\"I for one welcome our new robot overlords\"
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The Robot Problem’ and the Potentials of Labour Law Liam McHugh-Russell CRIMT 2015: Institutional Change and Expermintation 1 (or ‘I for one welcome our new robot overlords’)
Transcript of \"I for one welcome our new robot overlords\"
The Robot Problem’ and the Potentials of Labour Law
Liam McHugh-Russell CRIMT 2015: Institutional Change and Expermintation
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(or ‘I for one welcome our new robot overlords’)
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Presentation Notes
My topic is something that fits uncomfortably with the conference themes of institutional change and experimentation. It concerns a topic usually discussed in language that concerns technological change on the one hand —like, for example, car-making robots —and macro-scale economic aggregates on the other: employment levels, education levels, measures of inequality —expressed, in the most sensationalist versions, in terms of “technological unemployment” —or, as alluded to here, a world of work without workers.
What About the Institutions?
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It is, however, precisely the absence of institutional nuance in these accounts that piqued my interest. What I have to offer, however, isn’t so much an institutional critique as prologue to critique. My broad overview of a group of narratives of automation and the future of work currently being woven and rewoven into broader political, economic and policy discussions, is intended only to expose some loose threads of that narrative, rather than revealing what unravels if we try to pull them loose.
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The Way of the Dodo
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But instead of spending too much time explaining what I am going to say, let me just say it. In his book Rise of the Robots, released two weeks ago, Martin Ford argues that jobs are going the way of the dodo, that much of the work we do today, will, like blacksmiths before us, disappear, and that this time—this time!—no new jobs will arise to take their place.
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Ford’s book is, to be clear, simply the latest in a well-established genre of non-fiction writing now released on a relatively predictable cycle.
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In 2013, we had Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over
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In 2004, Levy and Muraname’s New Division of Labour in 2004,
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And in 1995, it was Jeremy Rifkin’s End of Work
“A new era of production… the cybernation…
almost unlimited productive capacity… progressively less human labor”
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Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution
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These books represent only the peaks of an expansive geography. Indeed, it is hard to open the newspaper these days without finding echoes of The words expressed by collection of scientists and economists writing as the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,“ writing to warn President [Truman] that the world was facing A new era of production…one with almost unlimited productive capacity …and, most interesting for my purposes, a world in need of progressively less human labor.”
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The Imminent, Inevitable Automation Apocalypse
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Thus, I mention Ford’s book, not because it brings anything particularly novel to the debate, but precisely because its thesis is so typical of the literature. Indeed, the subtitle of Ford’s book, “Technology and the Threat of the Jobless Future,” Perfectly expresses the literature’s rhetorical touchstones: The theme of Imminent, Inevitable Automation Apocalypse
1. Apocalypse
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First off: automation is almost always expressed as bad news; And often, the narrative is one where robots are actually the bad guy.
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Such framing has a rich vocabulary of images and narratives to draw on, including, for example, Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings losing to IBM computer Watson.
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Now, as indicated by Jennings’ ironic codicil in his final jeopardy answer—“I for one welcome our new robot overlords”— it is hard not to think of the labour-robot confrontation in terms of a complex of interconnected anxieties, existential anxieties about the relationship between humans and our creations--stories of Frankenstein in metal skin and particularized instances of much more generalized fear of the negative side effects of new technologies (as in James Cameron’s “Terminator”).
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Beyond these, however, Watson’s Jeopardy victory, like Garry Kasparov’s loss to Big Blue in 1997, resonates with much older narratives about head-to-head competitions between man and machine.
2. Coming Soon
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Now, to my second point: despite the moral urgency of this narrative since the 17th century and the French physiocrats its crisis point has been perennially delayed to an imminent future, always on the cusp of arriving.
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Let me touch just on the recent fortunes of this narrative in light of the evidence. Despite Keynes’s prediction, in his 1930 Essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” t hat economic growth would soon satisfy most needs and make most work superfluous, labour demand kept increasing for another forty years: wages kept growing, and unemployment stayed more or less stable, even while millions of women entered the paid workforce.
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Labour Demand
Products
Prices
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Now, The implementation of a new technology, even at the firm level, will have an indeterminate effect on the use of labour. Even if we assume that there is only one kind of labour input, then a new technology might decrease the need for workers, or reduce the cost of capital goods —but in a way that increases the needs for workers —or it might change the quality of the output, meaning that consumers will pay more for it. And when new technologies are implemented across an entire industry, the impact on the economy as a whole will be indeterminate, as consumer spending, prices, and production levels readjust across industries.
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And again, at the firm level, the change may also change the skills demand of the production process up or down, with ramified impacts across the economy. Despite these theoretical complexities, most economists agreed that the Luddites were wrong, that technology did not, in fact, destroy jobs.
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Nonetheless, starting in the mid-1970s, many of the jobs that had supported the middle class income growth of the post WWII golden age started disappearing, and being replaced with more precarious, lower-paid work, while wages of those with high levels of education started growing.
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Tracing the trend line of these changes into, many economists who had expressed strong doubts about technological unemployment signed on to this new version. As expressed in books like Katz and Goldin’s Race between Education and Technology, the consensus became that growing inequality in the US could be attributed to an oversupply of workers with skills that could be substituted by robots, and an undersupply of workers with skills that complemented robot capabilities.
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Most recently, one can discern the tide turning again. With the advent of technologies that can perform tasks thought far beyond the reach of robot capacities —driving, medical diagnostics, and legal due diligence— popular anxieties have once again become dominated by concerns that the future does not need our help.
3. But Definitely Coming
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Third, and somewhat ironically given the variations in the nature of the forecasted catastrophe, the one universal that has marked these discourses is the idea that the influence of technology on labour markets is inexorable—unstoppable.
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From Marx’s prediction in Capital that mechanization would drive wages to subsistence levels, to Keynes, in his 1930 Essay predicting that economic growth make most workers superfluous, What is most ubiquitous is the idea, labelled “The Borg Complex” after a race of cyborg aliens famous from the television show star trek whose most famous line is “resistance is futile,” that technology will do what it will do, and we will have to live with the consequences. Whatever the future may hold, it will arrive through the mechanical unfolding of a natural, inevitable process. Politics might intervene to prevent catastrophe, but only from outside this natural order, as a kind of latter-day deus ex machina.
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The Future/ No Future
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Now, in the neoliberal version of this tragedy, the role of nature is played, needless to say, by the market, while politics, powerless to prevent the inevitable, plays the fool. The consummate advocate of this attitude is Tyler Cowen, who has predicated that in the United States, once the robot hordes start unemployment rising and wages falling (while enriching a small sliver of the population), That Americans will respond by moving into smaller housing and accepting a lower standard of public services, transforming much of the US—these are his words, not mine—into something like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Why bother with Science Fiction?
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Were these narratives to come to pass, the stakes of those processes for labour law—the amount of work that is available, the types of work that people do, and how that work gets distributed—are high. Yet given the tradition of failed prophecy in these accounts, it is tempting to just ignore these discussions and focus on “what’s really happening”
• Imminent Change • Bad News for Workers
• Air of Inevitability
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Automation as the new Globalization?
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I locate an answer to that question in an earlier case of a discourse about new technologies inexorably transforming the economy: namely, the engagement with globalization First, while today’s narratives concern the labour market consequences of driverless cars and robot doctors, And the earlier narrative was about communications and transportation technologies facilitating cross-border trade and transnational production,
• Politics of Bad Ideas
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Second, I note that Tyler Cowen’s book has been incredibly popular in policy circles. In which one can see echoes of the substantial impact on decision making of ideas which, whether they were true or not in the abstract, were implemented in ways with profound ramifications for conditions of work and the global division of labour. Where many others had characterized those processes in neutral (or in some cases, jubilant) tones of inevitability, labour law scholars were instrumental in shading these processes as politically-mediated institutional decisions—thereby differentiating between sufficient and necessary causes in the restructuring of work.
• Labour Law and the Institutional Dimension
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Case of Globalization (cont’d)
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Here, we see the value of an institutional intervention, which I come to from my own travels in “labour law” For, where many others had characterized globalization through neutral (or in some cases, jubilant) descriptions of inevitabile processes, labour law scholars were instrumental (though hardly alone) in shading these processes as politically-mediated institutional decisions —thereby differentiating between sufficient and necessary causes in the restructuring of work.
• Automation: Whither Labour Law
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Back to Automation
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Now, we get to the crux of what I have to say, and let me preface that this is preliminary work: it is at best an expression of a set of intuitions, rather than a collection of concrete findings. But my intuition sense is that where labour law, as a discipline, has engaged with the claims and findings regarding the effect of automation on the skill structure of labor demand, it has done so without the critical posture that allowed globalization or transnationalization of production to be understood, not as a technology-driven process, but as the interworking of assemblages—technological, social and also normative—with Contingent, indeterminate outcomes for distributions of power and resources between groups of workers and others
• Basic Minimum Income • National Mutual Funds • Managed Technology • Job subsidies
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The final two chapters of The Second Machine Age—perhaps the best book on the work-automation interface, and certainly the most open-minded—authors Erik Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee consider and weigh many potential institutional responses to the labour market transformations they predict for the coming years.
• Against Reactive Analysis
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My emphasis is precisely to oppose this reactive mode of thinking about the relationship between social change and normative forms. The technologies that get developed and implemented will depend on the institutional structure, on the ownership of the robots and the ownership of the surplus, and what “ownership” means in particular cases. Thinking of the solutions and problems together will mean profoundly different outcomes; I have a feeling that labour law (in a broad ecumenical, sense) has the capacity to do just that. The easiest way of understanding what I mean is to think of collective bargaining, which takes the question of how to address unfair outcomes in the employer-employee bargain, and reframes it by defining fair outcomes as whatever flows out of a rebalanced institutional framework.
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But let me close with an example that is more to the point. Starting in 1811, groups of textile workers engaged in a series of collective, sabotaging and smashing weaving machines under the banner of the apocryphal figure of Ned Ludd, pictured here in a contemporaneous woodcut. Economists call the idea that technological change will increase unemployment the Luddite Fallacy, on the basis of an understanding that the Luddites were opposed to the machines themselves. Yet as chronicled by EP Thomson and Eric Hobsbawm, the grievances were about wages and working conditions, the machines destroyed because they made a convenient target in an age before the large factory.
