All the hype about technological unemployment only provides a glimmer of hope against the cold reality of a highly mechanized future of shitty, low pay jobs.
With five years of persistent unemployment undermining capitalism, and the continuing advance of computer-based artificial intelligence and robots, the idea of increasing unemployment caused by technology has been raised by many, including Bill Gates.
It also figures for a moment in the Robert Reich film, Inequality for All, when tech tycoon Nick Hanauer notes that Amazon, a company he funded, hires fewer people than would smaller stores that weren't so efficient. Erstwhile reformist Hanauer doesn't mention, nor does Reich state anything about the low pay and grinding workload at Amazon.
Nor does he delve into the “efficiency” at Amazon, which was created through a kind of hyper-Taylorism, where every last motion of each worker is monitored. The overseer of slaves has been replaced by GPS devices attached to workers, and a monitoring system of computers that algorithmically plan out where people are to move, when.
This “Technolgical Unemployment” frame is a load of techno-utopian nonsense.
Back in the day, when machines were introduced that would weave fabrics, human weavers destroyed the machines. They saw these machines as putting people out of work. They were led by Ned Ludd, and were called Luddites, the term we still use to describe people who oppose technological developments.
The Luddites were both right, and wrong. They were right that their jobs were gone, but they were wrong to think that the people would remain unemployed. Mechanized mills lowered the cost of cloth, which made fabric more affordable, and clothes ultimately dropped in price. That created jobs.
Of course, some of those jobs were horrible jobs. Weaving skills were less important, and masses of women, men, and children to staff the looms created a situation where people worked long hours for fairly low pay.
The frame of technological unemployment assumes that there won't be new jobs. Their argument is that the economy will have to change. The more radical people suggest that we'd need to establish a system of “basic income”, or just giving cash to people. That would allow people to spend money, and allow the economy to grow or at least not crash. The more moderate people suggest that nonprofits will grow in importance, mainly as a vehicle for moving private dollars to people in need.
Both outcomes are possible... but only if the masses of people put up a fight, and demand basic income, and demand that the corporations give over their money, or perish.
What's more likey is something like Gigwalk or Mechanical Turk. Gigwalk recently got a fat load of venture capital money, so I decided to sign up and see what was in there. The system aggregates labor. People can look at “gigs” or small tasks that pay from around to per task. They involve going somewhere, taking photos, or writing up a report about a visit. The pitch Gigwalk makes presents it, to the people buying the labor, that it's basically “secret shopping.”
Reviews on the appstore say that people didn't get paid, or the app didn't work inside the stores (which are now set up to prevent people from using cell phones and wifi, mainly because people do comparison shopping in-store).
The Mechanical Turk has been around for years, and what they do is buy tiny units of labor for small amounts. You might be paid 25 cents to type a business card into a form. The typical job there is about an hour.
This is the real effect of advancing technology. Work is mechanized and underpaid. There will be unemployment, but there will be a lot of these tiny micro-jobs that last a few minutes to a day, and pay very little money.
Original: The So-Called Technological Unemployment, and Permanent Piecework