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By Paul Horton.

It is clear to most critics and economic commentators that digital technology is displacing work and cheapening much of the work that remains.  Amazon is likely to replace many warehouse jobs with robots once robots are created that can grasp packages. The consulting firm McKinsey predicts that many retail jobs will be replaced by the digital market and home delivery in the next fifteen years.

Defenders of the new tech economy counter this commentary with the idea that when robots replace people, more programmers and technicians will be needed to create more robots. But many doubt that enough jobs will be created, and Marc Zuckerberg, for example, has begun to support the idea of a minimum earned income for those who are unemployed or underemployed as a result of technological unemployment.

Jaron Lanier and Jonathan Taplin are two of the critics of the tech sector’s assault on the middle man and the middle class.  Both Lanier and Taplin are especially critical of the squeezing of what might be called the “creative class” of knowledge workers and artists who had been heretofore seen as the harbingers of innovation within a postindustrial society. For both, economies of scale created by digital platforms controlled by the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube are driving down the value of the work produced by artists, musicians, and writers.

Not only is all work threatened by robotics, but creative work that is produced outside of the corporate technosphere, work that is associated with creative innovation, is cheapened or bought and coopted at lower value.

As you read the following, think about whether you agree or disagree with Lanier and Taplin. Do they exaggerate in your opinion?

From Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? (2003):

As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead. And empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be undervalued by the new economy, while the closest to the top computers will become hyper-valuable.

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all of that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy is not improved.

Digital technologists are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything—and they’re doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less more of us will be worth. (Lanier,15-16)

A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyper-amplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all or nothing contest and it inflicts smaller all or nothing contests on those who interact with it.

Siren Servers gather data from a network, often without having to pay for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available computers, run by the best technical people. The result of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage. (54-55)

Some of the prominent present day Siren Servers include high-tech finance schemes, like high-frequency trading or derivatives funds, fashionable Silicon Valley consumer-facing businesses like search or social networking, modern insurance, modern intelligence agencies, and a multitude of other examples.

The latest waves of high-tech innovation have not created jobs like the old ones did. Iconic new ventures like Facebook employ vastly fewer people than the big older companies like, say, General Motors. Pit another way, the new schemes, the Siren Servers, channel much of the productivity of ordinary people into an informal economy of barter and reputation, while concentrating the extracted old-fashioned wealth for themselves. All activity that takes place over digital networks becomes subject to arbitrage, in the sense that risk is routed to whoever suffers less computation resources. (56-57)

From Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (2017):

Platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allow firms to outsource online piecework. As Mary L. Gray reports in the Los Angeles Times, “ Researchers at Oxford University’s Programme on Technology and Employment estimate that nearly 30% of jobs in the U.S. could be organized like this within 20 years. Forget the rise of robots and the distant threat of automation. The immediate issue is the Uber-izing of human labor, fragmenting jobs into out sourced tasks and dismantling of wages into micropayments.” The workers on these platforms have no job security and no benefits. In addition, the prices for this piecework can be lowered radically as more people come on board the platforms from all over the world. Neil Irwin, writing in the New York Times, notes, “So Uber alone may not be a major force reshaping the nature of work. But the same technologies that made it possible could be making employers more interested in building a workforce of nonemployees. A weak job market has probably given them more ability to make it reality.” (203-204)

Characterizing [John Maynard] Keynes’s “technological unemployment” as just a “skills problem” seems shortsighted. The notion that a fifty year old auto worker replaced by a robot is going to retrain himself as a software coder and apply for work at Google seems to be a pipe dream that only someone as rich and insulated as {Google cofounder] Marc Andreessen could conceive. If Frey and Osborne are right, 47 percent of jobs may be automated in the next two decades, then we face one of two possible futures. The dystopian future of mass unemployment and psychological alienation leading to social unrest is one we have already seen in Blade Runner. The only preset remedy is to create millions of low-wage “bullshit jobs”—the writer David Graeber’s term. Graeber notes, “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.” This is not a world any of us wants to live in, let alone work in.

Already in the United States we know that the labor-force participation rate for men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four who have only a high school diploma is at historic lows.

The only way out of this crisis—to realize Andreessen’s vision of six billion people dabbling in art, science, and culture—is to have some version of universal basic income (UBI), free health care, and a deep reduction in the length of the workday. Already some employers in Sweden are cutting their workday to six hours, and Finland is experimenting with guaranteed income. These are not impossible goals, yet Andreessen can still posit a future in which a deep social safety net exists without the most modest proposed changes to the status quo, such as free college tuition and universal health care. (207-209)

  • According to Lanier and Taplin, how do digital platforms and growing tech corporation control of the American and global economies create more unemployment?
  • How do digital platforms change the organization of work and where the work gets done?
  • Do you think that the US will eventually adapt the strategies that Sweden and Finland are if confronted with increasing technological unemployment?

Activity:

Go to the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment website: and read (under“Research”click on “Publications”) the paper entitled, “Future Shocks and Shifts: Challenges for the Global Workforce and Skills Development.” Then click on “Videos,” and click on 2 at the bottom of the page to locate this video on the top row: “Skills, Education, and Work in the Digital Age.”

 Complete the following in a group of four:

Watch as much of this video as you can and write a three-page brief (see format below) that recommends public policies to the President of the United States to deal with technological unemployment. Targets stated should be implemented in a five to ten year window. One of your classmates will act as POTUS and other classmates will act as members of his cabinet. You will read your proposals to the POTUS and his cabinet. They will ask you questions about your proposal.

Feel free to consult as many sources as you deem necessary, including these sources from the left, center, and right:

Automation and Technology Increase Living Standards

What happens if robots take the jobs? The impact of emerging technologies on employment and public policy

The Future of Jobs: The Onrushing Wave

Bill Gates: People Don’t Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots

The backlash against Bill Gates’ call for a robot tax

Bill Gates Says Robots Should Be Taxed Like Workers

You will have two class and homework days to prepare your three-page recommendation that should include the following:

–A brief statement of the issue using statistics and citing sources internally

–A list and description of possible policy responses (at least five)

–A cost benefit analysis of each possible response

–A conclusion that offers three best policy responses based on cost/benefit analysis

Paul Horton
 is History Instructor
University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School

Featured Image by Land Rover Mena. Used with Creative Commons license.

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Anthony Cody

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