Proper Gander: Automation and occupations (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporter Richard Bilton is waiting on a sidewalk in Los Angeles as a couple of boxes on wheels trundle up towards him and then carry on past, with another one stopping by his feet. Lifting its lid, he finds the cheeseburger he ordered online, delivered by a robot rather than a human, and while he’s explaining this, a driverless taxi cab glides along the road, identical to one he tried out in San Francisco. Thousands of automated servants like these are already operating in several cities across America, with robotaxis scheduled to arrive in London before the end of 2026. In his edition of Panorama (BBC One), Bilton asked the question Will Robots Take My Job? and looked for an answer among academics and tech companies leading in robotics.

More complex types of robots than those on wheels are still in development, some of which promise to be particularly useful for otherwise difficult tasks, such as one designed to enter burning buildings. The humanoid robots featured in the documentary don’t attempt to look like people beyond their basic shape, with varying designs of cold, blank-faced heads reminiscent of something from Doctor Who. While prototypes can do backflips and dance, their immediate descendants are likely to end up with less vivacious careers as warehouse operatives. So far, these robots aren’t autonomous, but are controlled by a technician twiddling a joystick, and can only perform within a set of limited pre-programmed movements. Teddy Haggerty, CEO of Robostore, talks about turning this apparent restriction into a business model, emphasising the ‘remote’ in remote control. He suggests that these robots could be used in a warehouse in one country, directed by workers based in another country. The important point is that these workers are employed for lower wages than the going rate wherever the warehouse is located. Even with outlay for the upkeep of the robots, this would reduce costs to the company, maximising profits. This tactic is nothing new, akin to placing a call centre in a country where labour is cheaper than the places where the calls are going to. The robotics companies’ representatives Bilton meets excitedly describe how their humanoid robots will do the dull jobs and chores so we don’t have to. Their enthusiasm is understandable, given the ever-expanding applications of this technology, especially now Artificial Intelligence is being integrated. As James Bessen of Boston University explains, this enthusiasm gets channelled into hype. Sleek promotional videos and flashy choreographed demonstrations are intended to attract investment. Building a profitable business model is the priority, rather than providing what’s really needed and wanted by people, including the employees involved.

The only workers featured in the programme whose jobs are being directly threatened by AI robots are the taxi drivers Bilton speaks with, who aren’t impressed by the supposed merits of driverless cabs. Fast-food delivery robots have started to replace costlier people on motorbikes, and if Haggerty’s idea gains traction, more human warehouse workers will be made redundant. AI-enabled robots are also learning specialist roles such as welding, and many office duties can already be carried out quicker and cheaper by AI analysing data and drafting strategies. According to a 2024 report from the International Monetary Fund, an estimated 70 per cent of UK workers are in occupations with tasks which could be performed or enhanced by AI.

However, robots aren’t yet sophisticated enough to be swapped for large numbers of staff. Professor Aaron Ames of the California Institute of Technology points out that even the action of opening a door is currently beyond their grasp. Another reason why the growth of AI robots may not lead to mass unemployment, quoted by Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve Robotics, is that new technology expands the economy and creates more new jobs than those it supplants. Bessen agrees: ‘it’s just a mistake to think that this technology comes in and replaces the humans and everything else stays the same’, citing how next-to no occupations were made obsolete by the growth of automation in the mid-20th century. Although they don’t say it themselves, this stance reflects how capitalist production adapts according to what is likely to be profitable. For example, driverless taxis have reached the stage where the expense of manufacturing and running them is falling below current costs for traditional cabs, such as drivers’ wages, which means they are more likely to turn a profit for the companies behind them. As also shown by Robostore’s cynical idea to outsource warehouse staff, financial prerogatives override the interests of workers in how the technology is applied. Whether this leads to unemployment or creates new jobs elsewhere, it’s still in the alienating context of capitalism’s labour market.

In a socialist society, the use of AI and robotics would be guided by practicalities, as financial considerations would no longer exist. Without the framework of employment, people and robots wouldn’t be in competition, so it wouldn’t be that a robot would ‘take someone’s job’. For the same reason, people wouldn’t risk hardship if a robot or AI did tasks instead of them. It’s possible that many aspects of how society functions would be automated, reducing the amount of labour people would have to do, freeing up more time for what they want to do. AI (or whatever it becomes in the future) could monitor what needs to be produced and trigger this to happen, with robots doing the practical work. Communities and the organisations they run would be able to decide how technology is incorporated into industries and services based on people’s requirements and the circumstances at the time. The robots shown on Panorama have this potential, but as this technology is developing in capitalism, it will instead be shaped according to what benefits companies’ shareholders.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: From Marx to Musk (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his interview with Rishi Sunak on 2 November Elon Musk speculated that the widespread application of AI would usher in an ‘age of abundance where any goods and services that you want, you can have’. People would only need work for ’personal satisfaction’.

Clearly, this wouldn’t be capitalism. It couldn’t be as it would mean the end of working for wages and producing goods and services to be sold. This was understood by, of all people, Jeremy Clarkson in a surprisingly perspicacious passage in his column in the Sun the following day:

‘The fact is, then, that if machines are doing all the jobs, there will be no economy. You won’t be able to buy anything because you won’t be earning anything. And there’s no point going to the government for help because that won’t have any money either. Because machines don’t pay taxes. They just spend all day making stuff. That no one can afford to buy. This means we will need a whole new economy. A whole new system where there’s no such thing as money. And that is the biggest worry of them all because no one has a clue what that might be’.

The last bit is not true. Socialists have long understood that the answer would be a society where productive resources including machines would be commonly owned and democratically controlled and used to produce wealth to directly satisfy people’s needs instead of, as now, to be sold on a market with a view to profit. In such a society there would indeed be no such thing as money.

Clarkson may not have known it but he was describing what has recently been called ‘fully automated luxury communism’. But we don’t have to wait for ‘full’ automation to bring about a society of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use. The productive forces are already sufficiently developed for this. Making the change is now only a question of political will.

As a matter of fact years ago Marx had anticipated the points made by Musk. Writing in the late 1850s he speculated what would happen if the application of science and machinery to production led to such a high level of productivity that not only the value added by direct human labour to each unit produced was reduced to an insignificant proportion, but so was that transferred to these units from the fixed capital deployed:

‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (…) With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis (‘Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.’, Grundrisse, chapter 14).

In other words, goods and services would be so cheap — each unit would contain so little labour, both new and that transferred by machinery, etc — that the huge amount of them that could be produced could not be priced but might as well be given away or provided free.

Marx did not expect this point to be reached — he expected that the working class would have put an end to capitalism long before — but he realised that, if it were to be, it would mean the end of capitalism. Production for sale would no longer make any sense.

Stuart Russell’s 2021 Reith Lectures on ‘Living with Artificial Intelligence’ (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The 4 lectures are online here but here’s a quick and sketchy summary.

Lecture 1: The biggest event in human history

Machines don’t have objectives, so the ‘standard model’ of AI is to feed objectives in and let the machine figure out the method. But if the objectives are ill-considered, the machine won’t know that. Machine ‘consciousness’ is an anthropocentric irrelevance.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could herald a Golden Age, in which we could ‘raise the living standard of everyone on Earth in a sustainable way to a respectable level.’

Corporations have been called ‘profit-maximising algorithms’. It’s silly to blame them, because ‘we’re the ones who wrote the rules.’ Russell says we should change the rules.

Lecture 2: AI in warfare

AI features in drone swarms, supersonic missile fighters, self-drive tanks and submarines, and robotics, but he is mainly concerned with Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) – weapons which locate, select and engage (kill) human targets without human supervision. The entire AI industry is opposed to LAWS on ethical and practical grounds. The biggest drawback is the eventual availability to all actors of cheap LAWS, making conflict and escalation more likely. In 2017 Russell and some students made a scary YouTube video called Slaughterbot to demonstrate the future potential of LAWS. Russian commentators dismissed the technology as 30 years away. A Turkish firm built one 3 weeks later.

Nonetheless he is optimistic about a comprehensive LAWS ban, citing treaties on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as land mines, blinding laser weapons, etc.

Lecture 3: AI in the economy

Most experts think AGI is a ‘plausible outcome within the next few decades’. JM Keynes postulated ‘technological unemployment’, but classical economists dismissed this as a Luddite fantasy. Russell disagrees, illustrating why with an ingenious paintbrush analogy. He describes the ‘wealth effect’ as automation makes things cheaper, but sees AGI pushing ‘virtually all sectors into decreased employment’. He acknowledges that wealth percolates up and doesn’t trickle down, increasing inequality: ‘I don’t know any near-term solution other than redistribution’.

Lecture 4: AI – A Future for Humans

The EU asked him if Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics could be made into law. He said they are illogical and unworkable. Instead he proposes three design principles:

The sole objective of any AI system must be the realisation of human preferences.

The machine can never assume that those preferences are fixed and known, it needs to ask (the uncertainty principle). It must always allow itself to be switched off, in case it is the problem.

Machines should rely not just on what some humans say (they may be mistaken, or bad actors) but also on general human behaviour, and written records.

Russell thinks businesses will have a strong financial interest in following these principles, to avoid bad press and payouts after a disaster. But they also have a ‘first mover’ incentive, hence the need for defining codes of conduct.

Cooking the Books: Lights Out (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arising out of our review in February of Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, in which he mentions companies like Tesla ‘pushing toward “lights out” production, in which fully automated work processes, no longer needing human hands, can run in the dark’, a reader has asked:

‘How can a production facility without human labour power (variable capital), as the only commodity capable of adding surplus value in production, possibly be profitable?'

Although in Marx’s day a ‘lights out’ factory was not an issue, it is an extreme case of something that he did consider when, in chapters 8-10 of volume III of Capital, he dealt with the emergence of an average rate of profit which all capital would tend to make.

Our reader is correct. Labour power, when activated, is the only source of surplus value, and so of the profits capitalist enterprises make. Thus Marx called the capital invested in buying it ‘variable’ capital as its value ‘varied’, increased in size, in the course of the production process. The value of the capital invested in plant, machinery, materials, power, etc was transferred unchanged into the value of the product; so Marx called it ‘constant’ capital.

But there was a problem. Assuming that the productivity of all labour power was the same in that any given amount produced the same amount of surplus value, this would mean that industries using more would make a larger profit than those employing less.

To illustrate this point Marx compared five different industries with different average combinations of constant and variable capital. Two will suffice to illustrate his point: one 60 constant and 40 variable; the other 90 constant and 10 variable. The surplus value produced in the first would be 40 and in the second 10, meaning that, if each retained the surplus value produced in it, the rate of profit in the first would be 40 percent and in the second 10 percent.

However, this is not what happens. Industries with a lower proportion of variable capital do not make less profits and, if they did, there would be no incentive for capitalist enterprises to adopt the less labour-intensive, more technologically advanced production methods that is one of capitalism’s observable tendencies.

What happened, Marx explained, was that, as capital flowed into the industries producing more surplus value and out of those producing less, this led to changes in amounts produced and their price that meant in the end that capital of the same size invested in any industry would tend to make the same rate of profit. It was as if all the surplus value produced was pooled and shared out in proportion to the size of the total capital (constant plus variable) invested. In our example, with the total capital invested of 200 and total surplus value produced of 50, the rate of profit in both industries would be 25 percent.

As Marx put it,

  ‘However an industrial capital may be composed, whether a quarter is dead labour and three-quarters living labour, or whether three-quarters is dead labour and only a quarter sets living labour in motion, so that in the one case three times as much surplus labour is sucked out, or surplus value produced, as in the other, ….in both cases it yields the same profit’. (Chapter 9, Penguin edition, p.270)

The same would apply to capital invested in a ‘lights out’ factory. The fact that it would be composed of 100 percent dead labour would be irrelevant; it would still tend to attract the same rate of profit as any other industrial capital of the same size, despite not contributing anything to the pool of surplus value as it did not use any value-producing, living labour.

Editorial: Don't Be Sidetracked By Automation (1956)

Editorial from the June 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 20-year-old word Automation, which was designed to describe automatic processes involving electronic devices but is how being loosely applied to any replacement of human labour by machinery, is being used to divert workers' attention from the matters that ought to concern them. What matters to the workers of all countries, and ought to receive their undivided attention, is not what kinds of machines are used to turn out goods but who owns the machines and who owns the goods. If we lived in a system of society based upon common ownership of the means of production and distribution nobody would have cause to fear the introduction of more efficient methods. No individual would suffer hardship through the abolition of his job and all people would gain through the greater production of wealth. But all countries in the world operate Capitalism and it is Capitalism not the machines that creates the problems and hardships for the men and women who work the machines. This aspect is entirely ignored by all except Socialists.

Many defenders of Capitalism, worried by the resistance organised workers are showing to the new production methods, are trying to counter it by stories of the better times that will come after the hardships. The Daily Mail in an editorial (3 May, 1956), had the following about what it calls the spirit of "anti-automation": -

  "It results from fear of the robot—the thought that men skilled and unskilled alike, will become redundant when their work can be done by the press-button and the electronic brain. We must all sympathise with this feeling.

  "In the long run automation will mean a stupendous rise in standards of living."

There is no evidence whatever to justify this promise of a stupendous rise in standards of living for the workers. In the first place there is no evidence that automation will do more than increase somewhat the past small annual increase of powers of production—a point that will be dealt with further. But even if automation did vastly increase the efficiency of production that would not give any guarantee that the workers would benefit, for the products do not belong to the workers who produce them, but to the Capitalists who own the plant and factories.

What if anything the workers get out of increased production depends on their ability to back up their demands with effective struggle. Employers will not in the future, any more than in the past, give higher wages merely because output and profits are rising.

In this country the bait is held out that automation will enable the manufacturers to produce more cheaply and sell more cheaply and thus gain new or widened markets for British goods. But every other country is developing the new methods too, and in each country the workers are being told the same story. Cheaper British cars will meet in the world market the competition of cheaper cars from U.SA, Germany, France, Russia, and all the other producers, so automation if it led to all-round cheapening would solve no problem and alter nothing. In actual fact it is by no means certain that it will lead to cheaper cars but cheapness is not all. Another of its purposes is to enlarge the output and quicken production—which is not necessarily the same thing as to cheapen it. But it is of vital importance to manufacturers to get their new models on the market with minimum delay and thus get the cream of the market ahead of competitors. A contributor to the Financial Times (10/5/56) describing the £4,000,000 new tractor plant of Standard Motors says, "it does not follow that the new tractor will be relatively cheaper," for against some expected saving of labour in the works has to be set the great cost of the new plant.

In the motor industry, battles for supremacy and survival are being fought inside America and Britain, and internationally with other competitors. Automation is a weapon in the struggle, but the struggle is a typical feature of the way Capitalism operated long before this latest of the technical developments. It should not be forgotten that the tens of thousands of unsold cars that led to workers being put on short time in Britain, and the 900,000 unsold cars that have had similar consequences in U.S.A, were not to any extent the consequence of automation: they were the normal results of over-production in face of a falling demand.

On the experience America has already had with automation an article in the Economist (5 May, 1956) has some interesting things to say. In chemicals automation has led to real economies of production and “ here automation pays already; and pays well.” The same is true of the steel industry, “but in most cases, particularly in the automobile and electrical industries, automation means that machines have become bigger and more expensive and that there are more of them.”

The article goes on:—

  "In the newer production industries, automation has come to stay and probably to predominate. This is not at all the same thing as saying that automation has begun to pay. When the giant machines and automatic transfer devices arrive in one plant, its competitors feel compelled to get them as well to secure the same increases in the pace and capacity of their output. But the suspicion is growing in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland that, in spite of its speed, automation is very expensive.”

  “Automation does reduce direct labour costs but not always proportionately, since the remaining operators have to be more highly-skilled. In addition, most firms are finding that the ‘automated’ lines require large numbers of maintenance men, who must be first-class technicians."

The writer in the Economist adds one wry comment about the attitude of the trade unions:—

  "If any net saving in labour costs remains, the trade unions have made it clear that they expect this gain to be paid out as higher wages to the remaining workers. In some cases, therefore, the savings anticipated when the machinery was ordered may prove illusory.”

We can say that that trade union attitude is more sensible than passively accepting whatever the employers want to dictate but it is not at all sensible in relation to the real need of our age, that of getting rid of this cut-throat, wasteful and war-producing system of society so that greater powers of production will harm no-one and will benefit all.

Pathfinders: Socialist Robots . . . (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Robots . . .

In Rossum’s Universal Robots (1921), the best workers are the cheapest ones with the fewest needs, who know only how to work, have no humanity, remember everything but think of nothing new. In fact, they are Robots, humanoids genetically engineered for a life of drudgery, as the Czech word ‘robota’ indicates. Although the concept of artificial humans goes back much further than Čapek’s play, it is since his work that ideas of mechanical men and women created to serve humanity have really taken off, and increasingly are no longer restricted to film, TV and literature.

Modern robots, however, have little in common with Čapek’s. Bolted to the floor, they are computer-controlled mechanical arms capable of such tasks as painting, welding, riveting, loading and stacking, and are seen in increasing numbers throughout the manufacturing industry. Whether they should be classed as robots is debatable, for they fail utterly to resemble what we commonly understand to be a robot; that is, a mechanical human.

Such robots have been in development for some time, particularly in Japan. ASIMO, for example, is Honda’s 4-foot tall humanoid robot which can walk, run, climb stairs and respond to fifty different Japanese phrases. Sony’s QRIO can connect wirelessly to the internet and get up should it fall. And Toyota’s ‘Partner’ robot can inflate its mechanical lungs, purse its artificial lips and play the trumpet (The Economist Technology Quarter, March 12th 2005). But that’s about all they can do, and as yet are a very long way from the C3POs, Datas, and Terminators of film and TV.

As we move toward socialism, and as technology advances, it is not unlikely that a sentient, humanoid robot capable of speech, thought, mobility, and invested with something of a personality (to ease communication with it and reinforce its ‘humanoid’ characteristics), will be created, should present trends continue. However, they could present something of a problem for socialism, for in a society where all people are considered equal, what relationship will we have with artificial people? Will organic humans be more equal than inorganic ones?

Naturally, science-fiction has much to say on this subject. Isaac Asimov’s robots, featured in many of his short stories and novels, are programmed to obediently serve humanity, even answering ‘master’ to humans, who often address them as ‘boy’. This slave class stands in complete contrast to the ruling class which robots have evolved to become in Philip K Dick’s dystopian futures, and are so lifelike that they cannot be distinguished from human beings. Indeed, there are certain strands of evolutionary theory which suggest that inorganic life will achieve superiority over organic life so that the machine – if machine is the right word – may indeed become the dominant life form.

Although Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy, noted that machinery ‘is intended to cheapen commodities’ and ‘is a means for producing surplus value’, the exploratory dynamic of science is not always suppressed by the confines and limitations of capitalism and humanoid robots may continue to be developed into socialism, even though they are hugely expensive and as yet have no practical applications. However, it’s unlikely that socialists would want a servant, machine or otherwise, to see to their needs, for it would clearly necessitate a master and servant relationship. And if robots were programmed with a consciousness, as well as the capacity to display emotive behaviour, we can assume it would be a socialist consciousness and would doubtless object to its servitude. If sentient humanoid robots are going to work at all, it must be alongside us and not for us. On the other hand, we may altogether abandon as unethical the project of replicating human life in machine form and concentrate solely on the non-humanoid form of robot.

It seems unlikely, though, that such machines could ever perform tasks with the dexterity, creativity and joy of human beings, and it may be counter-productive to invest the huge amounts of time and resources necessary to create phenomenally complex machines if they can only replicate the mundane work of Čapek’s originals. For a socialist society, humanoid robots may be breathtaking examples of human ingenuity, but little more. …

and Robochefs

Life hectic? Too much stress? Can’t be bothered to cook? Just go to your domestic organic recycler, tap in the code for ‘chicken and chips’, and the appropriate molecules are extracted from your underground organic waste vault (ugh) and reassembled into piping hot rosemary-flavoured poule et frites (yummy). What’s even better, as this ‘chicken’ never lived to suffer in the first place, vegetarians might like it too. Farfetched? Well, just a bit. This kind of molecular assembly, though theoretically possible, is several horizons beyond the current nanotechnology horizon, and at present only exists as the fabulous ‘food replicator’ seen on the Starship Enterprise.

With the Bush administration’s determination to get humans back into space and on their way to Mars via the International Space Station, one offshoot technology is exploring ways to make the food available to astronauts more interesting and varied (New Scientist, August 20). Since food ingredients in space have to have a long shelf-life without refrigeration, the challenge is to produce variety out of a limited repertoire. The new idea is to devise a mathematical language or ‘grammar’ to describe different foods, and then program a virtual food machine to synthesise or simulate these foods out of raw ingredients. While the feasibility of making such a machine compact enough for space flight is doubtful, with no restriction on size or number of ingredients the land-based potential is enormous. The machine could be programmed to develop its own recipes, perhaps by an evolutionary process, so that unthinkably interesting new foods could be born.

Pathfinders may sometimes give the impression that socialism will always take advantage of any labour-saving technology that capitalism happens to come up with, but in this particular case it may well do the opposite. While the drive to automate tedious, arduous or dangerous work is clearly worthwhile, what is more questionable is whether we would ever want to automate enjoyable social practices. Even if a machine could come up with a recipe we never thought of, would it be worth it? In capitalism, where cut-throat competition makes the buck more important than the buzz, speed, innovation and output are what matter. Capitalism is always ruining the fun in everything, so that people begin to perceive almost any creative activity as dreary work to be avoided, or given to machines. In socialism, with its conflation of work and play at the centre of the social ethic, there will be some things people will always prefer to do themselves, and for each other, without the robots taking over. Sex is definitely one. Maybe cooking is another.

Paddy Shannon

Far Eastern Notebook (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Year of the rabbit

Whilst the Japanese government tried to remedy its labour shortage by a January feasibility study on opening its labour market to foreign skilled and semi-skilled workers (except of course for the construction industry), Singapore has similar problems. Since the mid-sixties the government family planning campaign on hoardings, TV and in newspapers, to "Stop at Two" has borne fruit in a lowering fertility rate. One would have thought that this would have been cause for government self-congratulation as well as a good omen for the world which, we are continually told, is overpopulating itself to the point of self-starvation. But as socialists have always held, population laws are social not “natural", and in capitalism, are geared to the requirements of capital accumulation and profitability. As the Singapore Straits Times (8.1.88) put it, "Public officials, business executives and others were previously reported to be alarmed that continued low births would eventually damage the economy, retard progress in living standards and even threaten the nation's security". Hence the recent reversal of government policy replacing financial penalties for third births and more, with population incentives, although the sudden surge in births last year was attributed to its being the Chinese Year of the Rabbit.

The reversal of the policy and of the arguments used, does not seem to have damaged the government’s credibility. Of course, by the time a generation of home-grown workers reaches an exploitable age the labour market situation could well be reversed many times, and with it the arguments. But that is the capitalists' problem. That of the workers world-wide is to realise that in every country they are conjured into, and out of. existence like an obedient genie, to satisfy capitalism's need for factory and cannon fodder, and to totally reject this obscenity.


Our friend the robot

Robots in manufacturing are no longer news. But a new generation in the building construction industry is setting fresh standards of innovation in Japan. Modularised to handle the variety of tasks and situations found on site, these are commercially marketed as viable replacements for labour used in concrete pouring, plastering and the erection of the steel skeleton of buildings. Much is made of their safety function in a country with nearly a thousand deaths a year in the building industry, but the main motive, as with much machinery introduction, is replacement of skilled labour in short supply, which translates into higher labour costs and lost contracts.

In construction, the average age of the skilled worker is now over 40, an indication of one of the biggest headaches for the Japanese capitalist — its ageing workforce. With present labour demand high, the unions see retraining as an acceptable alternative for workers replaced by the robots. As Makoto Saito, assistant manager in Kajima, a large construction company said. "[Our workers] think that the robots are developed for their benefit”.

The higher demands of flexibility, adaptability, and robustness placed upon construction robots as opposed to those used in manufacturing, have prompted the Japanese Construction Ministry in association with research institutes, to develop new design and planning systems for construction to suit the limitations of robots and not of people. When this is done in ten years or so, and the robots' role becomes more general than a mere labour shortage stopgap, Japanese construction workers may be in a better position to see who are the beneficiaries.


ASEAN’s rising sun

This region’s non-event of 1987 was the December meeting of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) heads of government in Manila. The first for ten years, its official business took only eighteen minutes, and was mainly a demonstration of support for the Aquino government.

The role of Japan, a non-member, in the region, was highlighted by a report by the member states' Foreign Ministers. This expressed the fear that the reduction of USA involvement in the region was allowing a more prominent role for Japan militarily. In particular it points out that Japan's announcement that it is prepared to protect the sea-lanes of communication as far as one thousand miles from Tokyo, and the increase of its defence budget to beyond one per cent of its GNP has raised some concern among the ASEAN member states. Another committee stated that Japan would strive to achieve a military back-up for its dominant economic might. This mood was not dissipated even after the summit, when Japan's Prime Minister Takeshita presented ASEAN with a US$2 billion aid offer (later tied to joint Japanese participation) and, almost contritely, referred to Japan's "deplorable history of the last war” and its present rejection of the path to military power. Japan's recent warning shots at a Russian Badger bomber in its airspace, the first such incident despite many similar incursions since the war, and the knowledge that its self-defence force contains 270,000 people, 1100 tanks, 50 modern destroyers and fourteen submarines, as well as hundreds of combat aircraft could have been to blame. Perhaps ASEAN is beginning to realise that its Manila Declaration aim to produce a nuclear weapon-free zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality in its region will founder on the hard realities of its own world of national and commercial rivalries.


Profit or loss of liberty

Little has been heard of Laos since the 1975 takeover by the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party. But what we did learn from those admirers of this particular brand of state capitalism, was that it was busy building "socialism" with the aid and advice of its comrades in Vietnam. The Far Eastern Economic Review (31 December 1987) quotes Suthin, manager of a plastics factory: "Under the new policies the government won't tie our hands and our feet. We're free to run our own business, but we're expected to make a profit". If the factory loses money "and the manager doesn’t have a good reason, he'll be thrown in jail".

Pathfinders: Crystal ball gazing (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prediction is very difficult, the great physicist Niels Bohr once observed, especially about the future. Future trends in economics and geopolitics may be difficult to map out, but surely nothing is harder than attempting to guess what’s going to happen in the realms of science and technology in the next thirty years. Nevertheless, the UK Ministry of Defence has had a go. Within the broad sweep of their hundred page strategy document (see The Military Are Not That Unintelligent, page 14) the MoD’s think-tank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) includes an illuminating discussion on probable developments across the range of applied science, together with its implications for society and social stability.

The most substantial developments, according to the DCDC, will be in the fields of nano and biotech, energy, cognitive science, and the universe of communications, network and sensor technology that comes under the general heading of ICT. Nanotechnology has so far failed to produce any ‘wow’ factors, being still in the low foothills of an Everest of development, but it has nevertheless turned out some pretty useful materials, from sun creams that don’t turn white to carbon-fibre compounds that are both lighter and stronger than steel and which will be used in everything from electronics to aircraft. As an enabling technology, it is predicted to underpin breakthroughs in computing, biology, chemistry and physics. Biotechnology, uniquely vulnerable to ethical, religious and political disputes, may see advances in disease control, customized drug treatments, stem-cell and gene therapy, age limitation or reversal, bionic and biochip implants and human-computer interfaces, memory and intelligence enhancing drugs, and revolutions in food production.

The controversies over stem-cell research and GM crops are of course old news, but now there is a growing debate about drugs that make you smarter (look up Modafinil or see Drugs May Boost Your Brain). Should we take them, or are we merely making ourselves into harder-working super-proles with enhanced durability and XXL productivity, and all for the same wages as before? The answer to both questions is: probably. The limitations on capitalist exploitation are that we get worn out and die too fast, and the rich could get a lot richer with our continued labours into a second century of living, however, if the DCDC’s predictions for cognitive science are anything to go by, we won’t have a choice, because we’ll be up against machinery that’s soon going to be as smart as we are. As they put it: “ Soft Artificial Intelligence is already well established with self diagnosing and self reconfiguring networks in use and self repairing networks likely in the next 10 years. Mapping of human brain functions and the replication of genuine intelligence is possible before 2035 (p.59, original emphasis.) Just imagine, robo-workers you don’t even have to pay. Or worse, soldiers you can’t kill, demoralise or turn off. In among the section on future military battlebots, aerial drones, microspies and other products of the MoD boffins’ preoccupation with violence, we find an uncomfortable marriage of AI to super-advanced battlefield hardware. While US troops have for some time been testing prosthetic enhancements that make them as strong as ten men, the future of warfare as described here does not involve humans at all – at least not on the side that can afford these autonomous proto-Terminators.

But perhaps it won’t be that bad, as the DCDC recognizes that any extreme military or other technical advantage by one power may be undermined by the leakage of secrets, perhaps by scientists themselves keen to preserve a ‘level playing field’. If everybody gets the Terminators, and they just slug it out between themselves without involving any real humans, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing at all. Ah well, some hope.

So, are they right? Yes and no. They’re right in that all or most of these things are possible, and they’ve covered all the bases as they see them. At one farthest extreme they speculate on a lasting technological ceiling which will not be broken until various disparate strands of development conjoin, but the possibility of a Kursweil-like ‘Singularity’ event, one so explosive that it launches a scientific and social revolution, remains off their radar. At the other extreme they envisage a reaction to globalisation leading to greater cultural conservatism, with science throttled by economic protectionism leading to a global economic downturn, but they do not entertain any more extreme scenarios, such as the rise of a powerful religious fundamentalist anti-science lobby, or an anti-globalisation retreat into luddite neo-medievalism. There is no consideration of the raging debate about patent laws and their ambiguous role in innovation, on the one hand supposedly stimulating it, on the other, most certainly stifling it.

And did they miss anything? They only missed what you’d expect them to miss, firmly rooted as they are in the authoritarian assumptions of the government ministry of which they are a part. World social organisation to them is a question of which set of rulers has their hands on the gadgets. Thus, cheap technology may be acquired by terrorists and rogue states in order to blow up or poison innocent civilians, but it does not occur to the DCDC to ask what those innocent civilians themselves might do with this technology. Although other parts of the report mutter darkly about a resurgence of Marxism, it is clear that they have in mind the authoritarian, doctrinaire parody which existed in the Soviet era, and there is no indication that the writers suspect that ‘ordinary people’, as opposed to rulers, might start punching their weight in the decision-making process, and that governments might for the first time find themselves on the back foot. Of course, people may not take advantage of the information revolution to effect a personal and social revolution that destroys the power of the owning class and sets the human race free to manage its own future. However, the DCDC may well be overestimating the power of states to keep control amid this tidal wave of ‘enabling’ technology, and they may also be underestimating the ingenuity and collective strength of those same ‘ordinary people’ who increasingly do not see the need for capitalism at all – especially if they’ve all been knocking back the get-smart pills.

Paddy Shannon

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

Robots at your service (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We are entering into a second industrial revolution, the era of automation. This time it is not man’s muscles that are to be replaced and extended but rather man's brains 

Though the above statement appeared in a book published in 1952, the underlying sentiment is not altogether modern. The chilling thought of man the creator threatened by his own creation is echoed for example in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, published in 1817.

But the early nineteenth century was the era of the Luddite riots when workers protested not against automation—the word was first coined in 1946 by Del Harder, an executive with the Ford Motor company—but mechanisation. In the 1950s however, when a survey was carried out in Detroit asking people whom or what they feared most, automation came second in the list behind ‘‘the Russians.” But what exactly is automation and what is the nature of the threat it is supposed to represent? In an article in the New Scientist (12/2/81) Peter Marsh explained.

  Every activity has three essential elements: power, action and control. When control is exercised by a mechanical device it is called automatic or self-acting.
  An example is the pressure cooker (invented in 1680). But automatic is not the same as automated. For something to be described as automated requires that it has at least one of three additional features. It must firstly make use of a “systems approach” whereby things are made by passing them through successive stages of a manufacturing process without human intervention. Secondly, the device must be programmable, that is, able to do more than one kind of job. And finally, it must have the capacity to receive and process feedback information through sensors to adjust its routine according to changes that occur around it.

On the basis of this analysis Marsh defines three broad technological revolutions that have taken place over some two and a half centuries (roughly the time capitalism has been in existence).

The first of these was the Machine Revolution (1750-1860). It brought about big advances in both the “action” and “power” elements of activities such as textile manufacture. Next came the Scientific Revolution (1880-1920) characterised by the growth of science-based industries such as chemicals and electrical goods. It was followed after the second world war by the Computer Revolution which has greatly extended, and is continually extending, control over the processes of manufacturing.

Some indication of the tremendous strides that have taken place in the world of computers can be seen from the following:

  One authority has observed that the first computer sold in 1950 filled a room yet it is now possible to buy a micro-computer with a lot more capacity which is 30,000 times smaller. At the same time the cost in 1950 adjusted to present values was £1 million, whilst the equivalent micro-computer today is £200. Because there are no components there is very little to go wrong and thus the possibilities of failures and breakdown which cannot quickly be restored by replacing the relatively cheap silicon chip, are very small. The micro-computer is therefore very reliable. (Management Accounting May 1981)

The job of a computer is to interpret a series of binary digits, which in the earliest computers were represented by cumbersome and inefficient thermionic valves, which were superseded by the electronic switch or transistor. Yet a further development was the integrated circuit, which enables all the electronic components of a whole computer to be contained on a tiny wafer of silicon: the silicon chip or micro-processor. But already a successor is within sight: the Josephson circuit, which will make computing thousands of times faster by utilising the super-conductivity of certain materials at temperatures near absolute zero.

In the fifties the first “automation scare” was at its height. Subsequently, concern subsided only to reappear recently. Last year, for example, a confidential Labour Party policy document captured the headlines by arguing for a “socialist planned economy” (more state managed capitalism) to meet the challenge of the micro-chip.

But what justification is there for this renewed concern? Marsh offers four reasons why “1980-style automation will have a bigger effect on work than the first computer controlled factories”. The first is the growth in the number of computers. In 1960 there were a mere 10,000. Today there are around 700,000 “big” computers costing more than £10,000 as well as tens of millions of smaller ones based on micro-processors.

Secondly, the technical advances in micro-electronics have enormously increased the versatility and scope of computer technology. The significance of the chip is in its size: it is not only cheap and fast (messages don’t have far to travel) but can be used in places where a computer could not be accommodated before. As a result the purpose of computers is no longer simply to store, manipulate, retrieve and organise masses of statistical information. Increasingly they are used in control, monitoring, regulation and automation.

The emergence of the industrial robot neatly illustrates the point. A robot is defined as a mechanical arm which is controlled by a computer. Of the 8000 world robot population in 1980 almost all were “first generation”—big, clumsy, expensive devices used mainly for such work as welding and paint spraying. The newer lightweight “second generation” robots now being produced can manipulate items with amazing precision. An example is the PUMA made by an American company, Unimation, which costs £20.000 and can position things to within 0.1mm.

One reason robots have hitherto made little headway in Britain is the low wages here compared to mainland Europe. As an article in the Guardian explained: “We are in a curiously inverted trap; low labour costs depress the necessity to use advanced technology which in turn decreases the rate of development of technology itself.” (22/11/79). And as the same article pointed out, Britain does not have an overfull order book nor an insufficient workforce to cope with it. Not that the absence of an “overfull order book” signifies that people's needs have been satisfied; true to its absurd and contradictory nature, capitalism is in a slump, intensifying the poverty it compels workers to endure in an age of potential plenty.

But the growing dexterity of robots together with their declining costs in relation to labour costs, make them an increasingly attractive proposition. Indeed, according to statistics from the US car industry, the total cost of the human worker is now $19 an hour while that of a robot is $5.40 an hour (Guardian 19/5/ 81.) And there is another factor to take into account. While automated equipment may work all the anti-social hours an employer may want and not go on strike, it does have a drawback; it cannot be sacked should the state of the market render its loyal services redundant.

To some extent this disadvantage has receded with the advent of the robot. Hitherto, it was mainly the biggest firms with funds to match, involved in the mass production of thousands of items in a single production run, who could afford to automate. The equipment is normally unprogrammable, designed to carry out a fixed routine.

Not so with the robot, which can be programmed to make a variety of products. This means that automation need no longer be restricted to mass production by the economies of scale. Using the same robot—which is within the price range of of even small firms—the automation of small-scale “batch production" has become a distinct possibility, allowing the manufacturer to rapidly switch to a different product should the need arise.

The implications of such flexibility are significant. According to the Economist (24/3/78), “ . . . over four fifths of the world's manufactured products are still made in batch lots of between 10 and 50 units usually at a cost of at least five times that of a mass produced item". The automation of batch manufacture will also be made easier by the chip based computerised scheduling of changes in the raw materials needed.

Moreover the potential scope of robot applications is growing. Recently, the Japanese Industrial Robot Association reported that there are more than 100 products. among them freezers, calculators and TV sets, now assembled by human factory workers that could be made by existing robots which can “see". (New Scientist 12/6/80). As for the future, Joe Engelberger, president of Unimation, has estimated that “. . . the next generation of robots-mobile, multi-armed, understanding speech, talking and with rudimentary vision and a finer sense of touch — would be around for practical use in about three years time.” (Guardian 19/5/ 81)

The impression that may have been gained, that the drive to automate will spell a massive loss in jobs, needs to be put in perspective. Though the increased use of computer technology will entail a certain amount of job loss, its application will open up new areas of work—for example in software (programming). This is shown by the increasing ratio of software to hardware costs which were 2:1 in 1973 and are forecast to be 10:1 by 1985. Mass unemployment is not the result of technological progress but is a feature of capitalism in a depression. The bleak outlook for the world's economy is another reason for Marsh's concern over automation. The growth rate in the seventies was roughly half that of the sixties. This, argues Marsh, “decreased the opportunities for governments to create and pay out of taxation, the jobs in services that did much to absorb the people squeezed out of manufacturing over the past 20 years.”

The suggestion here that automation will serve to exacerbate the problem needs to be examined in the light of the circumstances that persuade or dissuade an employer to automate. Under capitalism the direction, pace and extent of technological innovation is dictated not by human need or conscious will, but by the prospect of profit. Without profit production grinds to a halt, irrespective of the needs of people or the degree of technical sophistication employed.

Another characteristic of capitalism is its basic instability. Unplanned, it moves in continuous cycles of market expansion and contraction. Though a boom cannot be sustained indefinitely neither is there such a thing as a permanent slump. Marsh observes that the effects of new technology on the labour force will be far less marked when it is introduced at times of increasing demand for goods than when demand is falling. But in a recession when much existing technology is often underused, the incentive to introduce new technology will be considerably less anyway than at a time of rising demand, when firms strive to increase output and offset the increased cost of labour power.

If the decline in manufacturing industry is irreversible, runs the argument, future employment would have to be found increasingly in the service industries if mass unemployment is to be averted. Ironically, the pessimistic view of the effects of new technology on work is centred more on service than manufacturing:

  The information occupations (secretaries, typists, clerks managers) are thought to amount to 65 per cent of the working population so that even moderate improvements in productivity could bring about unemployment levels in the region of 10 to 20 per cent unless offset by compensatory increases in demand in these and other activities. By comparison, the impact of new technology on employment in manufacturing is expected to be relatively small. The overall consequences are said to be comparable with the industrial revolution. (New Scientist 26/4/79)

An example of “improved productivity" would be the truly paperless office, a vital requirement of which would be a practical electronic method of filing documents quickly and cheaply. Philips have already developed a prototype system called Megador which achieves the necessary speed—it can read and store an A4 page in one second and retrieve any document in 5 seconds—but is regarded as too expensive for all but the largest firms (New Scientist 23/4/81) Twenty years ago in America Congressman Adam Powell launched an official investigation into “the impact of automation on employment” with a warning that “the Frankenstein of automation has come closer to us”. If ever there was a case of mistaken identity it is this. That the elimination of drudgery and the increases in productivity that automation makes should come to be seen as a threat is an indictment of the society we live in.

Machines are neither masterful nor submissive. It is men and women, having or lacking possession of the means of wealth production, who relate to each other in this way. Capitalism is the monster we ought to fear and hate. Who can regard a system that perverts technology into a means of inflicting global destruction with anything but apprehension? Who can say that such a system is efficient, when so much of its productive effort does not satisfy the needs of people?

Thanks to the computer revolution we are potentially better able now than ever before to organise effectively the socialist production and distribution of wealth. All that stands in the way is an increasingly outdated social system.

Robin Cox

Editorial: A World of Abundance (2019)

Editorial from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a lot of chatter about artificial intelligence and robots replacing workers in the workplace. Not everyone shares the anxiety about the potential threat of massive job losses. Some see this as an opportunity to bring about a different society where robots can perform all the menial jobs leaving humans free to pursue their hobbies and interests and lead a more fulfilling life. They are advocates of what is known as Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC).

Their argument is that developments in technology have created the possibility of a ‘post-scarcity’ society, where there will be abundance for all. They understand that present-day capitalist society cannot deliver this, as production is limited by what can be sold profitably, and that a fundamental change in society is required. One that provides for human needs rather than the profits for the few

However, we are not in agreement with everything they say. In a Guardian article (18 May 2015) Aaron Bastani, a prominent advocate of FALC, calls for ‘ a 10- or 12-hour working week’ and ‘a guaranteed social wage’, which implies that work will still be defined by employment and a monetary system would continue to exist. In socialism, however, work would be freed from the restrictions of wage labour and everyone would have free access to what they need and money would be redundant. It is only under capitalism where we are compelled to make profits for an employer that work becomes drudgery.

It is not just in the last few years that technological developments have made possible a society of abundance. This potential was achieved sometime in the early years of the twentieth- century when the world market was established.

The FALC advocates also seem to confuse abundance with luxury. Bastani calls for ‘Cartier for everyone, MontBlanc for the masses and Chloe for all’. (‘Britain Doesn’t Need More Austerity, It Needs Luxury Communism’, 12 June 2015, www.vice.com). For us, abundance is where everyone can live a fulfilling life free from poverty, not that they will necessarily own a Cartier watch. Under capitalism, people who can afford it acquire these luxury items so as to flaunt their superior status. In a society of genuine social equality, this will make no sense.

In the 1970s there were similar fears that the introduction of the microchip would create mass unemployment. In fact, this did not happen as the new computer technology brought forth new skills. Computer programmers were required to write the computer software and engineers were needed to maintain the hardware. Likewise, the new robots will need skilled workers to program and maintain them, though the extent of this is still debated along with the net effect on unemployment and part-time employment. Increases in unemployment so far have mainly been due to market conditions, rather than the application of new technology.

Bastani, who claims to be influenced by Marx, should know that capitalism cannot replace all human labour with machines. Robots and computers cannot create surplus value, from which profit is derived. Only human labour can.

It is encouraging that, after all the years when it has been accepted that there is no alternative to free market capitalism, groups and individuals are discussing possible alternatives, and in the process have rescued the terms communism and socialism from their toxic association with the state capitalist dictatorships.

The Shape of Things to Come (1950)

From the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

An American invention, “Maddida,” the mechanical foreman, may open the way to robot factories, producing goods without human help, according to its inventor.

Maddida—its name is short for “magnetic drum digital differential analyses”—is a computing device which can take information from other machines, interpret it, and run the machines, says Reuter from New Brunswick.

Mr. Heyd Steele, 31-year-old physicist, who showed the machine at Rutgers University, said Maddida could do the work of a full aircraft crew, and handle 4,500 additions to eight-place decimals per second, working to an accuracy of one part in a million.

Maddida is the size of a pin-table. If the foreman should go wrong, a robot “doctor,” also shown at Rutgers, can diagnose the trouble. The above was a news item in South Wales Evening Post (29.3.50).

This news should be most encouraging for the unemployed, for would-be foremen, and other aspirants for promotion.

However, under a condition of Socialism such inventions will be welcomed.

Then each labour-saving device will mean more leisure for the community, and not, as now, longer dole queues, or other pleasantries of Capitalism.

P. J. Mellor.

Will Robots Cause Capitalism to Collapse? (2013)

From the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March the Socialist Party debated with Federico Pistono, the author of a book entitled Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy (reviewed in the March Socialist Standard). His argument is typical of many who think that the market-money-wages system we call capitalism is going to soon collapse as a result of the increasing pace of technological innovation leading to constantly growing mass unemployment. Peter Joseph, the founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, put it more dramatically in a TV interview the same month:

‘unemployment is a consequence of technology, entirely. The entire reason we have unemployment in America and across the world is explicitly based on the application of technology for cost efficiency. And this is not going to stop. And this will lead to what has been called by theorists the ‘contradiction of capitalism’, to the ultimate instability of our social system: the ability to produce more with less people and cheaper rates. It’s a complete clash of the system.’ (LINK).

A computer whizz-kid himself, Pistono describes various already-existing inventions that can displace humans in production, particularly due to advances in computer technology. Two he discusses in detail, because of their impact on relatively unskilled labour, are automatic vending machines (which would replace shop assistants) and driverless road vehicles (which would replace van and lorry drivers). He then asks why, if this is all possible, we are not seeing it:

 ‘Sounds futuristic? Every piece of technology needed for making this happen already exists, and has existed for many years. Then why is it not in place already?’

Good question. Why indeed?

Why machines are (and aren’t) introduced

When a machine is introduced in a particular production unit this reduces the number of workers (living labour) required there to produce the same goods or provide the same service. But, since the machine had to be produced by living labour, extra workers must have been taken on somewhere else to build it, so the question arises of whether the two effects on employment cancel each other out at the level of the economy as a whole.

At first, economists tried to argue that this was so but they soon recognised that they were mistaken and conceded that there would be a net reduction in the total level of employment, not as great as the number of workers displaced in the productive units affected but to a level less than previously. In other words, machines sack more workers than they take on.

Writing in 1821 not long after the Luddites had been smashing knitting machinery, David Ricardo concluded:

  ‘That the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy’(Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, third edition, Ch. 31).

He added that this reduction in total employment could, and normally would, be offset if the economy expanded as a result of new capital investment in some other field of activity. Marx, writing nearly fifty years later, agreed. This – the expansion of capitalist production – is the reason why the introduction of machinery in the past has not resulted in steadily increasing mass unemployment.

Marx made a further point about the introduction of machinery: for a machine to be genuinely ‘labour saving’ in the sense of reducing the total labour-time required to produce something from start to finish, ‘less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery.’ (Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15, section 2). By ‘labour’ Marx meant not simply ‘living labour’ or its immediate product but also the ‘dead labour’, the product of previous living labour, incorporated in the raw materials, energy, buildings and machinery used in production.

In a rationally-organised society based on the common ownership of productive resources so that production can be carried on to produce directly to satisfy human needs instead of for profit whether or not a machine did this would be the main criterion for deciding whether to apply it to production. Not all inventions of machines do displace more labour than would be required to produce them but, in a rationally-organised society, even machines falling into this category could be introduced if it was considered that the specific labour that would be replaced was considered dangerous, unhealthy or boring.

But this is not what happens under capitalism. Built-in to the capitalist system is a drag on the use of machines. As Marx went on to explain:

  ‘For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.’

Under capitalism the immediate product of living labour is divided into a part that the capitalist firm has to pay for (wages) and a part that it doesn’t pay for (surplus value, the source of profit). This means that under capitalism a machine that would genuinely save labour – the time society has to spend to produce something – would only be introduced if it also reduced the total labour that the capitalist firm had to pay for, i.e. the dead labour incorporated in the machine and materials plus the living labour it employs. If this is not the case, then the labour-saving machine will not be introduced, as to do so would reduce the amount of unpaid labour that the firm extracts, i.e. the source of its profits. In fact, the lower wages are, the less the incentive to apply labour-saving inventions, and vice versa.

Marx gave some concrete examples to illustrate that under capitalism there is a difference between invention and application:

  ‘Hence, the invention nowadays in England of machines that are employed only in North America, just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany for use exclusively in Holland, and just as many French inventions of the eighteenth century were exploited only in England … The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist.’

This is the answer to Pistono’s question as to why the futuristic labour-saving inventions he describes have not been used on a wide scale: capitalist firms are only interested in using machinery if it will reduce their costs of production, i.e. the labour (living and dead) that they have to pay for. They will not and do not introduce machines that will increase their costs of production, even if their use would reduce the total amount of labour required to produce them.

This is why, as long as capitalism lasts, the rate of the actual application of machinery to production will always be less than the rate at which labour-saving machines are invented. In this sense speculations such as Pistono’s about the rate at which inventions will increase (he claims, somewhat hyperbolically, that this will become exponential in the coming decades) is irrelevant. It is not this that will determine the rate at which inventions will be applied to production as the rate at which ‘robots will steal our jobs.’ That will depend on the rate at which they reduce the labour that a capitalist firm has to pay for, which will be considerably slower than the rate at which labour-saving machines are invented.

Under capitalism invention is one thing, application another. The mere invention of some labour-saving machine does not destroy jobs; only its application does.

Will history repeat itself?

The trouble with many theories of economic collapse is that, if they were true, they need to explain why capitalism has not already collapsed a long time ago. Pistono’s argument is no exception. He is aware of this, as he quotes one critic as exclaiming:

  ‘Have you ever heard of this discipline called history? We’ve gone through the same crap 150 years ago, and none of what you say has happened!’

It’s actually a good question. Mechanisation has been going on since the Industrial Revolution started in the eighteenth century (in fact, that’s what this was) but it has not resulted in steadily increasing unemployment. Pistono’s reply is that it will be different this time as in the past the pace of labour-saving technological inventions has never been as fast as it is today.

We have just seen that Pistono commits the fallacy of confusing technological invention with the application of inventions to production. Even so, as in the past mechanisation has not resulted in growing technological unemployment, since the capitalist system expanded to absorb this, a weaker version of Pistono’s contention might still be valid: that the rate at which machines are introduced (despite the restrictions on this under capitalism) might still be faster than capitalism can expand. In this case unemployment would still grow.

While capitalism does expand in the long run it does not expand, as everyone is agreed nowadays, in a straight upward-sloping line. It goes in fits and starts, booms and slumps, with each succeeding boom reaching a higher level of production and employment than the previous one.

Because capitalism grows in this way, it needs a pool of unemployed workers, which Marx called ‘the industrial reserve army of labour’, that capitalist firms can draw on quickly in a period of boom and who become unemployed again when the slump comes. So, unemployment rises and falls with the capitalist business cycle.

Pistono does not go as far as Peter Joseph and claim that all unemployment today is technological, but he does advance the increase in unemployment since 2007 as proof of his contention that the increasing application of modern technology is causing unemployment to grow.

Some of today’s unemployment will indeed be technological in the sense of being living labour displaced by machines and unable to find new employment because capitalism is not expanding (Ricardo’s worst case scenario), but most is cyclical, the result of capitalism currently being in one of its periods of slump. It is the industrial reserve army of labour returning to its slump level. Also, capitalist economists talk cynically about a ‘natural’ level of unemployment (the rate below which they say a rise in price level would result). So, by no means all unemployment today is technological; in fact, only a relatively small proportion will be.

Predictions of a continual increase in mass unemployment will only turn out to be true if capitalism does not recover from the present slump, and even then wouldn’t increase at the rate this hypothesis suggests. If it does recover then unemployment will fall.

So the question can be reformulated as: Will capitalism recover from the slump or will unemployment go on increasing until the system collapses? Both past experience and the theory of how capitalism works based on this suggest that capitalism will eventually recover, however long it takes and however hard workers have to be squeezed. There is no way of knowing, though, exactly how long it will take.

In any event, capitalism will have to be ended by the conscious action of people who want to replace it by a system where the resources of the planet have become the common heritage of all. Then, there will no longer be any barrier to the robotisation of repetitive and boring jobs. Then, robots will ‘steal our jobs’ much more quickly than today and that will be OK, as there will be no harmful side-effects since access to what people need to live and enjoy life won’t be tied to working for a wage or salary. As Marx put it, ‘the field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in bourgeois society.’

Adam Buick