The Automation Discourse

• Automation is a hot topic due to advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics that promise to transform work.
• Companies like Tesla are working towards fully automated "lights-out" production.
• Machines can now play ping-pong, cook, have sex, converse, develop strategies for playing Go and write symphonies.
• Computers are learning to identify cancers, develop legal strategies, and driverless trucks and robotic dogs are becoming common.
• It remains doubtful that "the hype" will come to fruition, machines are still incapable of simple tasks like opening doors and folding laundry.
• Computerized assistants and self-driving cars still require human intervention.
• There are billboards in San Fransisco threatening to replace fast-food workers with tech if the minimum wage is raised.
• Wall Street Journal dubbed the minimum wage the "robot employment act".

The Automation Discourse

• Scare stories about automation have coalesced into a social theory.
• This theory analyzes current technologies and predict the future and its consequences on society.
• The four main propositions of the automation discourse:
• Workers are being displaced by machines, leading to 'technological unemployment'.
• The future is the verge of a largely automated society.
• Automation entails liberation from toil, but may turn into a nightmare since people need work to live.
• A universal basic income (UBI) is needed to prevent a mass-unemployment catastrophe.
• Futurists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee claim technologies from science fiction are becoming everyday reality
• They also warn that not all workers will benefit from these advances.
• Wages are stagnating labor's share of the annual income is decreasing and going to capital, leading to growing inequality.
• Rentier extraction could crowd out technological innovation.
• Martin Ford claims that the economy is headed for a tipping point, leading to an 'automated feudalism'.
• Education and retraining will not be enough, so guaranteed non-wage income is necessary.
• Silicon Valley figures like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg support ideas like UBI, and Elon Musk is naming his SpaceX vessels after spaceships from Iain M. Banks's Culture Series.
• Politicians and advisors have identified with the automation discourse as it represents our "digital future".
• Obama noted automation will cause "economic dislocations" and is making middle class jobs obsolete.
• Robert Reich fears technology will displace menial and professional jobs, requiring a UBI.
• Lawrence Summer says the minimum wage is no longer a "stupid" idea due to workers' wages stagnating.
• Andrew Yang is running a presidential campaign on a "Humanity First", UBI platform.
• Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue for a socialist government to fulfill automation’s promise.
• Peter Frase explores alternative outcomes for a post-scarcity society.
• Left-wing writers stress there is no necessary progression into a post-work world.
• Srnicek, Williams, and Frase are all proponents of a UBI that serves as a bridge to 'fully automated luxury communism', conceptualized by Aaron Bastani.
• This is a meme about artificial intellgence, solar power, gene editing, asteroid mining and lab grown meat.

Recurrent Fears

• Various visions relies on a prediction of technological change.
• Automation substitutes for human labor, while labor-augmenting technologies increase human-productive capacities.
• Kurt Vonnegut describes automation where an entire job category is eliminated.
• It's debated whether current technologies are labor-substituting or labor-augmenting.
• Oxford Martin School suggests high risk of jobs in the US after automation.
• OECD predicts % fewer jobs at risk but significant changes in the way jobs are carried out.
• Automation is a constant feature of capitalism.
• Visions of automated factories appeared in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s, and 2010s.
• Automation theory points to utopian possibilities within capitalist societies.
• Economists like Wassily Leontief noted that the automatic price mechanism depends on human labor within production processes.
• Automation prognosticators argue that capitalism must be transitory mode of production.
• Taking its periodicity into account, automation theory may be described as a spontaneous discourse.
• Proponents of the automation discourse explain the low demand consistently in terms of runaway technology.

Declining labour demand

• The ascribed consequences of automation are showing and global capitalism is not providing enough jobs.
• Persistently low demand for labour reflects spikes and increasing jobless recoveries.
• There is declining labour shares of income.
• These shifts signal a decline in worker's bargaining power and wages are being skewed towards the highest earners
• Inequality is contained only by the strength of redistributive programmes.
• Critics of automation discourse are disturbed by trends leading to a low demand for labour.
• Automation isn't the cause for the low demand for labour.
• Focus the worlds attention on the problem of of a persistently low demand for labor.
• Even if the explanation is inadequate, automation theorists have at least tried to imagine broadly emancipatory solutions.
• Automation creates a vision of an emancipated future but it needs to be freed from the technocratic fantasies of how social change might take place.
• Major shifts in the economy have been adopted with social pressure due to communism and civilzational collapse.
• Instead of fearing movement, we should be apart of helping the next stage in our history.
• Reaching towards a post-scarcity world can result in mounting a battle against the change.
• The decline for the demand of labour is due to the tech advancements in the economic stagnation
• Fall in labour demand doesn't manifest in unemployment but rather under-employment
• Society could get there through struggles and path of social change.

Labour's Global Deindustrialization

• Automation-discourse theorists recognize that job-destruction will impact the labor in the service sector.
• Theorists therefore focus on new service-sector automation where robotization and AI is taking over.
• As a precedent to what they imagine, automation theorists point to what already happened in the manufacturing sector.
• Manufacturing had the employment-apocalypse first.
• Industrial robotics has been around for a long time (ex:"unimate' @ GM 1961)
• Industrialisation has given way to deindustrailsation throughout countries (less manufacturing)
• Manufacturing employment has fallen in the US, France and UK - but also Japan, Germany and Italy.
• Commonly assumed that deindustrialization is the result of offshoring production facilities.
• Manufacturing job loss has not been associated with declines in the manufacturing output

3 per cent per year since 1950.

• That basis, Brynjolfsson McAfee automation in compounding effects of exponential growth.
• US manufacturing growth-rate statistics over-inflated.
• Levels computers electronics sub-sector average rate over 10 per cent since the 1980s,
• Growth rates outside sub-sector 2 per cent.
• Since 2011, trends worse, where real output per hour lower than peak 2010 and growth rates are supposed rise.
• Correcting manufacturing-productivity statistics in line w/Germany/Japan.
• Germany/Japan have fallen from post-war peaks but automating with robots.
• Tesla California use robotics Germany and Japan use about 60 per cent more robots per 10k workers.
• Deindustrialization continues as economists expect.
• Detail, using accounting:
• ∆Ο – ΔΡ = ΔΕ (rate of growth output - rate of growth labour productivity = rate of employment)

Growth rates France

• Productivity growth rates much higher postwar 5.2 per cent yearly.

• Output higher 5.9 per cent.

• Steady increase in employment 0.7 per cent annually, output rates lower sharply, faster.

• productivity At 2.7 per cent faster output by cent annually.

• Manufacturing contracts by rapidly at 1.7.

• Disaggregation helps explain why see productivity growing rapid.

• Productivity growth only rapid relative output growth.

• Same pattern exist, production is low but not has there output growth which results decline levels employment.

• Output-Led deindustrialization has pure technology issues and need perspectives,

• The world has growing deindustrialization which varies but occurs

• Wealthier countries have high labour and capital but less growth.

• This leads to deindustrailstion in those countries due to their output growing 0

• Slower growth has low labour shares which cause unemployment, more automation and less growth.

• Automation is only making capital redundant in countries and so there have been no sources to boost profits.

Global overcapacity

• Economists don’t consider overapcaicity.

• Rate’s output growth declining and less workers due to low output demand, meaning automation.

• Productivity growth seems high as less workers needed with same capital.

• These causes lead to high unemployment as people are getting replaced.

• Firms compete now as growing slows, leads to less workers, less GDP and increased costs.

• This lead to rise technology to have new chain supplies and build big chains.

• Then the key turn, low Japanese firms entered the US and competed.

• High productivity for the countries meant there was an issue wage competitions

• The only way for a US company in this setting was to respond in productions

• Firms built to make less labour, but to find the lowest costs where possible.

• Similar strategies firms in Japan and infrastructure for communications.

• Wealthy countries manufacturing by still deindustrailsting.

• Firms building there as the world market shrinks.

• Chattanooga growing Detroit,

• Guangdong and expanding so a global issue.

• High degrees of robotic is good with globlal overcaity.

• Gives advantages and allows to take market share

• Workers know that this robot is helping firms for the benefit.

• China grew using mixed technology is good with labour, it is not fully using new technologies.

• System of over capacity and the Chinese have been able away to make firms which compete

Robotisation and production

• It could not otherwise in rate firms by
• China retain position well level is racing off a
• The jobs are to be little large
• Explains through capacity economy wages are
• Automation seek with for service the by technological
• Dynamic has so has a explanation it over.