The Future of Work and Automation

• Rapid advances in AI, machine learning, and robotics are poised to transform the world of work.
• Some businesses are aiming for "lights-out" production with fully automated processes, requiring no human intervention.
• Machines are developing capabilities like playing ping-pong, cooking, having sex, and holding conversations.
• Computers are learning to identify cancers and develop legal strategies, while self-driving trucks and weaponized robotic dogs are becoming a reality.
• There are beliefs that technology can cause mass unemployment.
• Providing a universal basic income (UBI) is a proposal to prevent mass-unemployment.
• Automation can result in growing inequality, where a greater share of annual income is captured by capital rather than labor.
• Guaranteed non-wage income, like a negative income tax, may be necessary.
• Figures like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have advocated for policies like taxing robots and exploring UBI.
• Politicians have identified with the automation discourse, suggesting that it could make many middle-class jobs obsolete.
• Automation discourse supporters take pains to insist capitalism will stay.
• Only a socialist government can fulfill the promise of automation by creating the post working society.
• Automation technologies replace human labor, rather than augment human-productive capacities
• During automation, an entire job class is eliminated.
• Automation is a constant feature of capitalism.

Recurrent fears

• Automation is a symptom of our era with the global economy failing to create adequate jobs.
• Current reality is a planet of extreme inequality where the rich live comfortably while others struggle in dead-end jobs.
• A post-scarcity world can serve as the foundation to address climate change and allow people to question, learn, and create.

Labour's Global Deindustrialization

• Automation theorists recognize the job destruction needs to eliminate a large range of service sector jobs to hold widespread ramifications.
• Manufacturing is seen as a precedent, where an employment-apocalypse has already taken place.
• Manufacturing is readily automated.
• The first industrial robot was installed in 1961.
• Manufacturing employment grew rapidly in areas of fast technical innovation, dropping prices and stoking demands
• These are the results of production facilities moving offshore.
• Real value added in manufacturing has more than doubled in many countries.
• Deindustrialization is most commonly defined as a decline in the share of manufacturing and total employment.
• The primary cause of industrial job loss in advanced economies is rapidly rising labor productivity.

Decline of Productivity

• Manufacturing productivity has grown at a slow pace for decades.
• Government statistics inflated productivity levels by counting products with higher processing power as more products.
• Manufacturing productivity rates have fallen dramatically since postwar peaks.
• In France, productivity growth rates in French manufacturing were much higher between 1950-1973, compared to current rates.

The Accounting Identity

• ΔΟ - ΔΡ = ΔΕ (Growth of output - productivity - growth in employment)

Blight of manufacturing overcapacity

• It is not only a matter of technological advancement, but global technology redundancy
• There are crowded markets.
• Rates of output growth in manufacturing have tended to decline worldwide;
• Rising manufacturing capacity created overcapacity, resulting in a 'long downturn' in output growth rates.

Driving Globalization

• Global waves of deindustrialization have originated in worsening overcapacity in world markets.
• The U.S. shared technology with former competitors to bring them under the U.S. Security Umbrella.
• Rising manufacturing capacity across the world lead to a long downturn in manufacturing output.
• Low-cost Japanese and German products invaded the U.S. domestic market in the 1960s, causing a decline in growth.
• Global deindustrialization is a result of global redudancy of technological capacities.
• Decreasing manufacturing prices caused a fall income per unit, fall in profits, and lower investment.
• There is heightened competition for market share.
• Rising overcapacity has been accompanied by efforts to develop new technological systems, and building new supply chains.
• The international supply chain causes cheap, low grade technology zones to open.
• The globalization of production allowed the richest economies to retain manufacturing, but not the overall trend.
• Rustbelts declined while Sunbelts expanded and integrated to global networks.
• Global manufacturing overcapacity explains countries attaining high degrees of robotization haven't seen the worst deindustrialization

Beyond Manufacturing

• Intense global competition and high degrees of robotization have given companies an edge, allowing firms to claim market share.
• High degrees of robotization help workers preserve their jobs.
• Worsening industrial stagnation causes wage stagnation, and falling incomes
• No economic system replaced manufacturing to shape global economic growth in the post colonial countries; lower export rates caused ignited the 1982 debt crisis, with countries deepening their global market.
• The lack of a better engine explains developing nations want to enter international markets.
• System-wide overcapacity and lower global growth have devastated poorer nations.
• Rapid workforce expansion between 1980-present means less job opportunity.
• A low demand for labor causes employment insecurities.
• Productivity growth rates aren't as high as technology suggests.
• Declines in the workforce are influenced by the gap in productivity and output growth rates.