Automation and the Future of Work. Aaron Benanav
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AUTOMATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK
AUTOMATION AND THE
FUTURE OF WORK
Aaron Benanav
First published by Verso 2020
© Aaron Benanav 2020
An earlier version of this text appeared as “Automation and the Future of Work,”
New Left Review, nos. 119, Sept.–Oct. 2019 and 120, Nov.–Dec. 2019.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-129-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-130-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-131-7 (US EBK)
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Typeset in Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
2. Labor’s Global Deindustrialization
3. In the Shadow of Stagnation
4. A Low Demand for Labor
5. Silver Bullets?
6. Necessity and Freedom
Postscript: Agents of Change
Notes
Index
Figure 1.1. Labor Share of Income, G7 Economies
Figure 1.2. Productivity–Wages Gap, OECD Countries
Figure 2.1. French Manufacturing Sector
Figure 2.2. Global Waves of Deindustrialization
Figure 2.3. Deindustrialization in China, India and Mexico
Figure 2.4. World Manufacturing and Agricultural Production
Figure 3.1. French Manufacturing and Total Output Growth
Figure 3.2. World Manufacturing and Total Production
Figure 4.1. Unemployment Rates in the US, Germany, and Japan
Figure 4.2. OECD Index of Employment Protection
Figure 4.3. Service Sectors in the US, France and Italy
Figure 4.4. Service Sectors in Thailand, Mexico and South Africa
Figure 5.1. Gross Government Debt-to-GDP
Table 2.1. Manufacturing Growth Rates, 1950–2017
Table 3.1. Manufacturing and GDP Growth Rates, 1950–2017
Table 3.2. Capital Stock and Labor Productivity Growth Rates, 1950–2017
THE INTERNET, SMARTPHONES, AND social media have already transformed so much about the way we interact with each other and come to know the world. What would happen if these digital technologies moved off the screen and increasingly integrated themselves into the physical world around us? Advanced industrial robotics, self-driving cars and trucks, and intelligent cancer-screening machines appear to presage a world of ease, but they also make us uneasy. After all, what would human beings do in a largely automated future? Would we be able to adapt our institutions to realize the dream of human freedom that a new age of intelligent machines might make possible? Or would that dream turn out to be a nightmare of mass technological unemployment?
In two New Left Review articles published in 2019, I identified a new automation discourse propounded by liberal, right-wing, and left analysts alike. Asking just these sorts of questions, automation theorists arrive at a provocative conclusion: mass technological unemployment is coming and can be managed only by the provision of universal basic income, since large sections of the population will lose access to the wages they need to survive.
In this book, I argue that the resurgence of the automation discourse today is a response to a real trend unfolding across the world: there are simply too few jobs for too many people. This chronic labor underdemand is manifest in economic trends such as jobless recoveries, stagnant wages, and rampant job insecurity. It is visible as well in the political phenomena that rising inequality catalyzes: populism, plutocracy, and the rise of a new, sea-steading digital elite—more focused on escaping in rockets to Mars than on improving the livelihoods of the digital peasantry who will be left behind on a burning planet Earth.
Pointing with one hand to the homeless and jobless masses of Oakland, California, and with the other to the robots staffing the Tesla production plant just a few miles away in Fremont, it is easy to believe that the automation theorists must be right. However, the explanation they offer—that runaway technological change is destroying jobs—is simply false. There is a real and persistent under-demand for labor in the United States and European Union, and even more so in countries such as South Africa, India, and Brazil, yet its cause is almost the opposite of the one identified by the automation theorists.
In reality, rates of labor-productivity growth are slowing down, not speeding up. That should have increased the demand for labor, except that the productivity slowdown was overshadowed by another, more eventful trend: in a development originally analyzed by Marxist economist Robert Brenner under