Robots (2013)

Book Review from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy’, by Federico Pistono. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012)

Imagine a world in which supermarkets are replaced by giant robotic vending machines; in which cars drive themselves; and in which journalists are replaced by computer generated reportage. Only, you don’t need to imagine such a world: it’s ours. The technology for all these things exists now (at the very least, at the developmental stage). This book invites us to imagine the impact of the roll-out of these technologies. It’s a sobering thought to realise that hundreds of thousands worldwide work in supermarkets, whose jobs could be extinguished in very short order by this technology.

The centrepiece of the book is an examination of the implications of Moore’s law, which is, roughly, that computer processing capacity doubles every two years. A great deal of the book is spent explaining the implications of this exponential growth. In short, it means the advent of machines which can replicate human-like thought processes. Pistono notes that whether these processes are ‘intelligent’ is unimportant: it’s the work they can do, and the processes they can reproduce that counts. He gives the example of radiographers: computers now have the capacity to ‘look at’ medical images and recognise a variety of conditions. This removes the need for a skilled human, trained over many years, to make the examination. As the book notes, though, as with the automated supermarkets, the machines will also displace unskilled labour.

The book is limited in its exposition, beyond telling us these bare facts. Pistono notes that he has not heard any good counter-arguments against the idea of technological unemployment, but his failure to rebut them in detail does not help build his argument. Luckily for us, Marx did address them in his book Capital:

‘The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. (…) When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it’ (Capital v. 1, LINK).

Marx addressed the ‘theory of compensation’: ‘that all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously and necessarily sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen.’ His rebuttal was:

‘The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them and was afterwards converted into machinery.’ (LINK)

Marx realises that technological unemployment is off-set, in part, by the increased demand this will create in the branches of industry that supply the newly mechanised fields of production. The extent to which these will soak up some of the workers made redundant by machinery, however, ‘depends, given the length of the working-day and the intensity of labour, on the composition of the capital employed, i.e., on the ratio of its constant to its variable component’ (a ratio Marx termed the Organic Composition of Capital). Marx also identified a growth in luxury production and of the servants (what we would now call ‘service industries’) as a result of the improved productiveness of the factory system.

These off-sets would be of little help, however, if all industries were simultaneously and continuously subject to more and more technological innovation.

Pistono’s book is of little help in addressing these problems. The solutions put forward are frankly laughable: we all will have to learn to get by with less and be happy with it. Drive less; insulate your house; grow your own food: these are the suggestions put forward. These are all well and good if you own a patch of land (or even your own house) but absolutely useless for the millions of propertyless semi-skilled and unskilled workers of the world. Millions in mega-slums are already showing us how to make do with less.

At best, this book is a useful primer to introduce people to the concept of incoming and widespread technological unemployment. It is hampered by its lack of detail in explaining the debates around the issue and its abject failure to present anything like a sensible response. At its best, it is a heartfelt tract, with some useful facts and bibliography.

Pik Smeet