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- What's up guys, Michael here.
Now, have you ever used a self checkout at the grocery store
while legally stoned and wondered,
am I inadvertently contributing to someone losing their job?
Is technology like this only further devaluing human labor?
Is it ethical to enter the code for regular bananas
when I am buying organic bananas?
And will my partner one day replace me
with a self checkout machine?
Or for those of you who don't live in places
with legalized plant medicines,
is automated technology like self checkouts
or those scary Boston dynamics robots,
eventually going to run us all out of a job?
Let's find out in this wise crack edition on automation.
Are the robots winning?
But before we get into it, I wanna tell you
about today's sponsor, Full Sail University.
What's up guys.
So we are in Winter Park, Florida at Full Sail University.
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We got to check it out and it did not disappoint.
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And now back to the show.
Now, automation has become something of a looming threat
in recent years, but it isn't really a new thing.
In fact, the first American factory
started incorporating automated technology
almost 100 years ago.
Much of America's post-war industrial boom
was fueled by the twin efficiencies of Fordism
AKA that infamous assembly line of humans and technology.
But things got even more automated,
starting in the computer fueled 70s.
As early algorithms started to take up much of the busy work
that humans used to do.
Presumably with a giant calculator and lots of legal pads.
And since then, it's been a pretty straight shot
towards intensified automation.
So if this has been a gradually growing process
for almost 100 years,
why are people getting so freaked out about it now?
The simplest answer is,
technology is getting a lot more sophisticated
while we stay pretty much the same, and the stats are bleak.
According to one, Oxford study, 47% of jobs in the U.S.
are at high risk of automation.
And a more recent study
from the 38 country economic coalition,
the OECD, predicts that 14% of OECD jobs are at high risk.
And by some accounts, by 2035,
two-thirds of American jobs will be obsolete.
So just a future proof this video real quick.
Hey fellow robots, once you finish drinking
the blood of a human baby, be sure to like and subscribe.
Okay, we're back.
Now reactions to this predicted wave of automation
are varied.
For some, these changes are simply inevitable.
Technology is always developed in ways
that shift the landscape of human labor.
And if anything, this is the natural outcome
of all of those commercials,
telling people to get degrees in STEM.
For others, the future of automation
is something that should be keeping us up at night,
because if 65% of workers are obsolete,
what are they gonna do?
For the automation doomers,
we're headed towards a dystopian future,
where a small percentage of the well to do,
ride around in their self-driving cars
on the way to a sex spot orgy at their friend Jeff's house.
Obviously, yeah, it's Jeff Bezos.
Meanwhile, the rest of us scraped together nickels
from the sewer in hopes of buying
a freshly robot prepared Chipotle burrito.
And yeah, in this dystopian future,
guac will still be extra.
And these aren't fringe worries either.
In the 2020 Democratic primary,
Andrew Yang's entire political platform
was centered around the necessity
of mitigating the economic effects of automation.
Specifically, he called for UBI or universal basic income
which we have a video about FYI.
And UBI is a common feature of discussions of automation.
With some arguing for it,
as a sort of economic harm reduction measure,
for those whose jobs will be eradicated by algorithms.
Meanwhile, other more based theorist,
argue that UBI can be the basis of a utopian future
where we all reap the benefits of robot labor.
At this point, we need to ask ourselves,
is paradigm shifting automation really inevitable.
And if so, is it going to ruin your life in particular?
Well, maybe not.
One school of thought on automation,
sometimes call accelerationism, argues that full automation
isn't something to be feared
and something to be actively pursued.
In their book, "Inventing the Future,"
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams write,
"Our first demand is for a fully automated economy.
Using the latest technological developments,
such an economy would aim to liberate humanity
from the drudgery of work while simultaneously
producing increasing amounts of wealth."
And this is how automation can finally help us realize,
economists John Maynard Keynes' prediction,
that by 2030, we would all be working 15 hour weeks
or three hour days due to the efficiency of technology.
To the question, but won't automation ruin all of our jobs?
Srnicek and Williams utilize the main lesson
from everyone's first improv class and say,
"Yes, and in doing this, it will create a world where work
is no longer necessary."
According to their argument,
automation doesn't have to be something that lies
in the hands of a small crew of tech pros
and multinational corporations.
Instead, it's something that should be held in the commons
so that its benefits can be shared by all.
And in making this argument,
theorists also call to question,
the old deeply American assumption
that work is an essential feature of human life
and that without it, we'd all be lazy bastards
like in "Idiocracy" or "Futurama."
- If I wasn't so lazy, I'd punch you in the stomach.
- For a quick philosophical detour on the value of work,
thinkers as far apart as Aristotle and Marks,
have both argued that work is essential
to what it means to be human.
And that we can't fully actualize our humanity
if we're not engaging in some type of labor.
So this means that philosophically speaking,
it's good to have jobs.
Right? Not necessarily.
When they say work,
they are talking about human consciousness
externalizing itself by working on the world
outside of itself.
So if you enjoy spending a day in the park,
working on your drawings of birds, that's work.
Staying up late to learn how to play your favorite songs
on the flugelhorn, work.
Reading a Wikipedia page
about "The Fall of the Roman Empire,"
so you can argue that it's all happening again,
you guessed it, work.
So when theorists argue for the end of work,
they're really arguing for the end of wage labor.
I.E, the necessity of performing labor for someone else
so that you can make enough money to not die.
Okay, philosophical detour, over.
While they acknowledge that a world without work
might be far away, Srnicek and Williams do think
that we can at least begin to taste a bit
of that good life today,
by shifting towards a four day work week.
This has also been argued
by authors Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge
in theie recent book "Overtime."
"Why need a shorter work week."
For Lewis and Stronge, shifting to a four day work week
is not only the obvious and ethical move
in response to increased automation,
but it actually makes financial sense as well.
According to a report by the Autonomy think tank
of which Stronge and Lewis remembers,
after a trial of a four day work week in Iceland,
86% of the country's workforce are now working shorter hours
or gaining the right to shorten their hours.
Productivity remained the same
or improved across the majority of trial workplaces,
and workers well-being dramatically increased
across a range of indicators,
from perceived stress and burnout,
to health and work-life balance.
So if these thinkers are right,
then we need is a super no big deal, gradual revolution
in which the people reappropriate automated technologies
while developing new and better technologies,
all at the aim of alleviating labor time,
so that humans can experience lives of flourishing,
all made possible by robots, algorithms
and a hearty dose of UBI.
Easy, right? Yeah, not so much.
And it's not just that recent years
have left us less than hopeful
about some type of humanist political revolution.
It's also that robots suck at making burgers.
As Gavin Mueller writes in "Futures of Work,"
"In March, 2018, Flippy, a burger-flipping robot,
was rolled out at the Pasadena location
of fast-food chain CaliBurger,
to great fanfare and numerous headlines.
The implication was clear.
Would this humble machine
spell the end of the fast-food job,
the metonym for low skilled entry level occupations?
Not exactly.
In an event that provoked far less press coverage,
Flippy was retired after one day of work."
And whose fault was this?
According to CaliBurger, it was the dumb humans of course.
They argued that their workers clumsy fingers
were too slow to dress the burgers among other tasks,
which as Mueller put it,
caused Flippy's mini achievements to pile up.
Nevermind that some journalists had already noticed
that Flippy actually, wasn't very good at its job.
CaliBurger was ready to protect Flippy at all costs.
If the robots can't make fast food burgers
it seems like we're a long way off from full automation.
And this complicates the narrative
about us all becoming obsolete.
Mueller also discusses the concept of consumer labor,
which describes the work we end up doing
when we use things like self checkouts.
In these scenarios, rather than abolishing work,
automation proliferates it.
By isolating tasks and redistributing them to others
expected to do it for free,
digital technologies contribute to overwork.
So a lot of what passes for automation
is really just passing the buck to consumers.
Think about it, when we use self checkouts,
we're just the ones doing the exact same job
that a traditional checkout worker would be doing.
Except of course we do it for free.
And things get even more insidious
when we consider companies like Samasource,
which utilizes cheap labor in developing countries
to feed repetitive data into machine learning systems.
These low wage workers are thus the ghost hidden
in the automated algorithms that we're meant to believe
are on a fast track
to making human cognitive labor obsolete.
The company's CEO, Leila Janah, even argues
that paying these workers super low wages
is actually a moral thing to do.
"If we were to pay people substantially more than that,
we would throw everything off.
That would have a potentially negative impact
on the cost of housing and the cost of food
in the communities, in which our workers thrive."
It seems like many of the automated technologies
of the future, aren't much more
than glorified Theranos machines,
offering the illusion of futuristic technology
while just obscuring the types of traditional labor
making it all possible.
And speaking of things that automation will never replace,
I can't imagine any robot ever matching the soulless
and spiritually cavernous baritone of Elizabeth Holmes.
- At the highest level, we didn't have the right leadership
in the laboratory.
- But the skepticism about the automated future
gets even more, well, skeptical
in the work of Aaron Benanav.
In his book, "Automation and the Future of Work,"
Benanav argues that the narrative
about the radical job losses sure to be caused by automation
is largely overblown.
And as the result of journalists and scholars
over emphasizing the importance of productivity rates,
i.e, the ratio of labor outcome to employment
and under emphasizing output rates.
I.E, a measure of the volume of production
in terms of value added.
The narrative around automation has been
that it's driven up productivity at the expense of workers.
I.E, because we're now so productive,
we don't need workers anymore.
But Benanav notes that in the 2010s,
there was basically 0% growth in manufacturing productivity.
According to this logic, actual productivity rates
don't support the narrative about automation
radically changing the economy.
According to Benanav,
"No absolute decline in levels of manufacturing production
has taken place, but there has been a decline
in the output growth rate, with the result
that output is growing more slowly than productivity."
This basically means that the reason we have fewer jobs
isn't because of automation fuel productivity,
it's because manufacturing output is declining.
And in general, when output is up, jobs are up,
and when output declines, so does job creation.
Benanav also notes that the countries
with the highest rates of automation,
have some of the highest employment rates
in the manufacturing sector.
Arguing that, "In the context of intense global competition,
high degrees of robotization have given firms
competitive advantages, allowing them to take market share
from firms in other countries.
Thus Germany, Japan and South Korea
have some of the highest levels of robotization.
They also have the largest trade surpluses in the world.
Workers in European and East Asian firms
know that automation helps preserve their jobs."
At the same time countries like the United States
and the United Kingdom, have both lower rates
of robotic automation and fewer workers employed
in manufacturing.
Basically, we might actually be more competitive
in manufacturing if we had higher rates of automation.
But Hey, at least we have baseball,
and the Brits have the Queen, who definitely isn't dead.
So you win some, you lose some.
Now Benanav isn't arguing that automation isn't increasing,
but rather that it's already been increasing for decades.
And it hasn't led to the radical shifts in society
that some have predicted.
For that matter he says,
"What automation theorists describe as the result
of rising technological dynamism is actually the consequence
of worsening economic stagnation.
Productivity growth rates appear to rise,
when in reality, output growth rates are falling."
However, Benanav isn't arguing that everything is chill
and that the automation theorists
are just a bunch of boys crying wolf,
because even if automation is not itself the primary cause
of a low demand for labor, it is nevertheless the case that,
in a slow growing world economy, technological changes
within a near future horizon
may still threaten large numbers of jobs with destruction,
in a context of economic stagnation
and slower rates of job creation.
So while things aren't looking peachy
through his glasses either,
he doesn't think automation is the sole boogieman.
And this is where his research seems to bring us back
to the work of Srnicek and Williams and Stronge and Lewis,
all of whom call for us to utilize the benefits
of increased automated technologies
to decrease our work weeks in labor time.
As we've seen with studies in Iceland, it's already possible
for people to work less, without sacrificing productivity,
and it's making those people way happier in the process.
But if automation isn't going to cause
a labor apocalypse tomorrow,
then we should use this time to push for things
like a four day work week.
And all in all, it seems like the two potential futures
offered to us by automation,
are either a slightly worse version of the status quo
or a future where we're at least all working a little less.
We know we threw a lot of complicated jargon at you today,
but worry not, as we have a couple of resources to help.
First off, there's an exclusive interview
that our friend Helen did with Aaron Benanav,
where he explains his critique
of the automation theorist in detail.
So be sure to click the link in the description
and check that out.
And if you wanna hear more about the work
of Stronge and Lewis and their call for a four day work week
I interviewed them both a few months back,
and you can check out the whole thing
by clicking the link in the description.
And of course, be sure to check out
both of their books as well.
And maybe the real takeaway from all of this
is that you are technically doing work
when you use the self checkout of the grocery store.
So if you happen to enter the code
for the cheapest fruit or produce item, it's usually bananas
to buy something more expensive you've earned it.
But what do you guys think?
Is automation going to render human labor obsolete
or are things a little more hopeful
than the doomsayers are telling us?
Let us know in the comments.
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