As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or
not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should
let them take it.
According to two new books the automation of up to 60 per
cent of current jobs in America, and by extension other nations, is all but
inevitable. Martin Ford argues in ‘Rise of The Robots’, education and up-scaling
won’t help us. There will simply be fewer jobs to go around, as everything from
accountancy to journalism will be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently by
machines. Jerry Kaplan agrees in ‘Humans Need Not Apply’, that billions will be
left destitute – unless we radically rethink our way of keeping people fed.
In successive waves of technological innovation from the
industrial revolution to the automation leaps of the 1950s, millions of working
people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience
their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it’s not
just working class jobs that are threatened. Robespierre was right – it’s the
prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite
to panic.
By the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be
doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place.
In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions
of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for
the majority of their adult lives. That’s fantastic. Or it should be. Did you
really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? All
else being equal, don’t you have better things to do than spending most of your
life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal – and that’s the
problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of
routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the
majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages
we get for them. Most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a
day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice – but the necessity of
earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, automation should for some
time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of
hours a week, but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages
than our grandparents.
The automation crisis need not be a crisis at all – but the
simplest solutions are too radical. The problem is not technology. The problem
is capitalism. People who do not work to create profit are considered less than
human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t
matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid
intern – the logic of capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making
money for someone else. Our economic system defines the basis of human worth as
the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit.
Martin Ford is neither an economist nor a political
theorist, but I imagine that when he says that in order to save us all from
armies of robot scabs, “a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules will
be required”
Kaplan and Ford’s books propose the same solution, and it’s
one that reformist have been suggesting for generations: a universal basic
income. If nobody can afford to buy the goods and services all these robots are
producing, global markets will collapse. World capitalism cannot be sustained,
Ford argues, on luxury consumption alone. It turns out that the only way to
save the capitalist system is massive wealth re-distribution and total
reorganisation of the wage system.
But why not go further and abolish the wage system? The
World Socialist Movement suggests we can have a world free of wage-slavery, free
from the artificial rationing of a money-system and the demands of market
prices.
Automation offers us two options. Just two. The first is
that we finally, collectively, break our addiction to disaster capitalism and
do what needs to be done to create a future where human beings can reach their
full potential. The second is that we don’t. And we might not. Just because the
answer to the “threat of mass unemployment” is obvious does not mean that we
will take it. It is just as likely that the magical thinking of market
fundamentalists will prevail in the field of automation just as it has in the
field of environmental protection and topple us all into a chaos where only the
very rich can survive, for a time, alone in their climate-controlled towers of
glass and steel. That’s the other solution. Whether it’s the solution we choose
will determine, far more than any job-thieving algorithm, what it truly means
to be human. As Professor Hawkins observed: “So far, the trend seems to be
toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
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