Race Against the Machine seems to be another in the near interminable series of books that tell us that machines are soon going to be able to do everything therefore no one at all will have a job.
OK, I exaggerate but this sort of argument has been made on since Ned Ludd was a lad.
The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.
The effect of all of this?
The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
There are two points to make about this argument. The first is that fine, so machines will take over many of the jobs currently done by humans. Shrug, great, we humans can go and do something else instead then. That’s what we have done as the tractor has taken over the fields, the machine loom the hand weaver and so on down the ages with every single invention that anyone has ever made to mechanise a task. This does of course rely upon there being something else to go and do and as economists insist that human wants and desires are infinite but resources to satisfy them are not then we’re never going to run out of those other things to do.
But let’s take the argument one stage further. Let’s say that this won’t happen, that the machines are going to get so good that there’s nothing left for humans to do as a job. I don’t say this is likely nor even possible but let’s make this assumption.
So, we’ve an economy full of machines making everything and no human anywhere has to do a lick of work.
The problem with this world is what? Machines making everything means that everything is cheap. Absurdly cheap, to the point of free. One of the points we can make about the economy is that everything in the economy, the entire GDP (in one way of measuring it) becomes someone’s income at some point down the line. We buy a telephone and some of what we pay goes to the people who put together the telephone. Some if it is used to buy copper: but that money paid for copper pays for the labour to mine the copper and some to buy the machines to mine the copper: the money to buy the machines buys the labour to make the machines and so on and on we can trace the entire GDP to someone’s income, somewhere. Might be their selling their labour, might be interest, dividends, but it all ends up, somewhere, in someone’s pocket.
OK, so what happens when there are not jobs: that means we’re not paying anywhere for anyone’s labour. The machines are building themselves, doing their own mining to get the materials to make the machines which mine the copper which goes to the factory of machines which makes the telephone.
At which point, who actually needs a job? As we’re not paying anything for human labour at any point then there’s no need to pay for anything at all: true communism has finally arrived in fact. We now have a surplus of everything anyone could possibly want, all made by those machines and all we humans have to do is use what we want when we wish to. We don’t actually need a job when everything is produced by machines.
So, I’m not really sure why people are worried about this idea that our working lives are going to be replaced by machines. Even if it does happen it isn’t actually a problem because if everything is made by machines requiring no human labour then human labour just isn’t required for us to have everything we want.
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