The pundits and ‘wise men’ – especially the ones in tech – tell a tired narrative about jobs and automation. It goes something like this: Automation destroys jobs. As it gets more sophisticated, it will destroy millions of jobs, leaving people destitute and desperate. Andrew Yang built an entire presidential campaign – one he centered on UBI – around this narrative. Tech libertarians love telling this story.
But it’s not just wacky candidates and tech geeks. Classic sci-fi took up the banner all the same, and they did so as far back as the 1950s. From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano to Isaac Asimov‘s The Caves of Steel, we see it from every direction. These days, popular sci-fi series like The Expanse simply take it for granted and bake it into their plots.
OK, so the narrative isn’t entirely wrong. Yes, automation destroys jobs. Marx pointed out more than a century ago that this happens. At the same time, it redirects and creates jobs. The net impact of automation on overall employment? It’s less clear than one might think. When we look at how work…works, we find that automation poses a bigger threat.
This post is about that threat.
Deskilling and Intensification of Labor
So, Yang and the tech world missed the point. Big surprise. What point did they miss?
They missed a point that dates all the way back to Marx! In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx acknowledges job loss from technology. But he spends more time on the deskilling and intensification of labor. That’s the real threat of automation. Let’s talk about those forces.
Deskilling
Companies use automation to break jobs into specific tasks. They use machine learning systems, algorithms, etc. to do this, allowing companies to hire so-called ‘unskilled’ workers to perform simple tasks. In other cases, they keep their current workers but move them to part-time or contract status. At other times, they fire and then rehire them at a lower rate of pay.
What unites these cases is that companies ‘deskill‘ the workforce. They undermine the sense in which people think about the job as work that requires expertise.
Companies did this a lot in the early stages of capitalism. To this day, we still tend to link it to factory work. Companies deskilled the workforce with the assembly line, breaking work into hundreds of repetitive tasks. This undermined the work of single craftsmen. In more modern times, we see it when schools require teachers to turn in detailed lesson plans or create online learning units. We see it when hospitals require nurses to divide their work into tasks that automated systems measure or even perform.
Amazon deskills its workforce to undermine workers’ negotiating position and make them replaceable. It also lowers the value society assigns to their labor, thereby holding down their wages.
All this creates a gap between poorly paid, deskilled workers, on the one hand, and a small group of ‘elite’ workers, on the other. This inequality helps build a world a bit like the one in Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Except that the workers actually do have jobs, albeit bad jobs.
Intensification
We see the intensification of labor across most industries. The Verve recently published a great article showing a broad range of cases. That’s a good source. But here’s the basic idea: companies increase efficiency by requiring workers to work harder, for a longer period of time, and/or with fewer breaks.
Unions have fought all this for more than a century. If anything, it was the primary motivation of early unions in the 19th century. For more recent cases, The Verve documented hotel companies using automation to track hotel housekeepers. The system pushed them to move more efficiently to specific rooms. Automated systems document the keystrokes of call center workers. And, in a particularly extreme case, an employer required its remote workers to turn on a webcam and have photos taken periodically throughout the day to ensure they were at their desks.
And then there’s the Amazon Fulfillment Center. Again. The Verve documents a complex automation system at Amazon to make sure employees aren’t taking breaks or otherwise carving out any time for themselves. For these reasons – and not the physical nature of the work – employees report being overworked and underpaid. We even find confirmation of all this when we look at Amazon’s system of patents. Alessandro Delfanti and Bronwyn Frey did that work for us in an article in Science, Technology, and Human Values.
So, deskilling and intensification stand out as the real threat of automation. Workers worry less about job loss than about extreme fatigue and injury on the job. All for wages barely high enough to survive.
Automation and Surveillance
It’s worth drawing attention to how companies use automation to deskill and intensify labor. Namely, they use massive surveillance and insults to basic dignity in the workplace. And they do so even in the white-collar world, which I didn’t stress above. This surveillance goes by many names, often even ones workers first created on their own, like Agile software development.
In the white-collar world, companies carve ‘skilled’ work into simple units. Project managers then feed these units into project management software. From there, companies load people up with more tasks, outsource work, or hire ‘unskilled’ workers. This, of course, increased efficiency and intensifies work. But it also prevents employees from thinking about the big picture. As a result, workers do more things but the tasks add up to less than the sum of their parts.
And it all looks much more dystopian in the blue- and pink-collar worlds, as we saw above.
The Threat of Automation
And so, we find the real threat of automation in places other than what Yang and the techies claim. A wide range of companies – from Amazon to hotels to the rest of the tech world – concentrate automation at the level of the manager or foreman. Automated systems ‘supervise’ workers and work tasks.
Historically, ’workplace automation’ started with the automated schedule in the late 1990s, not the AI that takes people’s jobs. A much more common type of ‘automation threat’ is not knowing when you’ll be called to work, not losing your job.
Automation and the Future
What does all this mean for the future? For one, it means tech solutions like UBI simply don’t solve the actual problems with automation. They serve other functions.
But, two, it means we need to think differently about automation. There’s probably no ‘singularity’ that’s coming to steal everyone’s job. And, even if it did, it would probably destroy capital accumulation as well.
No, that’s not quite how capitalism works. In fact, capitalists need labor to build wealth. They always have and always will, so long as capitalism exists. Capitalists use automation less to eliminate jobs than to get more value from labor for less money. They want to turn people into ‘unskilled’ workers.
But they always need workers. Don’t forget that.
Something I find aggravating about responses to automation worries that boil down to how “capitalism requires workers to extract value and cannot function without them” is that it is never quite clear whether the claim is definitional (capitalism being that system whereby accumulation occurs through the extraction of surplus value), implying that a fully automated economy would simply be a new mode of production, or causal, implying that the economy would collapse in some specific way were workers to be eliminated. The argument that worker elimination (or the reduction of those with jobs to a vastly smaller portion of the population) is technically DIFFICULT is not very satisfying, even if it does mean that a fully-automated future is further off.
Because, while the causal claim (which I think would be better called a historical claim) is probably true and the definitional claim is definitely true (IMO), the fear of left-wing silicon valley types that automation will eat the world is basically a fear that the powerful will try to exterminate the less powerful, not a fear that they will do so while preserving the fundamental relationship of labor to capital that characterizes our mode of production. So the historical argument needs to establish that not only would the transition to a world where elites can reproduce themselves and their lifestyles without workers be rocky, it would likely be a self-sabotaging attempt — i.e. elites couldn’t pull it off for reasons other than that it is quite difficult to design a warehouse or a factory that functions without humans. People afraid of automation eliminating workers are afraid that “or barbarism” means “or techno-barbarism.”
Like, I think these objections can probably be met, but I think that’s the standard that needs to be met to dispel fears of total worker obsolescence.
Also I get that that’s not the point of your post and you’re not singlehandedly responsible for arguing this, it’s just an ongoing frustration of mine that the core thrust of the automation-worries is so rarely addressed.
You’re right that some in the tech world worry about attempts to exterminate the population. Someone over at Jacobin published an article and, I think, a short book on it about a decade ago (Four Futures). I had forgotten about it.
In some ways, I don’t get the worry. If automation really were able to do the things the tech utopians want it to do, they shouldn’t have any problem sharing the world with workers out of a job. The Star Trek replicators can make a million earl grey teas as easily as they can make one.
Where it becomes a concern is when we reintroduce scarcity, environmental devastation, et al. But it still seems ill formed to me. That is to say, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where automation is sophisticated enough to keep elites at an extremely high standard of living, without the need for workers, but it *isn’t* sophisticated enough to solve problems of scarcity and environmental devastation.