Automation and the Future of Work. Aaron Benanav
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