I believe Automation is incoming but it's not going to wipe out as many jobs as we think. A focus on social/community workers will still be needed to keep structures intact and ethical. What do you think?
Automation has been happening for decades, even arguably since the industrial revolution. The implication is at some point we start to reach automation at a greater rate at which jobs can be made, or jobs are made through natural market forces.
The more jobs we automate, the more jobs we create as a consequence that need to be automated, because automation drives a need for new kinds of production. Like an infinitely repeating but diminishing series of numbers. Proportionally there's less jobs but in terms of actual numbers there are more jobs over time. The thing we all recognize is that this wont be uniform and will come at a human cost.
So there's two key milestones we're coming up on here, that ultimately amount to the effect of "this time it's different":
- Robotic dexterity meeting/exceeding the dexterity of a human arm at general tasks
- The automation of intelligence in addition to the automation of mechanical tasks
This is really dangerous. We've never faced this issue, and the reason for that is for the first time in history, as these new jobs are invented, the robots are better right out of the gate before the humans even get a swing at it, while existing jobs are also taken at an unprecedented rate.
I'm not disagreeing, but I'm trying to express that more jobs will be created as a consequence of more automation and because of a cascading number of factors there will be more jobs for humans than ever....at some undefined point, it could take thousands of years to stabilize. Machines can't make machines that make machines that make machines. You need humans at every point as things get more complex you need more refinement, supervision and upkeep. We're talking billions of humans vs trillions of machines potentially. That on paper is enough jobs for everyone. But do we really all want to be robot caretakers until the point the singularity kicks in and we really are fucked?
Automation should be a huge boon that can be utilized for dangerous/tedious/monotonous jobs, but under capitalism it's going to be a negative for the working class and will result in lost jobs and no alternatives provided.
The solution is the overthrow of capitalism. When the means of production are put towards bettering the lives of people rather than generating profit, automation could be a fantastic tool.
Automation has the POTENTIAL to free up humans from a lot of drudgery and shitty work.
In practice, though, it's simply a wealth intensifier. Only capital will own the machines because, at least right now, they're fucking expensive. But the savings they capture will be enough to make the folks at the top even richer. Absent some beautiful moment where a lot of this production suddenly becomes publicly owned, you can imagine how this warps capitalist society even further.
Another element to consider here is that even if all the jobs automation takes get replaced, it's not necessarily the same people who lost work that will be offered it again. Many of the professions ripe for automation disproportionately employ people of color compared to other professions, and many of the jobs automation might create in engineering, programming, etc. are in fields that have traditionally been hostile towards women and people of color. Line will go up, and the employment numbers might not look as terrible as we expect, but already disadvantaged groups will be losing their jobs.
Automation replaces a labor requirement with a capital requirement, so it increases the power of the capital class.
Automation also means fewer jobs, so it increases the size of the precariat. UBI can fix that, but the capital class has no particular reason to care what happens to jobless people, and the precariat is useful to suppress wages, and we just established that automation also increases their power, so it's not going to happen. UBI would make sense under market socialism, which also fails to protect the jobless on its own, but we don't live under market socialism.
And I don't think policy is the best lens to look through for people currently living under capitalism. You could dismantle capitalism with something as boring as UBI + a progressive wealth tax (ask me about it some time), but doing that would still require enough power to dismantle capitalism. You don't gain anything by coming up with a way to get there by passing some laws, instead of unions forcibly cooperatizing the economy, or a vanguard party leading people into a revolutionary struggle. They're all trying to do the same thing, so they all require the same amount of power. For now, it's much more important to worry about how to most efficiently build non-capital power structures.
I feel like “automation” is just another step in efficiency of production - what 10 robots (presumably still being overseen by SOME amount of human labour) can do, 1,000 humans with 20th century tech could do, 10,000 humans with 19th century tech could do, etc. Just because one human engineer can produce 10,000... I dunno, hubcaps - in an hour overseeing those 10 robots, the labour theory of value still holds.
Where I think automation really provides an interesting new potential change to current relations of production is: will we end up with a huuuuuge “army of surplus labour” - traditionally 10% unemployment is considered alarming, what if production (and even the service sector) become so automated we’re looking at 30, 40, 50%? Does that provide a revolutionary contradiction, or do we all become docile, being fed and clothed by unthinking machines just enough to nullify any desire to overthrow the current system?
Automation is good for luxury communism, gonna be devasting under capitalism
It doesn't affect labor = value, assuming you're talking about the Marxist Labor Theory of Value.
Automation is just more dead labor and reduced socially necessary labor time for commodities.
UBI is certainly not the new frontier in my opinion. Any system which allows basic human rights to be acquired through a marketplace is unethical, and just because the money is just given away for free doesn't mean predatory pricing schemes won't be implemented by the owner class. The only way to ensure that predatory pricing doesn't affect the acquisition of food, housing, etc. in my opinion is some form of voucher system.
Food stamps instead of cash? What are drug dealers gonna do with thousands of dollars in WIC coupons? That's a yikes from me dawg!
It's a shitty story written by a lib, but read manna. Also consider that Moravec's paradox means automation is coming for your boss's job before it comes for yours. Capital is starting to shed the PMC class as they use apps to directly dispatch workers to perform low paying gigs. Uber has so far failed to replace drivers with AI, but taxi dispatchers are gone now, and drivers are now responsible for their own vehicle maintenance. All those middle managers in the taxi industry have to find new jobs now.
Automation is just an expansion of productive capital. It furthers the division of labor and contributes to the total produce while reducing the proletariat's share of that production, just as Marx said it would over a century ago. This makes the worker's life harder over time even if it does get better. Idk about how UBI fits into this beyond some morsel of scraps thrown to the masses, but I don't think we're going to see it anytime soon.
Tbh I think full automation is different from productive forces development. Let’s say we get a robot R which can build itself. So R=2R=4R etc, each robot after the first one would have zero human labor in itself, so it’s labor value is 0. Considering we would get infinity of this greygoo-like robots their exchange value should be zero as well. However, on the other hand, the first robot is a product of labor, let’s say 1000000 human hours. We can estimate subsequent labour values as 1000000/(number of robots).
How capital would deal with such a scenario? Look no further than software, its first creation is labor intensive, but the copies of it are practically free from labor. So low-copy software costs a shitton, while popular software is cheap.
So, in capitalism automation likely would perpetuate rent extraction in some form, even if robots are dirt cheap. In centrally planned economy robots would be created to reduce socially needed labor hours, I guess.
