so-called Manufactures nationales, passed measures to restrict the use of machines in private companies.

Where the authorities do not intervene, the workers themselves may make a fierce and desperate struggle against the machine, of which we find a detailed account in Capital by Karl Marx (1976: 554-555): “In the seventeenth century nearly all Europe experienced workers' revolts against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and lace trimmings called in Germany Bandmühle , Schnurmühle, or Mühlenstuhl. In the 1630s, a wind-driven sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the rage of the mob. Even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, saw-mills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people only with great difficulty, supported as this opposition was by Parliament. No sooner had Everett constructed the first woolshearing machine to be driven by water-power (1758) than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workers, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills and carding engines. The large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the power-loom; and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin government, composed of such people as Sidmouth and Castlereagh, a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures. It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments.”

David F. Noble (1995: 3-23) maintains that the Luddites are not to be considered technophobic. When the machinery was introduced in manufactures, the workers destroyed it because of necessity, not because of technophobia. Their choice was limited to three options: 1) starvation for them and their families; 2) violence against the uncompassionate owners of the means of production; 3) destruction of the means of production. Choosing the third option was the mildest way to communicate their discomfort as regards unemployment.

The reaction of the political authorities was clearly less mild. Such was the incidence of the phenomenon that the English government implemented the death penalty for Luddites. The ‘assassination’ of a machine was put on a par with the assassination of a human being.

1.3. Classical Political Economy: The First Denial

In spite of the fact that the appearance of machinery produces worrisome social disorders, economists are reluctant to modify their theories in order to make place for technological unemployment. There are just a few exceptions. For instance, an attempt at conceptualization is found in James Steuart’s book An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), and precisely in chapter XIX (“Is the Introduction of Machines into Manufactures prejudicial to the Interest of a State, or hurtful to Population?”) . Steuart admits that the sudden mechanization of a segment of the production can produce temporary unemployment and, therefore, public policies are needed to facilitate the absorption of the labor force into other tasks. He is still persuaded that the advantages of mechanization outweigh negative side effects, but is also convinced that problems do not solve themselves. However, that of Steuart is an isolated voice.

Classical economics is dominated by Adam Smith’s optimistic perspective, which emphasizes the positive effects of mechanization and the self-regulating nature of market economies. In his masterpiece An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he provides evidence of a causal connection between high taxation and unemployment (Smith 1998: 1104), or excessive prodigality of the landlords and unemployment (Smith 1998: 448-449), rather than between the use of machinery and unemployment. Machinery is mainly seen as a means to increase the productivity of laborers: “The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed. […] The productive powers of the same number of labourers cannot be increased, but in consequence either of some addition and improvement to those machines and instruments which facilitate and abridge labour; or of a more proper division and distribution of employment” (Smith 1998: 455-456).

When Smith takes into consideration the possibility of a connection between the mechanization of labor and the redundancy of laborers, he sees this situation uniquely as a chance for capitalists and landlords, and not as a problem for the working class: “In consequence of better machinery, of greater dexterity, and of a more proper division and distribution of work, all of which are the natural effects of improvement, a much smaller quantity of labour becomes requisite for executing any particular piece of work, and though, in consequence of the flourishing circumstances of the society, the real price of labour should rise very considerably, yet the great diminution of the quantity will generally much more than compensate the greatest rise which can happen in the price” (Smith 1998: 338).

Afterwards, classical economists developed “the theory that the working class is being compensated for initial sufferings, incident to the introduction of a labor-saving machine, by favorable ulterior effects” (Schumpeter 2006: 652).

Marx baptizes this theory as theory of compensation . Among the fathers of the theory, Marx lists James Mill, John McCulloch, Robert Torrens, Nassau W. Senior, and John Stuart Mill. David Ricardo should also be added to the list. In synthesis, this theory states that, if new machines allow to save labor, manpower will be needed for the production of said machinery. Also, if initially the new production processes saves labor, then they boost demand and jobs, through the reduction of costs and, therefore, the price of the goods offered. Finally, it is hypothesized that there is a perfect identity between income and spending, and therefore the theory assumes that the major revenues arising from the reduction of the workforce in factories and farms will result in greater demand for consumer goods by capitalists and landlords, which in turn will create new jobs.

1.4. The Conversion of David Ricardo

If this is so, why do laid-off workers get so angry? Evidently, even admitting that there is a medium-term or long-term compensation of losses, the short-term effects are devastating for a social class that has no capital or assets. For those who live for the day, and perhaps have many children to support, even a few weeks unemployment can be lethal. If we consider that, in order to find a new job, the proletarian must sometimes emigrate, leaving loved places and people, or accept a less satisfying and less remunerated job, while he or she sees his or her former employer getting ri...