background preloader

Automation

Facebook Twitter

The Dialectic of Technology. I was surprised and pleased to see that Bhaskar had decided to post Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, as it’s one of my favorite pieces of Marxist-feminist writing. In spite of its occasional outlandishness, it does two things exceptionally well. The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize.

The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women’s liberation, going so far as to argue that “Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.” My recent writing has, I think, created an impression in some people’s minds that I’m reflexively pro-technology. I even jokingly refer to myself that way sometimes. Four Futures. In his speech to the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, Slavoj Žižek lamented that “It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”

It’s a paraphrase of a remark that Fredric Jameson made some years ago, when the hegemony of neoliberalism still appeared absolute. Yet the very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery.

And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism. Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity :: Peter Frase. In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek.

Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity. One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. The technical condition of possibility for this society is comprised of of two basic components. Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy.

Artificial intelligence: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy. AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars. For the company, there was an added bonus.

By offering an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914, he caused the best tool-makers and machinists in America to flock to Ford. Some did lose their jobs, of course. These May Be The Droids Farmers Are Looking For | Epicenter. When it comes to farm robots, fruit gets all the attention. But it looks like trees and shrubs could win the prize for first significant agricultural market for small mobile robots. Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market. The multi-billion-dollar industry that supplies ornamental plants to building contractors, big-box retailers and landscaping firms — $11.7 billion according to the most recent USDA figures — has been eagerly awaiting automation for decades.

The down economy and harsh state laws targeting undocumented workers have turned up the pressure. The horticulture industry has caught the attention of several robotics industry veterans, including Joe Jones, a co-inventor of iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaning robot. In today’s human-tended nurseries, immature potted trees and shrubs arrive at nurseries by truck and are offloaded onto the ground.

Technological unemployment: Race against the machine. FEAR of displacement from one's job by a superefficient machine is as old as modern economic growth (which is to say, about two centuries old). It is somewhat surprising that there has not been more made of the possibility of technological unemployment during the recent recession and lacklustre recovery.

Technological unemployment was widely cited as a problem in the 1920s and 1930s, a time during which productivity was soaring, inequality and unemployment were high, and instability was the norm. The argument that rapid technological change may be generating labour market problems is given a lift in an interesting new ebook by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, entitled Race against the machine. The opening chapter attempts to cast the book as a means to understand present high unemployment, which is a little unfortunate; most of current labour market weakness can be explained by weak growth, and weak growth is well explained by weak demand. But what else can be done?