The Automation Paradox

Automation is coming. It's unavoidable at this point, really. Automated tasks take less time, are near 100% reproducible and can be fine-tuned to be much more accurate. Robots and computers don't need to sleep, take breaks or need health insurance, the mistakes they make rarely cost more than the raw material's cost, and no robot is ever going to ask for a raise or sue for workplace mismanagement. Robots can transport several hundred times the load a human can, computers can accurately complete everyday computations infinitely faster than any human can. As such, a country will have to adopt the technology if it hopes to remain able to compete in the global marketplace. However, the problem that causes headaches is of that not all jobs that can be automated are risky enough to ethically pass on to machines. Of course one could make a case for keeping any low-risk job available for human applicants, and fill up the remaining capacity with automatic workers, humans and machines working side by side.

Now, from the practical perspective this is very difficult, because most machines aren't really designed to work the same jobs in the same spaces as humans, because human-machine-interaction just isn't quite there yet. Designing a quick solution to this would severely cut back on the machine's potential for productivity and thus every human worker on the floor would not only cost the company by taking up space that a machine could have taken up, but also by the several thousands of instances in which any number of machines needs to wait for the human to complete an action that otherwise would have taken a fraction of the time. Offering facilities like a break areas or bathrooms also become relatively more expensive, since the cost of building and maintaining them remains roughly the same, while less people will be using it. This is also presuming there is effective legislation forcing corporations to keep low-level job positions open for people, because - and you've seen it coming - from the economic perspective, including human workers at this point is absolutely nonsensical. At that point, humans would maybe be required to approve decisions the machine is not 100% clear yet, but this alone would cut down the number of what we currently consider entry-level jobs down past the margin at which the population without higher education can sustain itself by work alone. This includes young adults trying to pay rent during college, by the way, so this is very much an "everybody" problem. So what's the alternative?

Under capitalism, there really is none. Low-level jobs like working the register, can - under this model - be almost completely replaced, and there is real practical incentive to do so from almost every perspective. Beyond the financial angle, there will just be more space for a larger assortment of products, which is an improvement for both business owner and consumer, with an auto-checkout, theft is considerably harder, clients don't necessarily need to worry about carrying enough cash (not that that's a concern for most people nowadays anyway), and there won't be any computation errors during the payment process. Entry level jobs might shift to models like temp-work, but most jobs that end up at temp-agencies nowadays end up somewhere along the lines of data entry, easily replaceable as well with less than twenty work hours invested in a semi-competent data-engineer. This leaves very little actual entry level jobs that can't still be automated. But it doesn't end there either.

Nobody likes investment bankers. If you're an investment banker, I'm sorry. Statistically, one third of the people you know are talking shit about you behind your back, and it's almost entirely because of your occupation. Daddy state is your only real ally, which - to be fair - is a very powerful ally when push comes to shove, but it would be nice to have friends that don't just stick around for the expensive food. On top of that, most of you aren't actually doing necessary work, technically. Most of you are being paid for shooting down good ideas conceived by data-driven analytics. A computer can parse data about the market much more effectively and is also much better at modeling the data. Technically, one could pay a hamster to randomly eat out of one of two identical bowls labeled "yes" and "no", and come out with about the same results. And the hamster doesn't even need healthcare. Mr. Goxx in particular had most of you beat several times over, and he couldn't even read or snort cocaine. Jobs like these, that only really function, because a large amount of people are doing it and coming up with different results, can easily be replaced using random number generators getting their seeds off measurements of in quantum physics.

Equally, those cushy seats that are often part of the state, such as whether or not one qualified for insurance payouts, are more or less being handled like a checklist, which takes a human so much longer to read and more importantly learn than it would an army of relatively inexpensive processors. Similar things hold for consultants of almost every kind, since that industry is mainly data-driven and low on conventional innovation. If we are properly honest with ourselves, there are very few jobs that can't be reduced in their scope by automation, hence reducing the number of workers that are technically required in that occupation.

So what is a society to do? There is a Neo-Marxist approach to his "problem", which I'm going to get to later, since I think it's a very good one. Instead, I will lay out the options for a capitalist system first, and highlight why pivoting to a Neo-Marxist model is even necessary in the first place.

However one might define Capitalism, a handful of facts can't change without fundamentally turning away from the capitalist ideology. In the interest in giving capitalism an arguing chance, I will keep it simple and stick to two fundamental facts of capitalism.

1. In Capitalist Systems, money is exchanged for activities that are categorized as "work" and supposedly generate revenue.

2. Capitalist Systems divide the population into two implicit classes, that is the worker class and the owner class. The worker class generates revenue primarily through work tasks, the owner class generates revenue primarily by making available some means of productions.

Now, it's probably very easy to see why Automation fundamentally clashes with Capitalism, based off the points mentioned above. If one only receives money for work, the working class will have to compete with machines engineered to do their jobs better than them, but if the primary task of a corporation is to maximize profits, the owner class will have to make sure work costs as little as possible, while generating the most profit. This means the worker class' interest stands in direct conflict with that of the owner class. People familiar with Marxist Theory will feel reminded of class conflict at this point, and some of them might have played out the subsequent altercations between the classes. Now, let's assume both classes are equally likely to win - which I'm aware is not the realistic case, but bare with me here - and let's assume the worker class wins.

If the workers win, but the fundamentals of political finances remain as they are, the country will make deficits, and government spending will stagnate. This will take the country out of the race of global economics fairly quickly, and the ones running the state will have to make a decision on whether they'll hold with their established values, pivot, or abandon their cause entirely. Either way, this will not hold.

On the other side, if the owner class wins, the worker class will have to enter the job market at a higher level of education. This means, students will have to have their living costs compensated for longer into their life, since most jobs that are available to them are not compatible with a student lifestyle, which includes taking part in stressful, time-consuming exam-seasons. Most economics majors will often begin their professional career in analyst jobs or other jobs that heavily relies on checklists, and thus will also be unemployed and those who can't enter the job market in a branch of the industry that still has jobs for people will have to go on unemployment benefits. Either way, this will not hold. It's clear that capitalism and automation are fatally incompatible.

Socialists - Marxists in particular - are much better prepared for this. To a Marxist, the humanist argument tends to win out against the financial one. The worth of the individual is not reduced to their ability to generate profit. This leaves room for individual expression, identification and interaction with cultural and ideological groups, and active engagement with ones surroundings. Maybe that's my early-twenties brain talking, but that sounds pretty sweet. To the Socialist, automation is not only an economic tool, it's an opportunity. An opportunity to leave behind the compulsion to work. The first society that doesn't feel the need to compel its citizens to work just to afford to live. This could open a system in which each citizen receives a set minimum of money each month to spend at their own discretion, and have the option to work for any additional amount they might need. This is of course not an add-on to tack onto a capitalist system, but this requires separate legislation that safeguards weak spots that are currently being exploited, even under social democracies.

Some might argue that nobody would work, if they didn't have to, but I find this criticism to be not entirely nuanced, apart from not being technically correct.

In Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut imagines a society where menial work is done completely by machines, and the only jobs still around is that of the engineers, that conceive more machines to automate tasks. This is of course meant to be dystopian, but the working class is not content with just the lack of work. There are sentiments that they would work willingly, if they could improve their quality of life for it. It's genuinely hard to really imagine a class of people that would want to sit around doing nothing all day. Player Piano is of course a novel. It's good fiction, but it is fiction. As such one shouldn't take it too seriously into account when inspecting social and political issues, but I think it should be said that most humans expect others to want a sense of accomplishment, and though this doesn't only manifest in ways that strictly speaking improves the lives of others, I believe it's not only too harsh, but also willfully incorrect to assume that the majority will choose to live passively and accomplish only empty things, if given the chance to do otherwise.

Being active, is all in all a very pleasant thing, no matter the type of activity. This should even be true for what most people consider labor, but being attached to an activity by way of ones livelihoods changes that drastically. Marx describes the theory of "Alienation" (or "Entfremdung" in the fancier German): Working under capitalism has very profound effects on the relationship between the worker and all activities they might engage in, work or otherwise. A worker that performs the same sets of tasks 8 hours a day, five days a week will not perceive similar tasks as relaxing ones - hobbies, if you will. The structure of a job makes compulsory demands of a worker with often only the incentive of a monetary reward and little to no choice of backing out. What remains are often creative tasks, music, painting, maybe sports. Common tasks that are considered hobbies, are rarely tasks that are included in most jobs. Similarly, universal hobbies are tasks that are not at all included in the standard definition of jobs. What does that mean for a society without the need for jobs?

If nothing has to be a job, everything can be a hobby. Of course data entry isn't really a task that people will want to do in their free time, but if it needs to be done by a human, there will probably be a person willing to do it for about a month, if that means they can improve their quality of life, and they won't have to do it for an indefinite amount of time. Generally, the feeling of completing a task is one of the best drivers of productivity. That's why there are so many task management techniques that focus on subdividing tasks into smaller ones.

The freedom to partake in the arts will mean that they can flourish once again, not unlike the days during which we recall great works of art being created, and this should be of interest to everybody. This means that culture can evolve, ideas can proliferate and innovation can thrive.

If automation is indeed unavoidable, as it very much appears to be, then even better. The menial tasks that tend to challenge the worker's patience and little else don't ever need to be done by people ever again and they can focus on work that is uniquely human. Works that make lasting contributions to a community, not just generate a fraction of a corporation's earning that quarter. This need not be unprofitable either. In the contrary: Such changes are almost always patentable, or at least important enough for donors to consider financing further efforts. Jobs can still exist, but they are a fair choice to be made by the worker, with room to consider ones family, ethical standards and the well-being of oneself and others.

So why am I writing this? To make people aware of the benefits of Socialist Theory? Hoping somehow these points become present enough in the political sphere to inspire systemic change? To insult investment bankers by telling them that a hamster crushed them in the quarterlies? Yes to all of the above. But mainly because I think these points are underrepresented in conversations about that topic. It's so often the question of whether we should automate at all and how committing to it will push people out of jobs. It's so often about schooling the affected workers into industries that aren't ready to be automated yet, but this line of thinking isn't about solving the problem, it's about delaying the effects of the problem, until either a solution comes around, or the ones talking about it don't have to live with the consequences. The solutions have largely been sketched out by brilliant thinkers already, some of them almost a century deceased. We just have to make the first step and acknowledge that the time for capitalism has passed and it's time to implement a system that accommodates the world we live in. Of course like most pragmatic writing, this text is mainly aimed at the ones on the fence about the issue, the ones not in agreement, but ready and willing to consider the possibilities. I find that detailed discussion around Socialist Theory is sorely lacking in many places where one might expect it to be taking place, so this my way compiling what little I know into a little practical exercise. After all, if capitalism isn't compatible with several concepts that are unavoidable in the foreseeable future, it would be prudent to reconsider our approaches now, before we absolutely have to deal with it, and while there is still time to change things, I think we should consider alternatives that are at least open to the solutions to these challenges.