Technology and the Future of Work

With the recent rise of machine learning and large language models, there is renewed interest in technological unemployment, that is, the displacement of jobs through the introduction of labour-saving devices. It is widely acknolwedged that technology causes short-term unemployment in a particular sector, the suggestion that it causes long-term unemployment has been largely considered fallacious; jobs lost to technology leads to increased productivity, lower real prices, and higher aggregate wages. Despite these historical examples, it is argued that new technologies are replacing employment without replacement in new sectors, ultimately trending toward the abolition of work. In our current political economy, a less than optimal vision of the future is presented, and alternatives must be explored.

Technology and Social Relations

There has been recognition of the role of technology, employment, and political economy for many centuries. Aristotle's Politics (325BCE) includes the following: "... a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments. For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus which, says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves".

Following Aristotle, Marx explicitly tied social relations to technology and noted their mortality. "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement — mors immortalis." (Poverty of Philosophy, 1847)

Aristotle and Marx expressed macro sociological points of view, the destruction of the social relations of slavery, feudalism, and the rise of capitalism. However, within each of these modes of production and especially the contemporary mode of production, mainstream economists have been attentive to technological unemployment. The history is rich with case examples; Emperor Vespasian rejected a method for the transportation of heavy goods to save employment, Queen Elizabeth I, refused to patent on William Lee's knitting machine for the same reason, and most famously, the Luddites of the 19th century destroyed textile machines, which historian Eric Hobsbawm colourfully described as "collective bargaining by riot". Factory owners, expressing their will through State power, suppressed the Luddites through the law and armed forces, including the execution, imprisonment, and penal colonial transportation of organisers. It was grimly poetic that through the British "Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812", the destruction of physical capital was a capital crime for a labourer.

Conventional Wisdom and New Circumstances

Among economists, even those sympathetic to the plight of the workers, the general consensus over the decades is that the Luddites were misguided. Very significant unemployment could arise due to technological displacements, such as rural workers with the introduction of tractors and other forms of mechanised agriculture. However, the increases in productivity from mechanisation would result in lower prices for agricultural produce and new employment opportunities would arise elsewhere, satisfying other needs and wants. Mainstream economics argued that whilst short-term unemployment could result from disruption, in the longer run this would be cleared by both market requirements with the potential addition of government intervention when required (Woirol, "The Technological Unemployment and Structural Unemployment Debates", 1996).

It is clear that throughout economic history these assumptions have largely held to be true. The introduction of labour-saving technology has consistently provided "more hands at the coalface" to provide for other needs. A challenge that is overlooked by the advocates of both market-based or market-based plus some temporary intervention (Keynesian) approaches is the necessity that new needs that require new labour are required. These are not propositions that can be readily assumed in the future. Not only do all goods and services have increasingly limited utility with the provision of increased supply (there is only so much drinking water one can consume), what new goods and services do arise do not necessarily result in an increased demand for labour.

Barry Jones' study "Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work" (Jones, 1982, 1995) take these matters into serious consideration. Extending the standard three-sector approach to work to a five-sector approach (primary, industrial, services, information, domestics and hobbies), Jones notes a trajectory of technology that will see fewer opportunities for employment in the traditional three or even four sectors and argues for opportunities in decentralised production with public funding for the fifth sector, which in more contemporary times would be considered a part of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). The latter has greater plausibility than the former - decentralised processes are workable in some contexts, especially for labour-intensive work, but capital economies of scale are more typical.

The Future of Technology and Political Economy

More than ten years ago, Harvard Business School Professor Dr. Shoshana Zuboff remarked, "What can be automated, will be automated", which is a truism for anyone thinking seriously about the future of employment. Capital will always see the cheapest price per unit of commodity, and this, in turn, will mean the ever-increasing automation of all labour by the owners of capital. Indeed, the traditional sectional analysis of the labour force according to industry also follows the trend of automation; the first is the automation of agriculture, the second is the automation of industry, and the third is the automation of services. The cost-disease of the service sector (Baumol, Bowen, (1965). "On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems") exists because of the productivity and wealth from the industrialised primary and secondary sectors.

It is possible, given the current state of robotics and automation, to make an educated guess at the sort of employment that is at risk in the coming years. This is primarily a function of ease of implementation and aggregate cost, including the savings of pushing work to consumers. Already, one is witnessing the displacement in the retail sector with the introduction of self-checkout kiosks, which initially is being applied to grocery and fast-food outlets but will expand to general retail, especially hospitality. In a more capital-intensive scale, self-driving vehicles will eventually reduce employment in transport industries, from taxis to trucks. The latter, in particular, will have a significant effect on small townships whose existence is heavily dependent on being truck stops for human drivers. Another development has been the ability of machine learning to draw upon the corpus of online artistic content to produce effective simulacra of artistic content.

Some of these jobs will become operators and programmers of such technologies, that is, the fourth sector of the economy. However, it is uncertain whether the productivity gains or the demand for goods will be sufficient for this labour displacement. The prospect of increased aggregate wealth but with an increasing disparity brings into question the concerns of political economy. Rentier-capitalism (Standing, 2016 "The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay"), apart from engaging in the worst sort of monetarised feudalism when it comes to control of natural resources, especially land, will continue attempts to create artificial scarcity and damaged goods in any other product that they can acquire a degree of monopolistic control.

Conclusion

Under the current version of capitalism, there will be continuing attempts to minimise the input of labour, maximise the productivity of capital, centralise and accumulate capital, form oligopolies and crush competitors, and extract maximum rent from constructed scarcity. A democratic counter can be expressed in the forms of social wages, UBI, and, less probably, job guarantees. Democracy and capitalism have always had this sort of tension throughout the twentieth century, with capitalists themselves divided on whether to move toward an authoritarian or liberal version of the system, with the biases of the system currently tending toward the former in the rentier form.

Whilst the liberal version of capitalism is more tolerable, a genuine alternative would encourage the introduction of technology simultaneously as a labour-saving and force for increased wealth. After all, the promise of technology should be that our lives are easier, not harder. Applied through worker's cooperatives and with public enterprises coordinating even greater wealth through the provision of social and physical infrastructure and the mitigation of negative externalities. This would require a fundamental change to our existing political economy and one which is beyond the adaptive capacity of the system. As a result, the productive forces of society will have increasing potential, and increasingly in conflict with the existing social relations, with the latter acting as fetters; "then begins a period of social revolution" (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)