Unless there are
slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and
contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong,
insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of
the machine, the future of the world depends. – Oscar Wilde
An article
in the New York Times last week made note of the lower mobility in
the work force: “Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their
peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been
widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass
unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward
center stage”. So add another to the economic woes; not only
unemployment, but less mobility if you are employed.
There is less mobility in the work force because the computers are
not simply displacing jobs, they are taking out the middle.
Computers are good at routine cognitive tasks in the middling
white-collar range, the desk jobs, the jobs that require keeping track
of things, making arithmetic calculations. They are not so good at motor tasks,
the blue collar jobs that require coordination, manual dexterity and
sense-of-the-world adjustments. Computers can crunch numbers but they
can't drive a truck or make up a hotel room. When it comes to
computers taking on human tasks, as Steven
Parker notes, the hard problems are easy and the easy problems
are hard.
Because they take out the middle, it is
a lot harder to pursue the American dream by working your way up the
ladder. Climbing up rung by rung, you will find a machine staring
down. And it won't retire or move up the ladder to make room for
you. Once in place, a retirement or promotion is not going to
happen, it isn't going to be opening up a spot.
Futurists have seen this coming for
along time, sort of. As automation got started, they saw robots
taking over the manufacturing tasks and our day-to-day activities
(serving us our dinner and the like), leaving people to do other
things – leisure activities or getting jobs making the robots.
Futurists always get it wrong because they take the present and
multiply it by some number to get the future, and they have the
essence of the issue wrong here as well. Although there are robots in
industry, the biggest effect of computer technology is in an the area no
futurist imagined. It is not improving the production of industrial
goods, it is supplying the increasing demand for virtual goods. So
the picture is not one of producing what we have always produced, but
doing it with less labor, it is that we now want things produced that
have not been produced in the past, and those things by their nature
require less labor. That is, we are meeting the computers halfway by
increasing our demand for the very things that they do best.
Ironically, even as they effect a widening of economic classes, robots, computers and automation are answering the bane of the industrial revolution, freeing many from the mind-numbing, routine jobs of the specialized factory floor that Marx reviled against as the source of worker subjugation and alienation. (Along with many of the modern-day clerical equivalents). The problem is that we are not seeing enough new, more productive and satisfying jobs rolling down the pike. So we might be seeing an end to worker alienation, but we also are seeing an end to work.
We have had an axiomatic view that when
technology uproots us from jobs it opens up new ones, and the new
ones are even better in pay and in job satisfaction. After all,
somebody has to make all those robots. It is a comforting thought,
but it is not really an axiom, perhaps just a lucky result
that has obtained over the course of the industrial age. There was
always a West where the workers could go, an expanding population,
undeveloped countries, and new products and demand. The same may
continue, but it doesn't look like it is.
Which sort of makes sense if we are
moving toward living in a virtual world with virtual industry taking
on increasing prominence, and with those industries not particularly
labor intensive (or for that matter capital intensive – at least
nothing like the era of steel and railroads), or not labor
intensive for those with motor as opposed to cognitive skills. We
aren't thinking too much about this right now. We focus on running
out of resources, not on running out of new markets, more specifically new markets – both of new consumers and new products – that bring
as many new jobs with them as are being displaced by machines.
(Though this is all starting to get attention, for example in recent
books by Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and by Tyler
Cowen).
The Outsourcing Masses
Though we are not as unemployed as we
might think. We just are not being paid for our work. Much of what
we enjoy from our technological progress is a new sort of
outsourcing. How much time do you spend on things that are made
easier and that you now do for yourself with the help of computers? You
do them now because computers have made it possible for you to do them. You take care
of your appointments and a lot of the service issues, you get
yourself directed via various phone prompts. You don't employ anyone when you do these things.The book “The 4-Hour Workweek” suggested, among other things, outsourcing day-to-day
tasks to people in India. But the largest area of outsourcing is not
to India, Sri Lanka or China. Our jobs are being outsourced to us.
The jobs are moving from the producer to the consumer side of the
ledger. And some of that work comes as the guise of entertainment.
How much of your work is being done as you do your e-mails and surf
the web, keep yourselves busy with your apps as you commute to work?
So it is not only that computers are replacing workers, they are
turning consumers into unpaid workers.
Bifurcation and classes
In the earlier epochs of history, we
find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into
various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome
we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,
feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs;
in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The
modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has
simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes,
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. – Karl
Marx
Slave and Master
for the Romans, Lord and Vassal in Feudal times, Bourgeoisie and
Proletariat for the industrial capitalists. What is emerging now?
Because computers allow us to lever our creativity and cognitive work
in the same way that capital plant allowed those in the industrial
revolution to lever their production of real goods, perhaps , as
Murray
and Herrnstein hypothesized when they proclaimed the emergence of
a new “cognitive elite”, class division will increasingly be
based on education and intelligence.
But although a bifurcation is occurring in
jobs, the opposite is occurring in consumption. Granted those on the
lower rungs spend more of their income on the consumption of real
goods than do those on the top rungs. And the share of income on
goods that by nature are in limited supply, like land, wine and art,
even social status, is obviously greater for the top rungs than for
the lower. But for both, consumption is increasingly oriented toward
virtual goods – consuming YouTube videos, tweets and social
networks, games and reality TV shows. These take little in terms of
labor – or for that matter, capital – to produce. And the labor
that is required is largely supplied by us as the consumers. Another
instance of outsourcing.
And one notable area of consumption
that by definition differentiates the classes, that of conspicuous
consumption, is going by the wayside. Yes, I believe we are seeing
the twilight of the era of conspicuous consumption. Not that Gucci and
Chanel are going to go out of business, but for most people that sort
of status statement is increasingly becoming irrelevant. No matter what you
are wearing and driving, a far better picture of you and your status
is just a few clicks away. You don't have to drive a Ferrari to let
everyone know you are rich and successful. If you are driving a
Ferrari, what it will convey is that you – who as everyone who
cares to Google you knows is running a hedge fund and is worth tons
of money – must like a Ferrari.
"A Demon Of Our Own Design"
"The End Of Theory"
