Is a machine really after your job?
Following an AI summit at Bletchley Park, an occasion firmly focused on how AI can benefit the few not the many, Elon Musk has opined that in future AI will replace all jobs.
Musk is a well known if wealthy idiot but is there nevertheless something in the point?
Some jobs have declined thanks to the use of machinery. One need only look at the decline in agricultural labour over the last 150 years in the UK, or check how many people quite large factories producing things like coca cola actually employ (answer, surprisingly few, its mostly done by machine).
However I’m old enough to remember the pamphlet written by the late Chris Harman some decades ago now titled ‘is a machine after your job’.
He meant is a computer after your job. The answer is, no it wasnt. What the computer has done has create yet more work, often of a rather mundane nature.
Some might argue that this is a victory for capital since it must have increased the productivity of labour and increased exploitation of the workforce. It is possible but it is arguable.
The reasons for this were actually pointed out at length by Raph Samuel in his Workshop of the World article in an early issue of History Workshop Journal.
Samuel surveyed in detail the industries of Victorian capitalism, which ones had moved to machine production, which ones hadn’t and why. The reality was that the labour process did not always lend itself to reliable use of machinery and sometimes it was simply just much cheaper to employ lots of workers than use expensive machines and those jobs, then as now, were not well paid. I suspect, broadly, that the same principles apply today.
Beyond that however while Engels rightly wrote of the dull compulsion of economic reality, and much work is drudgery or worse, there is dignity in labour and satisfaction in doing a decently paid, skilled job well. Is there still a political party that aims to make sure this is the nature of the UK’s workforce I wonder…. The race to the bottom doesn’t work for ordinary people and its usefulness to capital is debatable.
Leave a Reply