AI, Robotics, warehouse fires, strikes?
Yet again, factory, warehouse, and office owners, investors, those hedging their bets on AI, sing its praises to the high heavens: the latest technological advance is a reason for optimism! Rejoice! Everybody in this wonderful consumer society will reap the benefits. Think of all the applications: surgery, detecting cancer, faster delivery, hands free driving, no more people getting maimed at dangerous jobs like oil rig workers, welding, electrical linemen, truck drivers, fire fighting, machine operation, soldiers, tree cutters, and on and on. And even the non dangerous jobs, the expensive "brain workers" responsible for culture-- it turns out they use their brains so much pumping out recycled homogenous shit, standardized cultural commodities, the same stories, the same art, music, and so on over and over and over that a computer with a fancy program can now ape the generic products and pump them out without having to pay a screen writer $160,000 a year. Doctors, dentists, surgeons, translators, therapists, priests, teachers, poets, musicians, farmers, drivers, miners, lawyers, civil servants, bank tellers, cashiers, cooks, iron and steel workers, carpenters, and even prostitutes -- it's only a matter of time before these costly careers can be replaced by AI robots.
The optimism and enthusiasm hasn't changed much. Take this passage from Jean-Baptiste Say (1767 - 1832), a French classical liberal economist and business man:
"When a new machine, or, in general any process whatever that expedites matters replaces any human labour already employed, some of the industrious arms, whose services are usefully supplanted, are left without work. A new machine, therefore, replaces the labor of a portion of the workers, but does not diminish the amount of production, for, if it did, it would not be adopted; it displaces revenue. But the ultimate advantage is wholly on the side of machinery, for, if abundance of product and lessening of cost lower the venal value, the consumer -- that is, everybody -- will benefit thereby."
This techno-optimism is so laughable for the simple fact that we're not dealing with a few accidental discoveries revolutionizing production, with one or two machines, but with a regular, constant and general phenomenon. This claim that finally needs will be met has been trotted out since the invention of the printing press, the light bulb, the spinning wheel, the steam engine, electricity, the assembly line, the telephone, the computer, and on and on. Every invention, every technical advance, always praised as salvation resulted in people being without livelihoods.
If an old washboard is replaced by a washing machine, everybody knows that this machine saves quite a lot of work. If somebody buys himself a drill, he knows exactly why. The means of production should make work easier, save time and effort. Shouldn't it lead to more free time to do what one would like instead of more toil?
This self-evident fact ceases when it is a matter of producing capitalist wealth. Sophisticated machines, equipped with numerous functions, completely automated, perform complete manufacturing processes and churn out boots, clothing, light bulbs, cars and other chunks of wealth in gigantic quantities, thus making a lot of work superfluous. This society disposes over amazingly productive means of production.
No more work-- what's the problem? Now you can pursue leisure in free time! But it's apparently not like that in this society. No work means nothing but misery, unmet needs. Not because there's not enough stuff, but because people have no money to buy it. This society is said to suffer from over-production. There's too much stuff. But for what? Not too much stuff to satisfy needs, since everyone can see how many needs go unmet. But rather too much stuff for the purpose of production that reigns in this society: making profits.
Not only that, but as even the dumbest worker knows alongside the most celebrated ivy league economists: oh, what trouble this spells for jobs! How many will be thrown to the wolves?
The monster has taken another form: now the suppression of labor and wages will ravage so many once again, as if capital ever stopped in the first place.
And yet, no one dates to criticize the cause: private property. The fact that the means of production are owned and disposed of privately for the exclusive monetary interests of the owners alone.
An English Manufacturer: "The insubordination of our workers has given us the idea of dispensing with them. We have made and stimulated every imaginable effort of the mind to replace the service of men by tools more docile, and we have achieved our object. Machinery has delivered capital from the oppression of labor. Wherever we still employ a man, we do so only temporarily, pending the invention for us of some means of accomplishing his work without him."
--Quoted by Proudhon in his "System of Economic Contradictions, Vol 1", 1846
Today Jeff Bezos doesn't say AI will "destroy jobs", but create "new more engaging jobs". Yet no one really seems to believe such a thing.
When Proudhon wrote this, the capitalist class was ecstatic that they had managed to replace 3 out of 4 workers when it came to the manufacturing of fabrics, newspapers and books. Today, whole factories are run by a few dozen people per shift. With the help of today's technology, they accomplish in a few hours what 100 years ago took the labor of 10,000 men over the span of a week or month.
"People need jobs.” That's a complaint that everybody takes for granted, especially in times of high unemployment. In fact, it doesn’t get any more absurd. Nobody needs work. What people need are the products of work. Work is necessary toil for producing useful things. Work is a means to an end and not an end in itself. So if the necessities are produced in less time and there is less work to be done, then everyone should be happy, not worried.
But in capitalism, things are apparently not that simple. Here, there is a shortage of work – not of goods. Nobody is concerned about or claims that there is a shortage of goods. And yet people are poor and getting poorer because of a shortage of work to produce more goods. That is the first, best and most simple proof that in capitalism the purpose of work is not to satisfy people’s needs. Apparently, it serves a different purpose – and everybody knows what that purpose is: profit.
For profit there can never be enough work. The more the better. Could there be a better indicator of the antagonism between the purpose of work and those who have to do that work? And yet, because profit is the purpose of work, any work that is not useful for profit doesn’t get done. So the livelihoods of those whose work isn’t useful for profit are superfluous. This is yet another indicator of how little work in this society is a means for the people.
The truth is that people depend on work because they need the wages work pays. Otherwise, they remain excluded from the goods that exist in abundance, but that are the private property of those that have these goods produced for the sake of their profit.
So the brutality of this society does not begin when people need work and can't find any; it begins when they have this need for work in the first place. All the problems they have finding work are a guaranteed result of this absurd need for work – and always more work.
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