Automation & Unemployment (2020)

Book Review from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind: Allen Lane. 2020. 326pp.

Will there be enough work to go round? That is the fundamental question discussed in this book by Oxford University economist and former government policy adviser, Daniel Susskind. His main concern is whether the rapid spread of automated work, most of it based on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), will, in the near future, lead to ‘technological unemployment’ and if so how that future society can cope with this.

In a compellingly written and clearly argued narrative, his thesis is that, even if in the past, fears that new technology would lead to unemployment have proved unfounded, the nature of current and ongoing technology, especially AI and the robots it is creating, will indeed mean that the demand for human work will ‘wither away’. He argues convincingly and with many salient examples that the potential of AI is such that even the many tasks which are highly important for human society to operate efficiently involving feeling, empathy and judgement will, contrary to commonly expressed views, soon be able to be done by machines. Such machines, he insists, are already in use or in the process of being invented, even if they cannot ape human means of carrying out certain important tasks, are capable of achieving equally (or more) efficient outcomes than the same work done by the manual or brain power of human beings. And if no action is taken to handle this ‘task encroachment’ (the term he uses to describe this process) the resulting ‘technological employment’ is likely to bring increasing social instability.

So what action does he recommend? Certainly not efforts to prevent technology from taking over human jobs, He quite understandably sees that as an impossibility in a system where the criterion for choosing between human work or automation is which is more profitable and where the increasing trend is for the cost of automation based on AI to fall. Instead, accepting that in the future there will be far less work for people to be employed in, he recommends an increased role for the state. He argues that the state (the ‘Big State’ as he calls it) will have to intervene, to regulate and to effectively prop up the living standards of workers by what he calls a ‘conditional basic income’, a variation of the currently much discussed idea of a ‘universal basic income’.

How this could work leads the author on to some interesting discussion about the difference between work and employment. In particular, though not seeing beyond the need for the current organisation of work as paid employment, he also sees another dimension of work – as ‘a source of meaning, purpose and direction in life’. And this connects with the socialist case for a world of voluntary work and free access to all goods and services. The argument often made against this is that such a system could not work since, without the necessity to make money to buy goods and services, people would not work, would not co-operate to carry out the tasks to make society operate efficiently and things would simply fall apart.

However, even if Susskind’s own field of vision lies firmly entrenched in the current society of wages and salaries, buying and selling and the pursuit of profit, it is possible to draw succour for a different system from much of what he says. His final chapter, especially, entitled ‘Meaning and Purpose’, contains the notion implicit in the socialist idea of a moneyless, wageless society that it is not inevitable for human beings to see work merely as a means of keeping the wolf from the door (i.e. gaining income from employment) but that, over and above the current employment system, work is a basic human need, has a ‘social dimension’ and provides ‘a chance to gain status and social esteem’.

In this connection, as pointed out by the writer, even today, in a situation in which most people have difficulty in imagining how society could be organised differently from the way it is, in the UK 15 million people still volunteer regularly, already half as many as are in paid work, and are engaged in the kind of activity referred to by the author as ‘work in pursuit of purpose rather than productivity’. In this they achieve, as he puts it, ‘value through community recognition rather than through market wages’. Then, towards the end of his book, the author quotes with apparent approval the description of work in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme as ‘not only a means of life but life’s prime want’.

So this is a book well worth reading not only for its knowledge of and insights into likely developments in the field of work within the capitalist system but also for its reflections on the nature and purpose of work generally. While the author does not imagine a society structured fundamentally differently from the current one, he clearly sees that work could, and should, be more than just the grind of employment that it is for so many and as helping to fulfil the basic human need for personal fulfilment and social interaction.

Howard Moss