AI’s problems start at the top. Unlike the internet, which spawned a number of independent companies (including Google and Microsoft), AI seems to be controlled by existing tech giants, which are investing heavily in these new firms. ARM, for instance, the British-based chip designer whose IPO last week set Wall Street aflutter, is garnering huge investments from other Big Tech firms, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple. Elsewhere, Open AI’s largest investor is Microsoft, while DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

This pattern of collaboration between giants and upstarts suggests that the next tech revolution seems poised to empower the existing hierarchy. It also threatens the prospects of the classes below. Big Tech and venture capital executives such as Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve the cause of “elevating humanity”, despite potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. Indeed, according to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. In other words, AI looks destined to warp our class structure in a similar way to feudalism, turning what has been a collection of Roman citizens into serfs.

But is this the entire story? Historically, humans have performed analytical tasks manually. They may have created tools, such as spreadsheets and surveys, to help them. But the tasks of optimising businesses have largely lain in the hands of human analysts who spend their days collecting data on the performance of businesses and markets. In the last phase of technological development, jobs for these “symbolic analysts” exploded: in the US, the number of workers in occupations requiring average to above-average education, training and experience increased from 49 million in 1980 to 83 million in 2015. Yet these tasks are now running into a buzzsaw with AI, whose underlying premise is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes better than human beings.

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The greatest generational conflict

By Joel Kotkin

In his bestselling book AI Superpowers, Kai Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft boss who now runs one of the world’s most prolific AI venture funds, proposed a two-dimensional view of the future of work. His key thesis: that the social nature of a job and the discretionary nature of a job will be the key factors underlying AI’s impact. If, for instance, a job is highly formulaic and has few discretionary decisions, and people perform their tasks with little social interaction, AI is likely to displace it. So, while the CEO of an insurance company might be safe from being displaced by AI, one of his analysts is not.

And this is where the nuance is often lost. According to the US Labor Department, AI and automation could impact as many as many as 90 million American workers, with warehouse workers among the most prominent losers. What will really alter class relations, however, is the impact on more professional jobs. They have been the ascendent class for the last two generations, growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001 — well above the 0.4% annual rise for total employment. But whereas the computer revolution was a boon to those working as programmers and market researchers, AI does the job for them, often with more speed and accuracy. As Rony Abovitz, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and AI, has observed: “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work.”

In such a world, it is not hard to envisage a new kind of class conflict that extends beyond the traditional Marxist conflict between low-wage workers and better-educated owners. More than 82% of millennials fear AI will reduce their pay, and they are right to be worried. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, recently warned. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.” As if to illustrate his point, tech firms such as Meta and Lyft have already announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, while IBM has paused hiring to assess how many mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI.

What this means more broadly isn’t tricky to discern: a once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.

Indeed, tech executives are already planning for the emergence of a vast, unproductive class made largely redundant by AI and robotics. After interviewing 147 digital company founders, the technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has concluded that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”, while everyone else comes to rely on gig work and government aid. This is reflected in support for universal basic income by a number of leading tech oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and AI guru Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI).

Of course, many might wonder what is wrong with this. Already, roughly half of all Americans support the idea of a guaranteed basic income of about $2,000 a month if robots put them out of work. UBI enjoys even stronger support in most European countries, particularly among younger people. Further east, the popular Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Sato sees re-distribution as a way to as achieve the green goals of “degrowth” and “net zero” without devastating the masses.

Yet if history is our guide, such intellectual circles are surely plagued by a certain naiveté. In every stage of capitalism, the ruling class has offered promises of welfare and support. And in every stage of capitalism, they have only done so with the intention of strengthening their own position.

What is different this time, though, is that there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.

“No”, he answers — the threat of “technological unemployment” is now real. Susskind isn’t the first to write a robots-will-replace-you book. He won’t be the last. But he does set out his reasoning with unusual depth and clarity — for which I’m grateful because it makes it easier to understand the flaws in an increasingly influential argument.

*

Susskind’s own version of the argument begins with a pile of crap and then goes on to a load of balls. No, I’m not being rude — those are two of the images he conjures up to explain his thinking.

Let’s start with the crap — specifically, the “great manure crisis” of the late 19th century. Like a lot of stories about our Victorian forebears, this one doesn’t really stand up. Horse-dependent cities such as London and New York weren’t in any danger of being buried under horse manure, for the very simple reason that it was regularly removed and used as fertiliser. But, as the author points out, it ceased to be an issue at all when transport was motorised. Horses, once integral to the urban economy, disappeared from our cities, never to return.

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By Peter Franklin

Will technological progress do the same to the human workforce? That’s what economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontief have supposed — and Susskind, also an economist, agrees with them. In the final third of his book he sets out a policy response, but I’m more interested in why he thinks it will be necessary.

To sum up what he thinks the future of work looks like, he imagines the economy as a giant ball pit. Blue balls represent the tasks that human beings are the best at doing, and red balls those where machines have the advantage. He then paints a picture of how the ball pit changes over time. For most of human history, almost all the balls are blue. A few go red with early mechanical inventions, but then the industrial revolution happens and the process massively speeds up. As we hurtle past the present day and into the future, there are more and more red balls. Though some blue ones persist in the mix, they’re too few in number and small in size to provide a basis for anything like full employment.

This is Susskind’s vision of the future. It’s not “a boot stamping on a human face forever”, like in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but rather the relentless shrinking of our balls.

Of course, it’s not the future yet. Though machines have never been more productive as they are today, the same can be said of human beings, which is why there have never been as many jobs as there are now.

Susskind himself speaks of an “Age of Labour” in which “successive waves of technological progress have broadly benefitted rather than harmed workers”. He does a great job of explaining why the “substituting force” that machines have on the demand for human labour has, on the whole, been exceeded by the “complementing force” — i.e. the tendency of mechanisation to increase the productivity of, and demand for, human workers.

The Age of Labour will only end if the complementing force is persistently and pervasively overwhelmed by the substituting force. This has never happened before. For it to happen in the foreseeable future, requires some disruptive technology that’s never existed until now.

There’s an obvious candidate: AI or artificial intelligence. (If we define an AI-controlled machine as a robot, then we can include robotics under this heading too.)

*

The story of research into AI stretches back to the post-war era. But, as Susskind reminds us, the founders of AI got off to a false start. Their big mistake was to think they could build a human-like intelligence. Needless to say, they got nowhere. Eventually the funding dried up and research ground to a halt (the “AI winter”). The field revived when developers realised that they didn’t have to mimic the human brain to computerise tasks that previously only a human could undertake. Instead, they exploited the capacity of computers to learn through trial and error. In the right circumstances, they’re very good at this — possessing vast processing power and infinite patience.

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By Peter Franklin

Not that they are patient of course. Not being conscious, nor possessing anything that could be called a mind, they don’t have human qualities. Even the ‘intelligence’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ and the ‘learning’ in ‘machine learning’ are just metaphors. But that’s beside the point, says Susskind. No matter how mindless and mechanistic AI might be, what really counts is what it can do, not how it does it.

He describes the new wave of AI research as the ‘pragmatism revolution’ and there’s no doubt that it’s made breakthroughs. For instance, AI systems have been trained up to achieve total supremacy in games like chess and Go. There have been big advances in speech recognition, language translation and medical diagnosis software. AI is literally driving progress in automated vehicle technology. Facial recognition systems are now sufficiently advanced to raise serious concerns over civil liberties.

So just how far will the revolution go?

*

There’s long been a distinction drawn between routine and non-routine jobs — or, rather, routine and non-routine tasks. A routine task is one that can be taught as a ‘how to’ set of instructions — which is not the case with non-routine tasks. For instance, operating a till in a supermarket is routine; cutting someone’s hair (to an acceptable standard) is not.

The conventional thinking is that the first kind of work can be automated, but not the second — which is why we have automated tills and cash points, but no robot hairdressers. The key point is that because most jobs involve at least some non-routine tasks they’re safe from the robots.

Or are they? Look at the way that smart meters have replaced human meter readers. It wasn’t necessary to create a robot that can knock on your door, ask to be let in, find the meter, read it and report back to HQ. Instead, you just need a small box that sits in the meter cupboard, sending in the readings electronically. All the non-routine aspects of the meter reader’s job are thus eliminated, allowing the role to be fully automated.

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Of course, that won’t work with every job. You can’t eliminate the non-routine aspect of a hairdresser’s work, i.e. cutting hair, because that’s the whole point of it. Susskind, however, argues that AI is finding ways of turning non-routine tasks into routine ones. 

For instance, there might not seem to be anything routine about playing chess at a professional level. There are various principles and strategies that can be taught to any reasonably intelligent individual, but there is no list of instructions that one can follow to become a grandmaster. Except now there is — if you’re a sufficiently advanced chess computer. AI systems like AlphaZero have taught themselves how to play chess, encoding the instructions as a very complex algorithm that can be applied to any particular game.

It’s not that AI researchers have cracked the secret of human mastery of chess. The computers that can beat any grandmaster do so mindlessly — they don’t need to be conscious or creative or cunning. All that’s necessary is the brute processing power of the silicon chip — plus some smart machine learning software kindly supplied by some helpful humans.

Far from being reassured by the fact that there’s been zero progress towards the creation of a true machine mind, Susskind’s key point is that the ‘narrow’ AI systems that do exist are nevertheless routinising tasks previously thought to be non-routine. Thus a crucial limitation on the automation of human work has been lifted. The process of task encroachment is therefore fundamentally unconstrained.

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By Peter Franklin

The implication is that the substituting force of technology will continue, while the complementing force falters. The ongoing automation of tasks will free up resources that can be devoted to other tasks — but increasingly that demand will be satisfied by further AI-controlled machines instead of humans. The routinisation of more-and-more non-routine tasks would thus mean less-and-less need for us. 

Do you feel those balls shrinking yet?

*

But what if there’s nothing particularly special about AI? What if there’s nothing new about routinising non-routine tasks? 

Though Susskind clearly understands that an AI isn’t a true intelligence, he does suggest that they are nonetheless things of wonder. He draws a parallel between the mindlessness of AI and the godlessness of Charles Darwin’s account of the natural world. Though he had no place for a divine creator, Darwin still believed in the “grandeur” of life. The products of both AI and natural selection may arise from a mindless, bottom-up process, but nevertheless they can inspire “an almost religious sense of awe.”

As well as bigging-up our “unhuman machines”, Susskind is also keen on “demystifying human beings” and “not granting them magical powers”. Indeed, he rails against what he calls the “superiority assumption” — the idea that we’re special and will always be indispensable.

This is where the deepest flaws in his argument are exposed.

I once had a colleague who was a gifted draughtsman. Using nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper he could draw a near perfect square or circle. There were slight deviations, of course, but they didn’t distract from the essential squareness or circularity of what he’d drawn. Beyond the basic techniques, there are no instructions for achieving that quality of draughtsmanship — it only comes with practice and then only to those with natural talent. It is certainly non-routine.

And yet the task of drawing a square or a circle can be routinised using nothing more than some simple tools. So should we discern “grandeur” in something as basic as a plastic ruler — just because it provides a commonplace substitute for a rare talent? Should we think any less of what a draughtsman can do because some of it can be replicated by the contents of a child’s geometry set?

Many of our tools and machines routinise non-routine tasks. A camera captures a landscape in greater detail than any painter; a record player plays music with greater consistency than any musician. But which is superior, the machine or the artist?

Machines, including AI systems, can mindlessly do things that people do mindfully. But even if the outputs are comparable, the difference between the inputs remain all-important. The mind that allows the draughtsman to draw a pleasing square is also what enables him to design and build a cathedral. 

Creativity requires consciousness. AI has been able to automatise various tasks, both routine and non-routine, because there are ways of doing them without creativity, common sense or any other faculty that depends on a conscious mind. But just because this method works with games that have clearly defined rules and with various kinds of pattern recognition, it doesn’t mean that AI methods would work in most other domains of human endeavour. To assume there is an algorithm waiting to be discovered for just about anything human workers can do, is just that — an assumption, one unsupported by compelling evidence.

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Another assumption is that there really is nothing “magical” about human consciousness, that it is purely material in origin. But even then, one would then have to ask why natural selection would go to all the trouble of evolving such an unfathomably mysterious feature, instead of relying solely upon the biological equivalent of the algorithmic processes that AI uses. Perhaps the explanation is that conscious thinking is so much more capable.

*

Ultimately, an AI system is just another tool. It may be a very useful tool, but, being mindless, it’s got a lot more in common with a plastic ruler than a human being. AI technology isn’t even unique in making a routine out of the non-routine. That’s been going on for millennia with much simpler machines.

To prove his point, Susskind would have to show that AI has accelerated the process of task encroachment to a level never seen before in human history. But he doesn’t.

Indeed, one has to ask whether the process is slowing down. Just think about our home lives. My grandparents, who were born at the beginning of the 20th century, lived through changes of immensely greater significance than anything I’ve experienced. In particular, my grandmothers were liberated from a life of utter drudgery by domestic technologies like electric lighting, central heating, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the gas cooker and the refrigerator. Nothing in more recent decades compares to the importance of these machines. The wretched smartphone doesn’t even come close.

Where are the great labour saving devices of the 21st century? If task encroachment is all set to make us redundant, then why are we still doing the ironing?

*

Susskind is not a engineer and his book is not a technical manual. Rather he’s an economist and therefore what we might expect from his profession is statistical evidence that AI is transforming the economy. If a revolution really is underway, it should show up in lower employment levels and a much higher rate of productivity growth. He does cite various economic trends, for instance job losses in the manufacturing sector, but these are better explained by factors like outsourcing, offshoring and immigration.

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Sod the singularity

By Peter Franklin

That’s not really a criticism. The reason why killer facts are absent from his book is because they don’t exist. Not yet, anyway. What A World Without Work does provide, however, is a conceptual framework that can be tested against the evidence as it comes in.

Until it does come in, we can only argue the case on a theoretical level. On that score, I have deep disagreements with Susskind’s argument. 

Nevertheless, where he does go wrong, it’s always in an interesting way. Which is more than you can say for any machine.

It’s written from the perspective of a decaying civilisation awaiting the invader. A fatalistic ruling class is resigned to its fate and mounts no defence of their city – except for a display of finery, which they hope will impress their new overlords.

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Their behaviour is both pompous and cowardly; and one hopes they get what they deserve (which in the poem they do, but more on that later).

‘Waiting for the barbarians’ has been interpreted as a satire on authoritarian paranoia – and its deep psychological need for a mortal enemy. But this is a misinterpretation. The poem satirises decadence, not paranoia.

The protagonists don’t so much fear invasion as long for it – seeking exaltation in subjugation. Indeed, there’s a special egotism in seeing oneself as the last in a long line – the culmination of an old order and therefore entitled to give it up without a fight.

Real world examples include the 20th century liberals who saw the triumph of socialism as inevitable. Or the appeasers who would have had us submit to Hitler. Or the post-war declinists who gave up on Britain and begat the euro-submissive establishment.

Today, we can see the same impulse in those who wait not for barbarians, but robots.

There’s a whole industry of experts predicting the obsolescence of the human workforce, displaced by the irresistibility productivity of AI-powered automation. It’s a disturbing, but also beguiling, prospect – a promise of leisure and luxury without limit. I’m half-attracted to it myself.

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But is it inevitable? Writing for Bloomberg, Noah Smith sounds a sceptical note:

“The truth is, nobody knows how many jobs will be replaced by automation, or how automation will affect wages and inequality. There’s the possibility that AI, rather than replacing workers, will mostly just allow them to do their jobs more easily. And even as some jobs are eliminated, new ones will pop up, possibly at higher wages. That may involve painful, stressful transitions for people who have to switch jobs, but it doesn’t represent a robot apocalypse…”

It’s not that the relevant technologies aren’t already making advances. But whether they’re destroying jobs or not is an open question:

“…some countries that use more industrial robots, such as South Korea, Germany and Japan, have unemployment rates as low as or lower than that of the U.S.”

Exhibit A in the case that robots are replacing us is what happened to manufacturing employment in the 2000s. In America, a third of all factory jobs – nearly 6 million – were lost. As noted by Gwynn Guilford in an article for Quartz last year, there is no precedent for this rate of attrition, not even the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In seeking to attach blame, technology is an obvious suspect; but there is a plausible alternative – competition from, and offshoring to, low cost manufacturing economies (especially China). So how do we decide between them?

The standard view is that despite the job losses, there was a substantial rise in US manufacturing output in the 2000s – showing that America automated its jobs away (as opposed to exporting them to China). But as Guilford explains, the output statistics are misleading. That’s because they’re adjusted for the exceptionally rapid rate of product improvement in the computers subsector (Moore’s Law and all that):

“…the method statisticians use to account for these advances can make it seem like US firms are producing and selling more computers than they actually are. And when the computers data are aggregated with the other subsectors, the adjustment makes it seem like the whole of American manufacturing is churning out more goods than it actually is.”

Strip out this adjustment and the “apparently robust growth in manufacturing productivity is mostly a mirage”, which means we’re not looking at a productivity miracle:

“To be clear, automation did happen in manufacturing. However, throughout the 2000s, the industry was automating at about the same pace as in the rest of the private sector. And if booming robot-led productivity growth wasn’t displacing factory workers, then the sweeping scale of job losses in manufacturing necessarily stemmed from something else entirely.”

So that brings us back to China and some hard questions about the terms of trade and globalisation. This is Trump territory, but only because the ground has been vacated by more moderate politicians.

It’s all too convenient for those who do well out of globalisation to conclude that those who don’t are the victims of unstoppable technological change (as opposed to factors governments can do something about). Indeed, in the long-term, we needn’t worry about the world of work at all, if we assume there won’t be one. We can just theorise about things like ‘post-work’ and universal basic income instead. But what happens when it becomes clear that machines won’t be replacing us after all?

Sod the singularity, we must assume that the future of work will remain in our hands. When it comes, and if we’re still in charge, we’ll look very stupid if we have no idea what to do with it.

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The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

At the end of ‘Waiting for the barbarians’, some terrible news reaches the city from the frontier: there are no barbarians. The confused citizens return to their home, wondering what to do now the invaders aren’t coming:

“They were, those people, a kind of solution.”

It’s really not that long ago that the cathode ray tube was a part of everyday life – the vital component in the heavy, box-like TV screens and computer monitors sat in our living rooms and offices.

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As far back as the early 1980s, I remember people speculating that flat screens were “five-to-ten years away”. The joke was that they always would be. But then, suddenly, they arrived – displacing CRT screens just about everywhere.

The thing is that just prior to this revolution, the old technology was never more ubiquitous – thanks to multiple TVs in many homes and computerisation in the workplace.

That’s a pattern worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the puzzling phenomenon of (nearly) full employment in the contemporary capitalist economy. It may be that our robot replacements are lurking, flat screen style, just around the corner. In five-to-ten years we human beings may find ourselves joining those cathode ray tubes on the rubbish heap of history.

But, so far, there’s little sign it. That’s puzzling because even if technologies like advanced robotics and AI aren’t quite in full swing, other potentially job-destroying factors – such as globalisation – certainly are. Furthermore, we’re only ten years on from the calamity of the global financial crisis – and still propping up a low-growth economy with piles of debt, QE and ultra-low interest rates.

And yet, as a special report in The Economist describes, most western economies are generating jobs like there’s no tomorrow:

“Across the OECD a jobs bonanza is under way. In the past five years the group has added 43m jobs. The unemployment rate—the number of people looking for work as a share of the total labour force—is at its lowest in decades… In 2018, the employment rate among people of working age was the highest ever in Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia and 22 other OECD countries.”

Furthermore, the jobs boom doesn’t seem to be leaving many people behind:

“The boom is broad based. Unemployment among unskilled workers and the young is tumbling, as is long-term joblessness.”

The UK’s ‘jobs-led recovery’ is especially interesting. Prior to 2010, private sector job creation was massively skewed to the richer half of the country, but, in this decade, the North-South divide has narrowed dramatically.

Nor can the jobs-boom be explained away as a sub-optimal shift to temporary, part-time and self employment. The big picture is much more solid than that. And as for wage levels, those appear to be on the rise again after a long period of stagnation.

Even if our long-term future is one of ‘fully automated luxury communism’, the present is one of fully employed luxury capitalism.

But to some critics, the ‘luxury’ part of that formula would be better described as ‘unnecessary’:

“David Graeber, an anthropologist, goes further. In ‘Bullshit Jobs’, a book published last year which has become akin to a holy tract for millennial socialists, he claims that a big chunk of modern employment is pointless and soul-sucking. ‘Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,’ he argues.”

Of course, “bullshit” in this context is a subjective term. Deplorably, there may be some unkind souls who’d apply it to Professor Graeber’s profession!

Isn’t it better to see our surplus-to-requirements economy as a sign of progress? One can argue about how best to achieve and distribute frivolity-for-all, but as long as we don’t wreck the planet in the process, what’s wrong with a little luxury – or, indeed, a lot?

Of course, if luxury for some is only made available through the drudgery of others, then that is a problem. The kind of demoralising service-sector jobs described by writers such as James Bloodworth are clearly nothing to celebrate. And yet, as the anonymous authors of The Economist article point out, governments across the Western world are placing stronger requirements upon employers to look after their employees – for instance, through training opportunities, childcare provision, parental leave, health and safety measures and minimum wage levels.

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Furthermore, and contrary to the prophecies of the free market fundamentalists, pro-worker regulation has not killed off job-creation – quite the opposite it would seem.

The authors offer various explanations for this jobs miracle – the most interesting of which is that technology has revolutionised the process of recruitment:

“Better tech improves the ‘matching’ of employers with potential employees. Not long ago those hiring put an advert in a local newspaper or spread the word by mouth. Now employers can shoot from the hip, posting vacancies on a slew of jobs websites. In the ten years to 2016 the cost of filling a vacancy fell by 80% in real terms.”

I suspect that we’ve hugely underestimated the significance of the progress made in solving this most difficult of coordination problems.

The perception that the digital age hasn’t made more of an impact on productivity levels is one of the great mysteries of contemporary economics. But perhaps we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Or, rather, we’ve been misled by the key statistics.

The standard measure of productivity is specifically one of labour productivity – i.e. GDP divided by the total number of hours worked. But what about hours not worked because people are unemployed – earning nothing and producing nothing? This zero productivity is excluded from the standard measure, making a high unemployment economy look much more productive than it actually is.

If the internet has enabled employers to employ more people and workers to find jobs more easily then it will show up in the statistics as a hit to productivity – because more of the least skilled workers will be included. That is perverse, because while these newly-included individuals may be less productive than other workers, they’re obviously more productive than the uncounted unemployed.

One day the robots may finally arrive with our P45s in their steely claws. But until then we need a better measure of productivity to show the job-creating effects of technology as a plus not a minus.

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The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By John Cruddas

Firstly, there’s the author. He’s a leading light of Novara Media – and thus a general in Jeremy Corbyn’s online army. He helped lead the social media insurgency that seized control of the Labour Party from the centre-Left establishment and that must rankle.

Secondly, there’s the title: Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It’s a huge, expansive, outrageous idea. Does it come with fully automated luxury gulags and fully automated luxury famines? The put-downs write themselves (appropriately enough).

Thirdly, there’s the subtitle: A manifesto. Yes, this is a polemical work, written in a breezy, accessible style. It is a work of pop political economy – full of sweeping statements and broad brush summaries. And why not? Why should big ideas be confined to dry and dusty tomes? Why should the cut-and-thrust of public debate be limited to small ideas – like Trump’s latest tweet or what a Tory leadership contender might have stuffed up his left nostril?

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Of course, the fact that I welcome this book doesn’t mean that I agree with it. To a large extent, I don’t. Bastani’s arguments are thought-provoking – and, often, the thought they provoked in my mind was “this is completely wrong”. He is, however, wrong in an interesting way – which is more than can be said for a lot of his critics.

*

Let’s start with what makes up the bulk of the book: an exploration of the 21st-century technologies that are expanding the possibilities of human endeavour – and therefore politics, which is, of course, “the art of the possible”.

Bastani looks at AI, robotics, renewable energy, bio-tech, high-tech food production and, er, mining asteroids. Don’t expect too much caution here. He very much accentuates the positive – in support of his contention that we are moving towards an economic situation of “extreme supply” across a range of resources.

On some of these fronts (especially the asteroids) he’s far too optimistic about the pace of change. Overall, however, it’s a pretty good introduction to the potential of existing technology to bring about a “third disruption” (the first disruption being the agricultural revolution, starting 12,000 years ago; and the second the industrial revolution, starting 200 years ago).

The author is not a complete techno-Pollyanna: he acknowledges some of the pitfalls and setbacks of our age, such as the climate crisis and the faltering of Moore’s Law. But that still leaves a lot of complication unexamined.

For instance, Bastani quite rightly talks about the rapid progress being made on the renewable power front. Costs have come tumbling down. But when it comes to an “extreme supply” of energy, we had that decades ago. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap and concentrated liquid energy – oil – made the modern world possible. Then, bit-by-bit, we lost it: OPEC embargoes, the exhaustion of oilfields, air pollution, the dawning reality of the greenhouse effect. The true costs of fossil fuels are mounting up – and if we’re lucky renewables might just get us back to where we thought we were 50 years ago.

It’s not the only example of our uncertain progress. Antibiotic resistance, collapsing biodiversity, the diminishing productivity of scientific research: if you look, there is plenty of evidence against the idea that “things can only better” (as an anti-Blairite like Bastani probably wouldn’t say).

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By Peter Franklin

What he does say, however, is that the “rate of historical change is accelerating”. Whether that’s true rather depends on the timeframe. Zoom in on recent decades and a powerful case can be made for a technological slowdown. Economists such as Tyler Cowen write powerfully about a “great stagnation“. Even if one concentrates on digital tech, there’s a pretty good case that the development of the internet has been a lot less exciting over this decade than in the 1990s or 2000s.

However, these may be bumps in the road, not a dead-end – and it’s not unreasonable for Bastani to concentrate on where the road may be taking us.

*

The non-fantastical prospect of an end to scarcity is what brings his two most important arguments into play. Firstly, that technological abundance will make communism possible for the first time in history; and, secondly, that while the “logic of market demand means that capitalists must produce goods and services as cheaply as they can”, there comes a point at which supply becomes so extreme that capitalism can’t work anymore.

Let’s take a look at these propositions in greater detail.

By “communism” Bastani doesn’t mean the communist regimes of the past (and present), but “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another”. The excuse of the latter-day Marxist that ‘real communism hasn’t been tried yet’ has become something of a cliche. But going by Bastani’s definition, it’s clear that real communism hasn’t been possible so far and won’t be possible until work has been largely automated and shortages of key resources rendered a thing of the past.

Therefore this book is not a defence of totalitarianism. It could, however, have done without an aside like: the “seven-decade survival” of the USSR “remains one of the great political achievements of the last century”. When a regime doesn’t have to bother with democracy and can murder dissidents at will, it’s amazing how long it can survive.

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Still, let’s get back to the future. If we are indeed on the road to full automation and luxury, why do we need communism of any kind? Reviewing the catalogue of wonders that makes up the middle section of the book, one can’t help but notice that most are the achievement of capitalist companies and capitalist countries. Yes, the state does play a supporting role by funding basic research and shared infrastructure, but the change-makers are the innovators and entrepreneurs who define capitalism at its best.

Even Bastani admits that “capitalism has a number of useful features”.

But then comes the big claim that it can’t cope with extreme supply:

“…none of its shortcomings match its inability to accept natural abundance. Facing such conditions for resources – as with information, energy and labour – production for profit begins to malfunction.”

Even the briefest consideration of economic history shows this isn’t true. Across a vast range of commodities, goods and services, the unfolding of the industrial revolution turned extreme scarcity into extreme supply.

The classic example is lighting. In 1800, the cost of an hour of artificial light (equivalent in brightness to a 100 watt filament bulb) was prohibitively high – about $150 in today’s prices. That meant that even the rich couldn’t afford more than the dimmest candlelight (which was also smelly, dirty and dangerous). But with industrialisation and invention, costs plummeted to $5 in 1900 and, then, with the electric light bulb, all the way down to 5 cents by the end of the 20th century. CFL followed by LED technology means that it continues to get cheaper – and greener.

In the space of two centuries, lighting has became thousands of times cheaper. Compared to its original cost, it is very nearly free. (It is has become so abundant in our lives that we even speak of light pollution – an unwanted excess of light.) And yet ‘big light’ has coped – capitalist enterprises continue to manufacture lighting products at a profit and to reinvest some of those profits to make light even cheaper (with some prodding from the state in the form of efficiency standards).

It’s the same with just about anything else that’s become massively cheaper. Computer processing capacity, for instance. More than merely coping, capitalism thrives on extreme supply – using it to create previously undreamt of applications – and selling them to an eager public. Of course, abundance can be disruptive. Technological breakthroughs can render products, companies and entire industries obsolete. But capitalism as a whole adapts – there are new products, new companies, new industries.

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So why the contemporary crisis of capitalism? You don’t have to be a socialist to realise that there’s a deep rot in the system, especially its neoliberal incarnation. Bastani discusses various examples and you can consult the UnHerd archives for many more.

But when you look for the root cause of the corruption, it strikes me that the essential problem isn’t extreme supply at all – it’s that businesses are protected from disruption or allowed to exploit monopoly control over resources that remain scarce in an otherwise abundant economy (above all, land.) These are the twin evils of crony capitalism and rentier capitalism. They are real, they are powerful and they must be defeated. But what this requires is for government to take back control of naturally scarce resources, not the increasingly abundant ones.

*

Ah, but what about when capitalism creates artificial scarcity by using intellectual property rights to constrain the supply of informational goods?

This is an age-old issue that predates the capitalist system. From the cook’s secret recipe to the playwright’s manuscript, access to original information has always been contested – and the right of the originators to profit from their creative efforts always asserted.

Over time, governments have come to recognise and protect intellectual property because it is in the common interest that people should be incentivised to create more of it. In this respect, the most relevant figure in Bastani’s book is the cover price. Presumably, the text could be made available for free online. But wouldn’t the author agree with me that he should see some return on his hard work?

Of course, IP rights can be exploited to the general detriment – for instance through the practice of patent trolling. But that can be reformed. Moreover, the state (which, after all, controls the law) always has the option of abolishing IP protections altogether – dealing with the issue through deregulation rather than assuming control of industries.

However, Bastani wants us to consider the future, not just the present. In the increasingly automated economy of the decades ahead, the means of production won’t so much be the robots, but the artificially intelligent systems that control them. The automated economy will therefore be an algorithmic economy – revolving around instructions that can be copied and made ubiquitous or protected and made artificially scarce

With so much power and control at stake, isn’t it incumbent on the state to take ownership in the name of the people? Well, if we were talking about the code behind an all-powerful general intelligence that directs all productive activity, then yes – nationalise the singularity!

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But it won’t be like that. AI systems will be specific and multiple, not general and singular. They will enhance, not replace, workers’ productivity – and the know-how that will make the most difference won’t be reducible to reproducible code, but uniquely (and unequally) embodied within living, breathing human beings.

*

The economic system will be more complicated than ever before, and less centrally plannable. So, contra-Bastani, I believe that the conditions under which communism could actually work are further away than ever before.

Then again, anyone who thinks they can predict the course of a technological revolution – or how society will react to it – is bound to be confounded.

All we can do from the clouded vantage point of the present is envisage scenarios and debate the implications. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a passionate contribution to that debate and I hope it provokes many others.

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Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A manifesto, Aaron Bastani, Verso, £16.99

Levy, an entrepreneur and international master of chess, was the keynote speaker and has long predicted that by 2050 humans will be entering into legally binding marriages with robots. He’s said more recently that within the next century humans will be able to have babies with their electrically engineered spouses, given the “recent progress in stem cell research and artificial chromosomes”.

A surprising number of people aren’t troubled by bionic babies. They’re already signing up for android action, or its nearest equivalent. The New York Times recently reported the advent of Digisexuals, or those amongst us who reject human contact in favour of close emotional, or sexual, relationships with electronic devices and mechanisms enhanced by artificial intelligence. Exemplars of the trend include the Chinese AI engineer Zheng Jiajia who designed and married his own robot wife Yingying and the Japanese school administrator Akihiko Kondo who wed the pop sensation and hologram Hatsune Miku last November (neither wedding was legally binding).

Developments in virtual reality and digitally-enabled sex – using apps to control artificial phalluses and vulvas – are making it less and less necessary for reclusive tech lovers to seek human intimacy at all. And films such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, in which Alicia Vikander plays a robot who can pass the Turing Test, seem ever more prophetic. Most of us have little idea when we message a large corporate website’s “help” facility whether the person answering us is real or a bot.

Before I attended the Goldsmith’s conference my own views on AI eroticism hadn’t progressed far beyond Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron. I was unaware that several sex-doll companies, such as US-based Abyss Creations, were already producing products widely billed as sex robots – in reality dolls with soft silicone “skin” and animatronic AI-enabled robotic heads– and that some were already in use in brothels. I hadn’t realised the sex tech market was estimated at $30 billion a year, meaning a lucrative race was on to produce devices to replicate the soft squishy sensuality of human intimacy (thus reducing the need for actual human intimacy). One young female computer scientist I met at the conference had created the “Kissinger”, a device to simulate lip-on-lip pressure via a mobile phone app.

Most of my fellow Goldsmiths’ delegates didn’t just see these advances as inevitable; they felt they were desirable. The most vociferous proponents of humanoid robots tended to be men and it became clear a little geek stereotyping wasn’t entirely unwarranted. The male coders, academics and futurists I talked to were linear thinkers, at ease with coding and algorithms but less in tune, I felt, with the emotional vagaries of your average human female.

Two of the event’s leading lights regaled me separately with tales of their god-awful divorces and ex-wives, before telling me with painful sincerity they’d plump for an android spouse any day. A German academic, Jessica Szczuka said her academic research (involving 263 straight males) found that two thirds of respondents could imagine using a sex robot. It was hard not to think back to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, in which a bunch of irksome, feminist wives are replaced with fawning, docile lookalikes who don’t seem quite human.

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Should we care that the sex robots are coming?

By Kate Devlin

In fairness, it’s not just men who are drawn to sex tech. The Love and Sex with Robots conference was hosted by the archaeologist-turned-computer scientist Kate Devlin, who’s subsequently published Turned On, a history of the sex robot, which also keeps an eye on the science horizon. Devlin takes pains to point out that women in the field of AI aren’t swept up by the fem-bot type androids of popular science fiction. She questions why erotic tech has to come in human form at all and suggests we think more laterally.

In her book, she proposes a sensual duvet with receptors and transmitters that would be like wrapping yourself up in a pleasure-inducing cocoon. Devlin’s also a fierce advocate of the potential benefits of AI-enhanced erotic mechanisms in terms of catering for the elderly, the physically impaired and the chronically lonely. Like many women in the field she strives to promote the therapeutic side of sex tech. Szcruka similarly pointed out that the likely users of sex robots will be people who suffer from acute social anxiety, saying: “Someone with a fear of rejection could control the robot because the robot would never reject them.”

In wider, global terms you can see there’s an argument that this technology could help societies where there’s a perilous imbalance in the sexes, whether that’s remote mining communities or whole countries. China’s one-child policy and the Indian sub-continent’s extreme poverty, aggravated by both nation’s traditional favouring of male children, has led to mass abortion and murder of female infants. This necessarily means some young men will find it hard to secure a sexual partner, leading to either unwanted celibacy, or a culture that fosters rape and assault. Perhaps even the furious Incels (involuntary celibates – of whom the California school shooter 22-year-old Elliot Roger is the most infamous) would find their pent-up, misogynistic rage was soothed by a robot lover programmed for sexual healing.

The counter-argument is that such theories are delusional: that if a man becomes used to unquestioned compliance from a “female” robot then he will expect the same level of submission from a human woman. Or that angry, frustrated males will abuse non-sentient sex robots, making them more likely to behave violently to real flesh and blood women. In 2017, it was widely reported that an “intelligent” sex doll named Samantha, who responded to seductive chatter, was “molested” at Arts Electronica Festival in Austria. Her Spanish engineer, Sergi Santos, said festival attendees had treated Samantha “like barbarians”.

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Kate Devlin closely examines the ethical arguments against sex robots in Turned On – even looking head-on at the disturbing question of what happens if androids are constructed to resemble children. Once again, the central issue raised is whether such innovation is likely to help prevent actual abuse of minors, or actively encourage it. There’s almost no reliable evidence on the matter and the same is true of the debate around whether sex tech makes women more or less vulnerable to sexual assault. Devlin outlines the central problem:

“The ‘gateway’ versus ‘reduction’ theories remain ambiguous and they bear investigation, though such investigation is by necessity constrained by ethical boundaries… What ethics committee would sign off a study like that? What funding body would pay for it?”

And even if you settle these kinds of ethical issues, there are the everyday ones that complicate all technological innovation. Who is ultimately in charge of the software? Can it be hacked? Will large corporations hijack the programming to spy on our sexual habits? Will Big Government monitor it to see if we’re deviants?

If you feel this talk of androids is just an absurd sci-fi scenario, it’s worth noting the idea of creating a replica human for sexual pleasure has a history as long as storytelling. Devlin’s book highlights the Greek myth about a young woman called Laodamia, whose husband Protesilaus was the first to die at the siege of Troy. Distraught with grief, Laodamia commissioned a bronze statue of her dead spouse and took it to her bed.

Then there’s the 19^th-century ballet Coppélia, where a young man falls for a doll made by a malign inventor.  But truth is always weirder than fiction and few stories are more haunting than the tale of the artist Oskar Kokoschka’s affair with Alma Mahler (widow of the great composer). Mahler ended the intense romance after a couple of years, but  Kokoschka couldn’t come to terms with the parting. In 1918, he visited the Munich doll-maker Hermine Moos and commissioned a life-size soft effigy of Mahler, stipulating every last detail of design: “And take to heart the contours of the body, e.g. the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin… The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace.” Kokoschka posed the mannequin around his home and on one infamous occasion took her to the opera. But the doll proved deeply unsatisfactory and eventually, following a party, he destroyed her.

It’s easy to feel complacent; to believe this kind of obsessive behaviour that could never overtake you or me. Until you consider the average person’s emotional attachment to their smart phones, tablets and laptops. It may be too strong to say we’re in love with our electronic devices, but we display troubling signs of addiction and dependency that aren’t far removed from it. It’s fair to say I freak out more when I mislay my mobile than when I lose one of my sons. I think of my computer’s hard drive as an extension of my own memory. I see friends talk to Siri as if she’s alive and I found the film Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a sultry-voiced operating system, only too plausible.

On dating sites and chat rooms identity is blurred to the point you can feel passionate desire for someone who doesn’t exist except as a projection of a stranger’s fantasies. Teledildonics (app-controlled sex-toys that can be operated remotely) mean you can have a love affair where your lover never touches you because his skill won’t match up to your smart toy. Recent sex surveys have yielded the surprising result that millennials are losing their virginity later than comparable young from the 1960s to 1980s and were generally having less sex. One hypothesis was the pressure that comes from widely available porn and the pressure to perform.

I want to be relaxed about all this. I know our forebears were deeply disturbed by the spinning Jenny, the iron horse and the contraceptive pillandthat somehow humans adapt apace and survive the relentless tide of innovation. I find Kate Devlin’s enthusiasm admirable and I’d certainly test-drive her orgasmic duvet if it came to production – although nightly use might prove a bit over-stimulating. Nevertheless, something troubles me in the whole debate. We may not yet have reliable evidence to quote about the effects of intimate human interaction with machines, but most parents I know feel they observe significant changes in their children when they spend too much time on their devices.

Gaming and social media have inbuilt features devised to create an addictive response (such as Facebook’s infamous “like” button) and bond users ever closer to their favourite ways of wasting time. With advances in virtual reality you can only envisage the dependency becoming more pronounced – and the grumpiness, anxiety and anger when asked to return to real life becoming more accentuated. And if this is true of non-sex-tech how will it not be truer of the tech designed to push our sexual buttons? Especially for those who are most vulnerable: socially inept and reclusive young men. It’s not hard to envisage a scenario in which thousands of people retreat to an online erotic life with less chance of encountering a messy, complex, self-contradictory, enticing, evolving human being.

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I’ve spent 23 years researching and writing about sex and relationships and have become increasingly astonished by human capacity for erotic intimacy – and also by how frightened we can be by the levels of trust and vulnerability involved in such closeness. Some of the hardest sexual practices are paradoxically the simplest, because they involve sustained eye contact, tender exploration and gentle, slow touch. They necessitate trust of an order that doesn’t entail you thinking: “Hmm, has someone hacked into your central controls.”

I’ll probably sound wildly kooky if I talk about “energetic connection” but when you’re profoundly, erotically in tune with another personthere is a flow between bodies that seems to transcend the purely physical. The irony is that we call it “electrifying” in homage to the spark that gives life to machines. Science can surely explain that amoroussensation via dopamine, oxytocin and a crucible of other feel-good chemicals, but it’s still a peculiarly human, interactive sensation.

More than that, let us consider the slippery, contradictory nature of desire. Do we ever want what we think we want? Aren’t our deepest yearnings to some extent occluded? Societal norms, parental guidance and peer pressure steer us for so long that it can take decades to know your own sexual taste. And then there’s the fact that when you get what you want it often leaves you unsatisfied. A friend filled in an online dating form saying she wanted a tall, dark, handsome London-based professional and promptly fell in love with a short, sandy, eccentric farmer from Wales.

Can we write algorithms for androids that delight and frustrate us in equal measure, that keep pace with our unconscious desires, that change our perceptions of our needs and deepest longings? Can a robot ever resonate with that iridescent glow of heart and soul that comes from melding with your best beloved to the point you don’t know where your own body starts and his ends? Could you feel the fine hairs on your neck rise as your android lover turned to look at you across a crowded room, although your back was turned to theirs? I know many thousands would sign up for a Rampant Rabbit that had a robotic Idris Elba attached to it. And far more for a compliant sex-bot that looked and talked like Scarlett Johansson. But I’ll always yearn for that small epiphany Nora Ephron outlined in Sleepless in Seattle:

“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up… I knew it the very first time I touched her. … I was just taking her hand to help her  out of a car, and I knew. It was like… magic.”

“In the end, it’s not about intelligent machines taking over,” says Brett Frischmann, co-author of Re-Engineering Humanity. “I don’t really care about the engineering of artificial intelligence or really intelligent machines. I’m more concerned about the engineering of unintelligent humans.”

Like an episode of Black Mirror, the story that he and Evan Selinger tell in their rather dystopian book begins in small, seemingly insignificant ways.

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When I try to login to a particular newspaper I am usually confronted by a picture of a roadside scene. Over the image is a grid. I am then challenged to prove that I am human by clicking on each box that contains parts of a crosswalk, which I complete with only a grumble, more about the Americanism rather than anything else. I don’t for one minute think about what the data I am generating is being used for. When I have done this, I am presented with a second picture. It’s only when this task has been completed that I can read the story that I am paying a fee every month to access.

Sound familiar? This challenge is, of course, a CAPTCHA. It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ironically, the original Turing test was designed by British computer scientist Alan Turing to be administered by humans to robots as a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like behaviour. In the case of CAPTCHA, it is a machine that is testing a human’s ability to exhibit human like capabilities. In a sense it is testing the mechanisation of humans.

This automated stimulus-response test would be familiar to any psychologist who has watched rats scurry around a maze. At least the rats get a piece of cheese for their trouble.

The problem for us humans is that we don’t react in this automated manner only when faced by a CAPTCHA, but to a whole range of other software too. The automatic tick of a box – whether literal or metaphorical – becomes our default, predictable response when faced by choices where we should be paying more attention to the decisions we are making.

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We automatically tick the box to agree to Terms and Conditions online without ever reading what they say. We like the piece of Fake News on Facebook without even a quick Google to check out the story. We strap a Fitbit on to our wrist and strive to meet the 10,000 steps a day goal while our private data gets hoovered up to who knows where and we get used to being under constant surveillance. We change our coffee brand so we can have the pleasure of re-ordering it though Alexa, the virtual assistant that works through the Amazon Echo smart speaker – the use of which seems to infect families “like a happy virus.”

The result of this conditioning is that we become more like a simple machine – or a reluctant piece of technology – that can be nudged, shoved, or even programmed, by the coders of the apps and their corporate masters towards the goal that has been chosen for us. Many people just trust that Big Tech is looking after our interests rather than its own, or simply shrug their shoulders and enjoy the benefits of the app or smartwatch anyway.

The problem is that we are so enjoying the happiness, or “cheap bliss” – as Frischmann and Selinger call it – released by our freedom from these mundane tasks of reading a contract, shopping for coffee or recording our exercise that we don’t notice that the technology is starting to blur the line between who is the tool and who is the maker. It doesn’t occur to us that “the things that we use aren’t neutral”.

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The voices that warn us are drowned out or dismissed. When we do notice, we become so tied up with the swirl of controversy around a company like Cambridge Analytica, a platform like Facebook or even just social networks in general that we don’t notice that the problem is the much bigger system.

CAPTCHA, Fitbit and Alexa are all part of a network of smart digital technologies that may have different features and different effects on us, but which are together enmeshing every aspect of our lives. Even if we do realise the power of the Internet of Things, it is easier to close our eyes and give ourselves up to the technological momentum.

The fear that we will become like our tools isn’t new – Max Weber famously argued that the drive for efficiency by large bureaucracies was dehumanising work – but for Frischmann and Selinger never has this outcome been so likely, nor the consequences so profound. The cubicles of the typical open-plan office can make us feel like worker ants, but that distinctly steam-age form of dehumanisation is nothing compared to the digital variety – the former clocks off at 5pm, the latter sits on your bedside table. The two writers insist they are not anti-technology, more cautious about its likely outcomes.

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The impact of this network of powerful smart devices driven by algorithms designed to meet – and even anticipate – our needs cannot be understated. These little plastic boxes seem to quickly, and sinisterly, infiltrate every aspect of our lives, even the way we bring up our children. We think we are training the algorithms, when really we are the ones being trained. By the time we think “how could I have ever lived without it?”, we have moved a couple more steps closer to losing our humanity.

Frischmann and Selinger call this process “outsourcing”. Outsourcing, they argue, attacks what it is be human. When we let algorithms, robots and consumer devices take over what were once fundamental human functions – like making a decision – we lose our free will, our ability to act independently in the world. With less effort needed by us, we experience less of the action itself, and before long the behaviour becomes less intentional, and we do it more automatically.

By giving up control like this, we feel less responsible for how things turn out and conversely feel less of a buzz when they turn out well. Any understanding we may have had of how a process works is lost. We become dependent on the platform or app, a spectator in a life programmed by our devices, the engineers who programmed them and the corporations that own the lot.

The venture capital backed June Intelligent Oven is a case in point. It runs on AI, deep learning and many, many sensors and cameras. Needless to say, Alexa is built-in. The second-generation of the oven, whose manufacturers compare to the Tesla Model-S, has just been released and even has food recognition technology built in. The drop in price from $1500 to $500 means it is likely to be in your kitchen soon.

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The only problem is, as one reviewer points out, we might lose our ability to ever cook again: “When you cook salmon wrong, you learn about cooking it right. When the June cooks salmon wrong, its findings are uploaded, aggregated and averaged into a June database that you hope will allow all June ovens to get it right next time.”

Like its corporate-world namesake, we justify outsourcing to ourselves, our friends and our children in the name of efficiency. These smart networks reduce the transaction cost of doing something to close to zero. This reduction means that stuff happens fast and gives us what feels like a big boost to our productivity. The only problem is that going to the gym or spending time with the children can start to feel like going to work. It is Taylorism gone mad. (Taylorism was the first attempt to apply science to improve labour efficiency.)

We can’t win. The cheap bliss that the automatic use of these devices gives us is manufactured by the same people who programme our lives. Happiness, satiation, call it what you like, is a feeling that is itself engineered through techno-social engineering. We can’t escape it. The danger that the authors of Re-Engineering Humanity highlight is that the most efficient way to keep billions of people might be to engineer their preferences to expect very little and then give them only slightly more than that.

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Resistance is possible, the book tells us, perhaps with a little less confidence. To counter the outsourcing of our humanity, we need to consciously understand that we are shaped – even manufactured – by the built environment we live in whether a tower block or the Internet of Things.

Like the resident action groups who take responsibility for the estates that they live on, we need to start taking responsibility for the design and use of our digital ‘estate’. The best way to do this, the authors propose, may be to engineer delays back into our systems.

“Friction is resistance,” Frischmann thinks, because it gives us time to stop and think. Time that allows us to acquire our own beliefs, values and attitudes rather than an algorithm. “This is free will in action.”

If we don’t start to take back control, then the danger is that we lose what the writers call “our freedom to be off. Our freedom from programming, conditioning and control engineered by others.”

Further reading

Advanced economies shouldn't depend on cheap labour

By Peter Franklin

In an important article for Bloomberg, Kai-Fu Lee, encourages us to take a different perspective. What will robotics and AI do to jobs in the developing world?

“Artificial intelligence is dramatically accelerating the automation of factories and taking over routine tasks such as customer service or telemarketing. AI does such jobs cheaper than the low-wage workers of the developing world and, over time, will do them better. Robots examining your iPhone for scratches don’t take vacations for Chinese New Year; AI customer-service agents don’t demand pay raises.”

For any given range of jobs where automation is a viable option, one would expect those paying the highest wages to be prioritised. So does that mean that developing economies, with their comparatively low wage levels, are safe?

Not necessarily. Offshoring may save on payroll costs, but can be expensive in other ways. Distance from home markets and the difficulty of operating in an unfamiliar regulatory environment can both take their toll. Then there’s the potential threat to intellectual property and the opportunities for efficiency improvement that get lost when the shopfloor is a half-a-world-away from designers, engineers and other specialists.

It seems likely that many companies would re-shore their manufacturing facilities and call centres if they didn’t have to pay higher wages – or, indeed, any wages.

That could have devastating consequences for the countries left behind:

“Without a cost incentive to locate in the developing world, corporations will bring many of these functions back to the countries where they’re based. That will leave emerging economies, unable to grasp the bottom rungs of the development ladder, in a dangerous position: The large pool of young and relatively unskilled workers that once formed their greatest comparative advantage will become a liability — a potentially explosive one.”

China, though, will be fine.

As highlighted before on UnPacked, the Chinese want much more for themselves than to be the ‘workshop of the world’; Chinese demographics mean that the country can’t rely on an endlessly abundant labour supply; and, in any case, Chinese technological expertise and domestic consumer markets are strong enough to keep a heavily automated manufacturing sector at home.

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The innovation game: Can China regain its lead over the West?

By Peter Franklin

The real threat is to those much poorer countries that hope to get the sort of jobs from China that China once got from the West. In other words, if robotics and AI puts an end to the advantage of having a young and cost-competitive workforce, it could also end the spread of industrialisation and the prosperity that comes with it.

That looks like especially bad news for Africa – the great population growth centre of the 21st century. A different way forward is required:

“…what is an emerging economy to do? The first step is to recognize that the traditional paths to economic development — the China and India models — are no longer viable… The next wave of emerging economies must chart a new course.”

The developing world’s use of new technology to leapfrog entire stages of development that richer countries had to go through is a well-documented phenomenon. Examples include mobile phone-based financial services in places where there are no high street banks or, indeed, high streets. Then there’s the use of distributed forms of renewable energy where there are no electricity grids or big central power stations.

But that’s just for starters. If progress in artificial intelligence results in significant automation of specialisms such as the law, accountancy and education, then developing countries may be able leapfrog a lot of the services infrastructure that appears to be so essential to the functioning of a western economy.

Note that this does not require complete automation. For instance, in ten or 20 years time, an AI ‘law bot’ probably won’t be able to do everything that a London QC can do now, but it might be able to undertake more basic legal work. Such tools could combine to allow developing economies to advance without the highly expensive – and, one might argue, self-justifying – public and private sector bureaucracies that weigh us down in the West.

This would free the brightest and best in rising nations to focus on real entrepreneurship and true innovation.

Well, that’s the optimistic scenario – but why not go for it?

Further reading

How long before the world's youngest continent revolts?

By Daniel Knowles

One wonders why our ancestors went to such trouble. Cellars are useful, of course, especially in a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters; but to keep on digging downwards must have required a huge effort in an age before digging machinery. If they needed more space, why didn’t they just build a bigger house out of town?

The answer is that you had to be in town to benefit from the protection of city walls – and so when there was no more space at the surface, and houses had as many storeys as was feasible back then, the only other way was down.

In the global cities of the 21st century, the Middle Ages are back. Constrained not by city walls, but by property prices and planning restrictions, we’re digging down again.

Further reading

Should the rich be allowed to destroy their own wealth?

By Peter Franklin

In an article for the Guardian, Bradley L Garrett describes the land grab now taking place beneath our feet. Most notoriously, there’s the fashion for basement extensions in the posher part of central London:

“In London, a city with 150 years of trenching, digging and boring to its name, the chaos is reaching new depths. According to Newcastle University’s Global Urban Research Unit, more than 4,600 basements have been granted planning permission in the last decade – in just seven of London’s 32 boroughs…

“…Many of the basements contained cinemas, gymnasiums, pools, wine cellars and panic rooms. One even included plans for a subterranean beach with an accompanying waterfall.”

An especially weird aspect of these subterranean follies is that the diggers used to excavate them are often left behind. Having dug their way down into a confined space, the only way of getting them back up is by lifting them out with a crane – the costs and complications of which can be greater than buying a new digger. Therefore the last thing they do is dig their own graves to one side of the main development. That should be something for the archeologists of the future to puzzle over.

Technology, however, is moving on. Garrett mentions Elon Musk’s Boring Company – whose mission is to use tunnelling machines to create a 3D road network beneath Los Angeles. DARPA, the inventor of the internet, is also on the case:

“…the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is currently funding a “subterranean challenge”, soliciting bids for techniques to enhance “situational awareness” of global underground spaces, with a $2m prize. The challenge is to create machines that can make their way through tunnel systems, urban undergrounds and natural caves.”

Another initiative worth a mention is the EU’s BADGER programme which aims to develop an autonomous burrowing robot.

If these and other technologies succeed in bringing down the costs of exploring and excavating the ground beneath us, then a new dimension of urban development will open up. We could afford more of what we already construct below ground e.g. road tunnels, car parks, sewers etc; and also some revolutionary applications. How about basement extensions for the masses? Or ubiquitous ducting for public utilities so that the roads never have to be dug up again?

And here’s another one: The reason why it’s so hot on some London underground tube lines is because the energy generated when the trains break has accumulated as heat in the clay surrounding the tunnels. In over a century of operation the ambient temperatures have gone from 14°C to more than 20°C. If we had an affordable and precise way of running a heat exchange network around these tunnels, we could extract the energy and use it to provide heating at the surface. Cool!

Of course, as Garrett points out, we’re going to need 3D maps of our poorly documented sub-cities and we’re going to have to properly sort out who owns what underground.

However, assuming that the technology and the regulation comes together, the space beneath us may turn out to be more significant than the space above us.

Further reading

The false promise of the vertical city

By Peter Franklin

The biggest shift of the late 20^th century, a shift set to engulf the 21^st, is from labour to capital as a factor of production. As with the first Industrial Revolution, the core issue is the reallocation of resources that will result from the application of new technology.

Second only to resisting invasion by a foreign power, full employment has long been the core concern of political leaders. It’s the key to public sentiment – and re-election. It’s a key reason why Trump made a big deal out of criticising offshoring, competition from China, and cheap immigrant labour – even if the bigger challenge to jobs is automation.

Unemployment numbers have in fact been low in recent years. Yet something strange has been happening in the United States and, to a lesser extent, to other industrialised economies. Despite full employment, wages have been depressed. What’s more, plenty of people have ended up without jobs – and not even looking for jobs, which is why their absence from the workforce is hidden from the headline unemployment rate. As candidate Trump claimed back in 2016: “The five percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” He was onto something.

Male ‘workforce participation’ is the term economists use for men of prime working age who have jobs – and it has been steadily eroding for decades. Between 1954 and 2016 it dropped from 98% to 88%. In other words, a lot of people disappeared from the unemployment stats because they stopped searching for work. They decided to occupy themselves in other ways – by taking ‘early retirement’ on the golf course, caring for their grandchildren, playing video games, or falling into a spiral of addition. They became the ghosts of the unemployment statistics.

John Maynard Keynes, doyen of 20^th-century economists, foresaw just this situation nearly a century back. With a somewhat ironic turn of phrase he spoke of the emergence of a “new leisured class”, as machines take jobs.

Suggested reading

Why we should listen to the Luddites

By Nigel Cameron

Alongside the new jobless, we have many more people who do have jobs but whose standard of living has been increasingly depressed. The income stats are terrifying. According to Oxford economist Carl Frey and his colleagues, between 1979 and 2013 “the real wages of the vast majority of Americans … stagnated or even declined”. Productivity rose 64.9%, yet for 80% of the workforce wages went up by only 8.2%.

The shift in reward to the owners of capital has been immense. According to Frey, “A prime explanation is the robot revolution, which has contributed to both joblessness and wage reductions, especially among American men.” Specifically, “Diffusion of robots . . . has caused unemployment and wage reductions in particular among workers in blue collar jobs without a college degree.” Frey remarks that this “mirrors” the first four decades of the Industrial Revolution in the UK – when incomes stagnated or fell. “A large segment of the workforce has become detached from the engine of growth.”

What does this mean for an American working family? “The income distribution of 1979 would leave today’s top 1% with $1 trillion less in annual income and [add] $11,000 for a family in the bottom 80%.” These are astonishing numbers. It is unsurprising that with such a diminishing share of income going to workers there is a growing sense of political disenchantment – even radicalism. As Frey notes, from an economist’s point of view if workers don’t accept the “market reallocation” of their value, they will seek other kinds of redress.

Suggested reading

The cracks appearing in the digital economy's foundations

By David Z Morris

But what technology takes away, it also gives back. It is those same developments in digital technology driving automation that have granted the disaffected, and those who wish to play on their disaffection, the tools to hit back.

The disenchanted flyover voter – mid-life, male, lacking in education – does not need to be a social media activist, just a consumer. He can connect with like-minded people and access content to stoke his frustrations.

Enter Brad Parscale, head of digital for the Trump campaign. In a remarkably candid interview with the US television network CBS, Parscale laid out the Trump strategy to capture the hearts and minds of the disaffected voters in key states.

Apparently, Facebook offers political campaigns specialists who are “embedded” in the campaign and help drive it. Parscale claims he was able to ensure all the Facebook people embedded with him were actual Trump loyalists, though Facebook denies that campaigns had a choice in whom to accept. Either way, the Trump campaign signed on to the highly sophisticated marketing game. They tested 50-60,000 messages a day, up to 100,000 some days. The goal? As Parscale puts it, to reach “15 people in the Florida Panhandle” – micro-targeting voters based on their concerns.

Suggested reading

What will 'deep fake' imagery do to politics?

By Peter Franklin

And on top of this Facebook targeting, Donald Trump’s mastery of Twitter enabled a torrent of rabble-rousing tweets to be delivered directly to his followers, further stirring up discontent. And we now know that Russia has been aggravating the situation – both through ads from spurious organisations, and groups led by fake individuals. The goal has been to induce division by playing on the fears, legitimate and otherwise, of disaffected flyover Americans – and it is working.

Emerging digital technologies are pouring fuel on the flames of disaffection felt by flyover communities – both through their impact on labour markets, undercutting jobs and holding wages down, and in enabling those feeling aggrieved to find like-minded individuals and access content that reinforces their sense of disenfranchisement. Mitigating the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on its losers must surely be a priority.

It is true that the British Industrial Revolution, which spanned much of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, led to more jobs, better jobs, and ultimately the huge increases in wealth and comfort that frame modern life. “Prior to 1750, per capita incomes in the world doubled every 6,000 years; thereafter, it has taken some 50 years.”[1. Carl Benedikt Frey et al., in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2 July 2018]

But researchers have been looking in more detail at the costs involved in this huge jump in prosperity, at what effect the new machines had on the working population. They have unearthed disturbing facts that we need to remember as we face fresh changes ahead.

We tend to think of automation as using machines to do routine work. But at the core of the Industrial Revolution was the opposite. The heart of Britain’s hugely successful textile industry was the “domestic system” – skilled craftsmen working their looms at home. The new machines took this work into factories, and made it simpler. So unskilled operators could now provide most of the labour.

One effect of this was a big increase in child labour; the machines were designed so they could be operated by children, and they made up around half the factory hands. Having lost their skilled work, the craftsmen now faced fresh competition for the new, lower-paid, machine-based jobs.

This led to the most startling effect of all: an astonishing increase in the number of unskilled labourers. As pointed out in a recent speech to the Trades Union Congress by Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, between 1700 and 1850 the proportion of unskilled workers in the British labour force actually doubled, from 20% to 40%. Of course, many of these workers did have skills, but they were skills no longer in demand in the economy. To find work they had to compete with farm labourers and others for unskilled jobs. It was, literally, generations before the situation turned around.

Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey sums up the research:

“Technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large, yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market. During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology.”

“During the first six decades of the Industrial Revolution, ordinary Englishmen did not see any of the benefits of mechanization: as output expanded, real wages stagnated, leading to a sharp decline in the share of national income accruing to labour.”[2. Oxford Review of Economic Policy]

To be more specific, the academics found that, according to best estimates, while output per worker increased by 46%, real wages rose by just 14%. But as working hours also increased by 20%, hourly wages actually declined in real terms.

Further reading

The full effects of automation will be way more disruptive than globalisation

By Peter Franklin

No wonder the Luddites resisted the new technology – weaving machinery introduced in the textile industry – which threatened their livelihoods. There had been machine-breaking before, and petitions, and demonstrations. But the Luddites took protest to a new level. Their efforts were short-lived. The government in London sent the army north in 1813 to quell the revolt, and soon after, 24 ring-leaders were swinging from public gallows and dozens more transported to Australia.[3. It was rough justice. Here is an affecting account of the hanging of 14 of them, based on local newspaper reports. The men sang a hymn as they walked to the scaffold. Between them, they left 57 fatherless children.]

David Ricardo, the nation’s most famous economist after Adam Smith, is credited with developing the theory of comparative advantage which is the basis of globalisation. Ricardo lived through the Industrial Revolution, could see what was going to happen and agreed in principle with the Luddites: “I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers”, though he considered it pointless for the government to oppose new technology, since “it will be done abroad” anyway.

Introducing the technology was therefore the lesser of two evils: “By investing part of a capital in improved machinery,” he wrote, “there will be a diminution in the progressive demand for labour; by exporting it to another country, the demand will be wholly annihilated.”

As we look ahead in the 21^st century, economists have labeled the coming changes, powered by AI and robotics, as the “Second Machine Age” (two MIT economists) or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (World Economic Forum). If we are on the cusp of a “revolution” that parallels the original Industrial Revolution in impact and scope, its implications for labour markets could indeed be catastrophic.

Automation then becomes a major political challenge. Because one big difference between then and now is that in the days of the Luddites, the workers did not have the vote. Economic deprivation is a potent driver of the rise of populism in contemporary politics, especially in the United States, as my UnHerd colleague Henry Olsen has been explaining. Most of those who have lost out blame bad trade deals, off-shoring, and the immigration of cheap labour. If their resentments begin to focus on technology, a fresh Luddism would be a potent force.

We should heed these sobering words from Frey: “Although the Industrial Revolution began with the arrival of the factory, it ended not just with the construction of the railroads but also the publication of the Communist Manifesto.”

Further reading

Why aren't we more worried about the new slave economy?

By Nigel Cameron

There’s one big exception, however: the homes we live in. Most of those are hand-made. The building materials may be machine-made, but the piece-by-piece, one-off process of construction is labour-intensive, time-consuming and frequently unpredictable.

There’s got to be a better way. Prefabrication is one approach, but that involves a trade-off between the size of the prefabricated components and their transportability. It also tends to constrain the materials that can be used and the variety of forms the building can take.

In the early 20th century, Thomas Edison wasted a lot of time and money on the development of the single-pour concrete house. Employing a set of re-usable moulds, he believed he could mass produce affordable housing for all. Unfortunately, the moulds were so complicated and expensive that it was easier and cheaper to build the traditional way. A sideline in concrete furniture also came to a predictably sticky end.

Further reading

We must stop tolerating terrible architecture

By Peter Franklin

Edison’s single pour method didn’t just fail because of the practicalities; the principle was flawed too. A solid mass of concrete creates a structure that is virtually indestructible, but also unmodifiable – great for a bomb shelter, but not a home.

In an article for The Conversation, Seyed Ghaffar says that to successfully revolutionise house building we need to “automate and improve processes that have already been proven manually.”

A century on from Edison’s doomed attempt we might just be on the brink of getting it right:

“It’s often claimed that 3D printing – known in the trade as ‘additive manufacturing’ – will change the way we live. Most recently, a team from Eindhoven University of Technology announced plans to build the ‘world’s first’ habitable 3D printed houses…

“Additive manufacturing uses a combination of materials science, architecture and design, computation and robotics. Yet in some ways, it’s not as futuristic as it sounds. The simple approach of layer-wise construction… has already been practised for a long time in the construction sector, for example in conventional brick layering techniques.”

In fact, with 3D printing we might be able to go well beyond what even the most skilled human builders are capable of:

“When the printer and the feedstock have been properly set up, they will be able to produce full-size building blocks with a smart geometry which can take load without reinforcements. The shape stability of the truss-like filaments in these blocks is an essential part of printing, which provides strength and stiffness to the printed objects.”

Nature has all sort of cunning ways of creating light but strong structures – from the spider’s web to the bones of flying birds. The rapid, but precise, movements of 3D printers could allow us to draw inspiration from evolution, and extrude building materials to achieve great intricacy and efficiency.

Ghaffar believes that smart and automated construction methods could “revolutionise the industry within the next ten to 15 years”.

Will this make houses more affordable? It may well bring construction costs tumbling down – but, remember, not even a robot can make new land. Therefore, we’ll need policies to stop land monopolists from sucking up the value created by new technology.

Further reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

That said, the automation of house building may make it harder for developers to manipulate land prices by manipulating the rate at which land with planning permission is built out. With robots greatly speeding up the pace of construction, there’ll be no excuse not to build new homes as fast as demand requires and planning policies allow.

One last thought: Though Edison’s poured concrete technology was misconceived, the prototype houses he built with it could be surprisingly beautiful. The developers of today’s new construction methods would be well advised to pay equally close attention to the aesthetics.

If you want the public to accept new development, then the golden rule is that it should make places better not worse.

Trivedi shows us how automation would transform the economics of road travel:

“Getting rid of drivers cuts costs. Take an American electric car that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week as part of a ride-sharing network. According to Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn, charging the car costs about $250 a month and the lease takes $300 to $400 a month. Because the cars run around the clock, there are three drivers — together they draw $15,000 a month. Eliminate that expense, and this is a very different proposition.”

Now, one could quibble with these figures. For instance, most taxis don’t run 24 hours a day, because there isn’t the round-the-clock demand for it. Therefore, you wouldn’t need to fund three sets of wages. The non-wage costs might also need bumping up a bit. Nevertheless, it is clear that with automation, most of the cost of providing a taxi service disappears.

Therefore, if self-driving cars can be made to work and manufactured for a similar price as conventional vehicles, then the economics of road travel will shift from individual car ownership to hail-and-ride services. As individuals we won’t have to worry about things like maintenance, fuelling, parking, insurance and security, all of that will be done by the service provider.

Further reading

No need to buy. Once cars are fully automated, they'll all be taxis anyway

By Peter Franklin

The opportunities are massive – as are the threats to established industries. Therefore, it’s not surprising that a manufacturing nation like China wants to get ahead of the game.

Trivedi notes a flurry of initiatives in this area from big Chinese tech companies – while also discerning the guiding hand of government industrial policy:

“A lot of this follows a Beijing-mandated push. In April, the government laid out national road-testing guidelines for autonomous vehicles, adding to rules in place in Shanghai and Beijing. That will make it possible for China to collect vast amounts of data on AV testing on public roads, the way Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent, did with its sibling Waymo.”

When the Chinese government decided to back renewable energy in a big way, the country’s productive capacity swung behind the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. As a result of these economies of scale, prices came tumbling down – helping to transform the economics of the energy sector.

Further reading

The enemies of renewable energy have lost – they should be delighted

By Peter Franklin

If Chinese manufacturing muscle is applied to the pricier gizmos required to make a driverless car work, then there could be another cost revolution.

Of course, its not just a case of muscle. Automating road transport is a task of great complexity – of which developing and scaling-up the vehicle technology is only a part.

Even assuming that we can produce reliable and affordable self-driving cars, that still leaves the immense challenge of incorporating them into existing transportation networks. Multiple systems will need to be integrated and not just under the bonnet, but across an entire economy and society.

This looks like giving China a further advantage. The country’s leaders are not as likely to come from an engineering background as they once were, but they are systems thinkers – as you have to be when your job is to control the system. The full implementation of driverless technology will not be universally popular. Driverless cars will kill people (in fact, they already have). Furthermore, as human drivers are excluded from some – and, eventually, all – of the road network, there will be bitter opposition. However, Chinese policymakers have ways of overcoming public resistance that aren’t available to their western counterparts.

Further reading

We're going to ban human-operated cars. Yes, all of them.

By Peter Franklin

Perhaps that’s why they feel so confident in putting the country’s resources behind the new technology:

“The sheer amount of capital needed to fund the infrastructure for autonomous vehicles will be far more than many — or any — government is willing to commit just yet, other than China. “

Making the transition to self-driving cars will be a wonder of the age – an achievement on a par with the moon landings (though of much greater significance to everyday life).

If China gets there before the West, it will represent something more than one technology succeeding another.

In England, John Wesley by-passed the narrow confines of establishment Christianity, preaching directly to the poor, with emotion and passion. And in doing so helped light the fire of the so-called first Great Awakening. From this movement, modern Charismatic Christianity was born.

Suggested reading

Moved by the Spirit: the phenomenal rise of Pentecostalism

By Andrew Davies

At the same time, in south eastern Poland, an almost exact contemporary of Wesley, Israel ben Eli’ezer – or the Ba’al Shem Tov or Besht – began a comparable awakening within Judaism that came to be known as Hasidism. Like Wesley, the Besht wasn’t a formal theologian. He emphasised popular devotion and the religion of the heart. Drawing upon older Kabbalistic traditions, the Besht and his followers encouraged Judaism away from what they regarded as a dry and elitist Rabbinic legalism and towards greater enthusiasm, popular story telling and the unselfconscious joy of divine worship.

Hasidism had its opponents, of course. Lithuanians, under the leadership of the serious minded Vilna Gaon, looked down upon the excitable Hasidim. And the growing movement for a Jewish Enlightenment wanted Jews to find their place in the modern world of progress. Nonetheless, throughout the nineteenth century Hasidism became the dominant form of popular Jewish piety in central Europe.

And whilst the whole ultra-orthodox family – Hasidim and Lithuanians and others, known collectively as Haredi – were almost wiped out in the Holocaust, their post-Holocaust revival has been extraordinary. No longer based in central Europe, they have nonetheless taken the dress code and customs of their eighteenth century predecessors and transported them to New York and Israel, and also to places like Stamford Hill in North London.

And the Heredi family are growing fast – both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the Jewish community as a whole. In Israel, the Heredi community are forecast to become 40% of the Israeli population by 2065 – up from 14% in 2015. Likewise, in the UK, the Heredi community
continues numerically to flourish and is set to overtake the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community in the mid to latter part on this century.

For a group that was very nearly wiped out by the Nazis, this revival has been astonishing – and, if the forecasts are correct, is set radically to change the demographics of Jewish life, both here and in Israel.

Haredi men, for instance, believe it their duty to devote their lives to study. They take the injunction in Isaiah 11 that “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord” to mean that studying Torah is an end in itself. So, for example, in Israel, Heredi politicians are currently pressing the Netanyahu government for a return to full exemption from military service for the Heredim. They want no restriction on those who want to spend their lives praying and studying Torah.

They also demand an increase in state subsidies so that men do not have to go out to work. Around 50% of Heredi men do not have paid employment. For many secular Israelis, all these exemptions and subsidies stick in the throat, especially as a number of the Heredim think of the whole Zionist enterprise as a secular project, and as having little role in defining their Jewishness. Indeed, some Heredi remain openly hostile to the Israeli state and there have been a number of reports of Heredi men who have been persuaded to join the army being beaten up when they return to their communities.

As the numbers of Heredi grow, so too the tension increases between the Israel of capitalist enterprise and technology start-ups and the community of learners seeking to fulfil the Biblical mandate to fill the earth with the knowledge of the glory of God. Many argue that, at some point, Israel will not be able to afford to subsidise half of its Heredi men to spend their lives studying Torah.

More by Giles Fraser

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

On the other hand, the Heredim may well be ahead of their time. Like a number of futurologists, Yuval Noah Harari, the best-selling author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is warning us that technological advance will soon render many of us unemployed and unemployable: “the crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that human beings perform better than algorithms”, he argues.

“The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses. … The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?”

For some the answer is clear: study Torah.

What I admire about the ultra orthodox community is that they remain stubbornly committed to their own values, that they have not merged with the prevailing culture of secular progress and market capitalism. Who knows: perhaps they are ahead of their time?

The theory seems simple enough: each nation should focus on the things it does best, and trade for everything else. It’s attributed to 19th century English economist David Ricardo, since when it has been the basic idea behind “free trade”.[1.  Simple on the surface, comparative advantage is a bit more complex than it seems as it’s not about absolute advantage (A just makes things cheaper than B) but opportunity cost. Also, some writers now attribute the theory not to Ricardo but to James Mill. But Ricardo’s memorable example stands: Portugal should focus on making wine, and Britain on cloth.]

China’s big comparative advantage has been cheap labour, and as a result it’s yanked great swathes of manufacturing out of the US economy. Retail behemoth Walmart, for example, works with 5,000 different Chinese suppliers. That’s a lot of stuff American workers aren’t making any more. On the other hand, that’s a lot of stuff American workers can buy very cheaply.

Recommended listening

Taking on China: how the West can save free trade

By Juliet Samuel

Yet this worry has a very 20^th century feel. We should, instead, be looking ahead. For the problem isn’t going to be cheap human labour – it’s going to be nearly-free machine labour. We should be far more concerned about what Norbert Wiener, the “father of cybernetics” called the emergence of a new slave economy.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that automation is always good for us. It won’t eat our jobs. Like the first Industrial Revolution, every tech disruption since has led to more and better jobs. Some of us have been challenging this view for years, and either been ignored or told not to rock the innovation boat. Make what you will of his politics, Jeremy Corbyn is so far the only political leader in the west to have noted this challenge in a major speech.

In any event, the widely-held view of the first Industrial Revolution is simplistic. Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, recently made that clear. It did huge damage done to skilled labour markets that lasted a generation and more.

And Ricardo himself, who was living through the dramatic changes, had more than a little sympathy for the Luddites.[2. The original Luddites were worried about their jobs, and took the law into their own hands – with an occasional riot and many incidents of what was called “machine-breaking”. The government sent in the army. Hangings followed. Things calmed down.] But, believer that he was in comparative advantage, he wrote that if Britain didn’t employ these new technologies other nations would anyway.

Back to the future, in a 2013 report by two Oxford economists, they analyse the susceptibility of 702 different jobs being done by machines. The report concluded that the job most likely to disappear to machines was telemarketing. It struck me when I read the report that that calls from robotic, metallic, voices delivering potted sales pitches would be easy to hang up on. How could a computer programme really “sell”?

Well, Google has just proved once and for all that telemarketers are history. Every single one of them, worldwide. And also everyone else who earns a living talking on the phone. Listen to these sample calls, as a robot makes a hair appointment and books a table for dinner and see if you can tell which of the speakers is a machine. The impact is stunning.

More by Nigel Cameron

Mission to make money: a new space race is taking off

By Nigel Cameron

And so here we are again, on the cusp of an automation revolution in which what economists politely call “technological unemployment” is going to be a major challenge.

In one of the most ridiculous public statements ever, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin blithely assured the American public that not only are their jobs safe from automation, but the issue is “not even on our radar screen”. Any such effects are “50 to 100 more years” away.

As an American President keeps faith with his voters by starting a global trade war, we can only imagine what’s in store once he (and they) work out where the real threat to fly-over country jobs lies.

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

~ Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

While most grand political narratives had lost their appeal by the close of the 20th century, utopian thinking as applied to the workplace made it into the 21st century unbowed. In 2001, a book written in 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management,  was voted the most influential management book of the 20th century by the Fellows of the Academies of Management[1.  https://www.bus.lsu.edu/bedeian/articles/MostInfluentialBooks-OD2001.pdf]; its effects can still be seen in workplaces today.

In the book, Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer from Philadelphia, argues for the perfectibility of human labour through the application of pure reason to the shop floor.  “Scientific management”, the meticulous measurement and recording of workers’ movements to maximise productivity, aims to turn human labour into the equivalent of machine labour.

The purpose of Taylor’s initial experiments was to eliminate “unnecessary motions” during the handling of pig iron, but he insisted that his theories could be applied to all classes of work. “Every single act of every workman can be reduced to a science,” he wrote. His workers were closely observed, photographed and timed.  Those who failed to meet the exacting standards of scientific management theory were sacked.

Importantly – inevitably, perhaps – the worker under experimentation was not deemed to be quite human and the book is littered with references to a working class that is “too stupid” and “too mentally sluggish” to understand the theories. In fact, he seemed to view early 20th-century American society in the same way Thomas Hardy viewed late Victorian England, as a division (in Hardy’s words) of the “mentally unquickened, mechanical, soulless; and the living, throbbing, suffering, vital, in other words into souls and machines, ether and clay”.

Suggested reading

How cheap labour undermines economic productivity

By Peter Franklin

It’s an attitude that gives his approach more than a flavour of managerial Leninism: an intellectual vanguard directs the masses who are “incapable of understanding this science”; there is a difficult transitional period in which “both sides will rebel” against the new system; and finally, a new era will bear witness to a “complete change in the mental attitude of all the men in the shop toward their employers”. Conflict is resolved and the interests of employer and employee converge.

“In the end, the people… will force the new order of things upon both employer and employee,” writes Taylor with a zeal to rival any Bolshevik[2.  There is a neat irony here in that Rakhmetov, the central character in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, is an archetypal Taylorian character. He divides his work day up into units of a quarter-hour for every task while forsaking all recreation. Lenin liked the book – and the asceticism of its main character – so much that he purloined the title for one of his own revolutionary tracts.].

Parallels with communism are also apparent in his admonitions to his disciples not to abandon the one true path. The implementation of scientific management without its accompanying “spirit” will lead inexorably to “failure and disaster”, Taylor warns, pre-empting by several decades Leon Trotsky’s warnings about a revolution betrayed.

And Taylorism lives on under the aegis of capitalist progress. At the extreme end of things, we have the Chinese state’s development of a technology that monitors workers’ brainwaves in order to boost production[3.  https://uk.businessinsider.com/china-emotional-surveillance-technology-2018-4] (no doubt justified with an occasional reference to Lenin). Closer to home, Amazon has patented wristband technology that would allow it to monitor where its workers are placing their hands while they are picking and packing orders[4.  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-warehouse-wristband-tracking].

This is very similar to a process developed during early experiments conducted by a Taylor Society member, Frank Gilbreth, whereby a “Bricklaying System” was devised that prescribed the ideal number of movements to lay each brick –  it was brought down from 18 to five. Even the number of times a bricklayer was permitted to tap each brick as it was placed on its bed of mortar was tightly monitored by Gilbreth.

Amazon’s pickers and packers are already made to carry around a handheld tracking device which times their actions and monitors their productivity. Yet, as I discovered while researching my book, the labour policies deployed by the world’s largest multinational show little interest in the welfare of those at the bottom of the pile. Which does appear to concern Taylor, for all his intellectual condescension.

By the same author

The grim reality of renting in Britain

By James Bloodworth

His book ends with a rallying cry on behalf of the consumer, whose rights are “greater than those of either employer or employee”. That’s because Taylor believes it is the consumer who will bring the appropriate pressure to bear on firms which reject his doctrines. The people “will demand the largest efficiency from both employers and employees. It will no longer tolerate the type of employer who has his eye on dividends alone, who refuses to do his full share of work and who merely cracks his whip over the heads of his workmen and attempts to drive them into harder work for low pay.”

While this populist message might seem to contradict some of the preceding material, a moralising tone can be detected in the book. For all his contempt of the “stupidity” of the working masses, it appears to bother Taylor that more unscrupulous overseers may yet use his doctrines to do ill by their employees.

Yet Taylor’s faith in the ethical conscience of the consumer to step in and prevent exploitation was perhaps misplaced. For as far as Amazon are concerned – the nearest we have to a contemporary Taylorist behemoth – it is precisely public indifference that has allowed Jeff Bezos to slough off the doctrine’s paternalist component. But, then, writing more than 100 years ago, Frederick Taylor can be forgiven for not reckoning with the dissociative power of online shopping.

More on Amazon

It’s the war, stupid

By James Bloodworth

But don’t be fooled, this is really important stuff – and not just because the two sides constitute the most intellectually interesting bits of the British Labour Party. They are also representative of the much wider struggle between the working class politics of the old left and the bourgeois identity politics of the new left.

Ultimately, this goes beyond the left altogether, indeed beyond left and right – and towards the great dividing lines of the future, which will be about the nature of humanity in a world where technology poses a fundamental challenge to age-old understandings of who we are.

For the moment, let’s get back to the political geekery – and the beef between Blue Labour and the Accelerationists.

This is a divide I’ve peered into before, but this time I’m going to unpack a piece for the New Statesman by Jon Cruddas, a leading Blue Labourite. He begins by introducing the other side:

“Undiagnosed by the mainstream media and much of the academic community, a major intellectual renewal is underway across the left. It is energetic and tech-savvy… embraces bold ideas, and is well-organised and networked.

“It is fast becoming a new political movement; best captured in influential articles and books discussing ‘accelerationism’, ‘postcapitalism’ and even ‘fully automated luxury communism’.”

The animating idea of this movement is that, thanks to automation etc, there’ll soon be so much wealth available for redistribution that we’ll all be able to live on the welfare state – and not have to work unless we want to. How soon is soon is unclear, but the immediate task for the left is to accelerate progress towards the hi-tech socialist paradise.

Recommended reading

Accelerationism, Blue Labour and the future of work

By Peter Franklin

Cruddas places Accelerationism within a wider transformation in the nature of left-wing politics:

“The historic concerns of the left – nurturing citizenship and building the ‘common good’ – [has been] lost through a descent into relativism and a politics of the self…

“The character of the left has shifted. It has become obsessed with the belief that politics is an authentic search for the self, rather than a sacrificial contribution to the commons, with its trade-offs and compromises.”

Traditional socialism, of which Blue Labour is a part, emphasises working class solidarity allied to a sense of shared, though non-jingoistic, patriotism. It therefore stands at odds with the values of the new (or post-modern) left:

“This politics assumes that generalisation is not possible given our assorted personal histories and experiences of privilege, inequality and exploitation. Left politics has turned inward, preoccupied by questions of personal identity and with a new language of fluidity, hybridity and intersectionality. This dovetails with our modern narcissistic, individualised culture and Facebook echo chambers, in contrast to historic forms of collective agency and physical solidarities informed by traditional – often ancient – models of justice.”

Accelerationism is at the leading-edge of the post-modern left – because it purports to show how we can achieve a post-work economy and a borderless world. It is a vision of the future in which the things that Blue Labour stands for aren’t just seen as oppressive, but also obsolete.

No wonder Jon Cruddas doesn’t approve. His ideological opponents seek to detatch people from group identities and loyalties once held dear on the left. The post-modern approach is about individualised safe spaces, not common ground.

And yet, while some critics accuse the new left of pandering to the self-obsession of the ‘snowflake’ generation, others accuse them of making blanket generalisations – especially when ascribing ‘privilege’ or victimhood to individuals on the basis of ethnicity, gender or sexuality, while paying scant regard to personal circumstances, experiences or actions.

So is the new left a rabble of narcissistic individualists or a cabal of crude collectivists? Logically both accusations could be false, but they can’t both be true.

Except that they can. To understand why, let’s begin with the recent Twitter spat between the comedian Robert Webb and the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer. As part of an online debate about exclusivity of journalism, the latter made her position clear:

“I didn’t go to Oxford because I was privileged. I went to Oxford because I was clever.”

In response, Webb tweeted the following:

“I didn’t go to Cambridge because I was clever. I went because I was a white male from a stable family who encouraged me to work hard at an excellent state school. That’s all privilege. All of it…”

It all got a bit unnecessary after that, and Webb ended up apologising, but let’s focus on the core of his argument i.e. “That’s all privilege. All of it.”

There couldn’t be a pithier summation of what the post-modern left is all about. If it’s all privilege (all of it) – then there can be no merit (none of it). No merit in work and no merit in citizenship. This legitimates the twin goals of a post-work society and a borderless world – and, therefore, the ‘liberation’ of the individual from the responsibilities and loyalties of the past.

Crude collectivism and narcissistic individualism are thus far from contradictory. Indeed, the former is how you get to the latter.

Recommended reading

Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

By Peter Franklin

In a world due to be turned upside down by robotics, genetic engineering and quantum computing, we’re going to need more than lawyers and accountants making the big decisions.

In fact, it would be great to have some scientifically-literate decision-making on some not-so-futuristic policy areas too.

Take the example of highway maintenance. Politicians probably get more angry letters about potholes than any other issue – but somehow there’s never enough money for adequate repairs. One reason why is that the taxation of heavier vehicles doesn’t properly reflect the damage that they do to road surfaces.

It might be assumed that the heavier a vehicle the more damage it does – and indeed that’s the case. What isn’t as widely understood is just how disproportionate an impact that each unit of extra weight has – meaning a heavy goods vehicle does massively more damage than a car:

It’s a point explained by Philippa Edmunds in a piece for CityMetric:

“The standard 44 tonne HGV, which is the industry workhorse, causes 136,000 times more damage to road infrastructure than a Ford Focus because the damaging power rises exponentially as weight increases – a phenomenon known as the ‘Generalised Fourth Power Law’.

“Local and urban roads, unlike motorways, are not built to sustain the large volume of heavy goods now traffic using them.”

The Generalised Fourth Power Law, or Fourth Power Rule, means that with every doubling of weight, a vehicle does sixteen times (i.e. 2×2×2×2) as much damage.

There are a few complications to take into account, but that’s the basic physics.

Ms Edmunds represents the UK Campaign for Better Transport, which argues that road freight is significantly undertaxed – and not solely because the damage caused to roads:

“HGVs are almost seven times more likely than cars to be involved in fatal collisions on minor roads. They’re responsible for 17 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and a fifth (21 per cent) of NOx emissions from road transport, despite making up just 5 per cent of vehicle miles. When the full costs of HGVs are taken into account that equates to a £6bn a year taxpayer subsidy.”

As with all hidden subsidies, the distortion of incentives causes further problems:

“This subsidy undermines the incentive for the haulage industry to be efficient. Only a third (34 per cent) of HGVs are full in terms of load volume. Almost another third (30 per cent) are driving around completely empty – a figure that’s been growing for some years. Partially loaded trucks result in unnecessary lorry journeys to feed our shopping habits.

“In contrast, the German distance-based charging system incentivises efficiency and has reduced empty lorries by a third, as well as reducing tonne kilometres because of better loading rates; prior to its introduction, Germany had similar empty lorry levels to the UK.”

Hidden subsidies often have hidden beneficiaries. A prime example, in this case, are the online retailers whose delivery vehicles trundle around minor roads and residential streets in ever-greater numbers.

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Will Elon Musk drive a truck through the oil industry?

By Peter Franklin

If those such as Amazon had to shoulder the full costs of the congestion, pollution and damage done by their deliveries, then price competition would speed up the transition to more sustainable transport technologies.

Electric and self-driving vehicles are the key to change:

• Electric engines would massively cut pollution (including noise pollution)
• With dynamic road charging, delivery vehicles could be incentivised to travel where and when they cause the least congestion
• Without driver error, there’d be fewer accidents
• And without the need for a driver in each vehicle, it would be feasible to have larger fleets of smaller, lighter vehicles – which would do less damage to the roads

Door-to-door deliveries could be entrusted to very-much smaller vehicles such as the delivery ‘pods’ already being tested. These are small enough to share pavement space with pedestrians rather than road space with traffic. We might trip over them, but that’s better than being run over by a truck.

All of this is going to happen sooner or later, but to make it sooner we fast need a rational system of road taxation.

Writing for the Guardian, Andy Beckett explores the ideas of the ‘post-work’ movement:

“…a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater…”

“Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed.”

But isn’t work an integral part of life? If it seems so, it’s because we’ve been conditioned, say the post-workists:

“One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. ‘Work as we know it is a recent construct,’ says [Jeremy] Hunnicutt. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.

“The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was ‘an accident of history,’ Hunnicutt says. Before then, ‘All cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.’”

I think this misrepresents both the present and the past. It may come as a surprise to the cognitive elite, but even today most people work to live, not live to work (though this isn’t the same thing as seeing no value in work). As for the notion of a Protestant/capitalist work ethic, the idea that labour has moral content precedes both Protestantism and capitalism by centuries, even millennia.

Consider the Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work), or the alternative version laborare est orare (to work is to pray). Going back yet further there’s plenty in the Old Testament about the necessity and dignity of work, for instance the following passage from the book of Proverbs:

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.”

Thinking about the ant and her having no “guide, overseer, or ruler”, I wonder if what the post-workists truly object to is work itself or its regimentation in modern times?

Industrialisation can be seen as a process in which humanity has been mechanised to serve the literal and organisational machines of the capitalist era. From the smoke-belching factories of the 19th century to the high tech production lines of the 21st, it’s easy to draw an equivalence between capitalism and the dehumanisation of work.

Yet, there’s another story to tell about capitalism, which is the liberation of humanity from work. Marian L Tupy sets out the facts in an article for Reason:

“Between 1870 and 1987, working hours in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States declined from roughly 3,000 hours per year to roughly 1,600 hours per year. That’s a reduction of 47 percent. In Japan, an outlier, they declined by 33 percent.”

Do improvements in health and longevity mean that we’re making up these shorter hours over our longer working lifetimes? Quite the opposite, in fact:

“…in 1856 a British male worked 149,700 hours over the course of his lifetime. By 1981 that number dropped to 88,000 hours. That’s a decline of 41 percent.”

And, of course, those shorter working hours come with a massive increase in living standards. Despite the stagnation of wages in the last couple of decades, it’s important not to lose sight of the long view.

Counting hours is not the only way of looking at the progress we’ve made. Think of all the facets of the human experience that we’ve freed from work:

• The end of child labour
• Increasingly long retirements, supported by pensions
• The expansion of higher and further education (not to mention the ‘gap year’)
• The two-day weekend
• Shorter working days and longer holidays

(The entry of women into the paid workforce might seem like a move in the other direction, but it’s beeen enabled by their substantial, if incomplete, liberation from unpaid labour in the home.)

For millions of people, especially the young and the old, the post-work society is already here. For those still in the labour force, work is generally safer and less physically demanding than it was for most people in previous generations.

All of this has been made possible by three things. First, improvements in economic productivity; secondly, the fact that the fruits of this productivity have been widely shared; and, thirdly, people being able to enjoy their additional free time.

Will we be able to sustain these conditions in coming decades?

I’d say we have our work cut out.

Or how about a cauliflower field in Cornwall?

That’s where Sarah Knapton went for her Telegraph report on the latest in agricultural robotics:

“The University of Plymouth is currently working in cauliflower fields in Cornwall to see if a fleet of smart robots could fill gaps in labour market and help cut costs.

Manual labour can represent around half of total costs of agriculture and can sometimes be in short supply, particularly around harvest. So automating the process would not only keep overheads down but make sure farmers are not left with food rotting in fields because of a lack of human workers.”

The robot takes the form of a platform, that supports a mechanical arm – at the end of which is a disconcertingly human-like hand:

“Robotics lecturer Dr Martin Stoelen invented the ‘GummiArm’ robot which moves more like a human than a machine, and has jointed arms which can be made soft or stiff, depending on if the task requires strength, or a more gentle touch.

“Cameras and sensors in its dexterous fingers can also assess the crop as grows, so it can determine exactly which vegetables to harvest, and which to leave, as a human farmer would know instinctively.”

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By Geoff Heath-Taylor

The problem with relying on human labour isn’t just its cost, but also its availability.

In advanced industrial economies like the UK, the native population isn’t exactly desperate to do low paid, physically grueling, seasonal work; which is why food and farming sector has come to depend on migrant labour. There are now fears that, because of Brexit, the supply of willing workers will dry up – leaving crops to rot in the fields.

Obviously, the way forward is automation. That of course will require investment. It would therefore be wonderful if we had a major source of public funding for agriculture – one worth, say, several billions every year.

As luck would have it, we do! After Brexit, the agricultural subsidy payments currently funnelled through the EU’s famously awful Common Agricultural Policy will revert to national control. This represents a huge opportunity for reform – not least by using subsidies to promote environmental objectives.

Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about subsidies altogether – and direct funding either as payments for the delivery of public goods (e.g. the enhancement of landscape and biodiversity) or as an investment in business models that aren’t just environmentally sustainable, but financially too.

In a civilised society, there’s no such thing as cheap labour – somebody, somewhere has to pay the price. It might be the taxpayer providing further subsidies in the form of tax credits and housing benefit; it might be local communities impacted by rapid demographic change; and it might be the impact of extreme levels of emigration on the workers’ countries of origin.

In the end, one has to ask whether an economy that depends on cheap labour has any right to call itself advanced.

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The debate over immigration ignores half the issue

By Peter Franklin

The man hasn’t changed his mind since the 1970s, but Corbynism isn’t about the past. The cult inspires mindless devotion, but Corbynism is diverse in its ideological tendencies.

In a deeply fascinating essay for the New Statesman, Jonathan Rutherford critiques one of the most influential of those tendencies – a futuristic and heterodox school of thought called ‘accelerationism’:

“The Corbynistas influenced by the ideas of accelerationism have larger ambitions than Labour’s conventional manifesto policies. They argue for a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Instead of class struggle driving the course of history, the motor of change is technology. This theory of post-capitalism politics is about unleashing the boundless productive forces of capitalism in order to accelerate technological transformation…”

The idea is that in an era of super-productivity, the state will give us everything we want and robots will do all the work:

“…Everyone will be their own musician and poet in a state of ‘fully automated luxury communism’.”

Jonathan Rutherford is part of the Blue Labour movement – which is non-Marxist, communitarian and often characterised (mostly by its enemies) as culturally conservative. Judging by Rutherford’s arguments, it is also anti-accelerationist:

“For Corbynistas, automation will liberate people from wage labour. A Universal Basic Income will create the conditions to allow each individual to be and do whatever they want. For Blue Labour, work is how people create their lives. They contribute to society and in return receive esteem. Work fulfils the ethic of reciprocity which binds people together and by which we support those unable to work. A Universal Basic Income would undermine social solidarity by increasing the power of the market and state. Workers need more power and control not the promise of free money.”

The accelerationists are right about one thing. Automation really does have the potential to liberate people from drudgery. We can be confident of this because it’s already happened (for example, try washing your clothes without a washing machine).

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Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

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Automation has also destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs across the developed world. A new wave of innovation in robotics and machine learning is set to go even further – upending basic economic assumptions. Even if one doesn’t agree with their conclusions, the accelerationists are surely right to think about the implications.

However, Rutherford is right to question the desirability of a world without work. We already know what happens to communities when they lose their work-based institutions and worklessness becomes the norm.

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By Peter Franklin

The accelerationists may protest that in their vision of the future Universal Basic Income will be hugely more generous than today’s welfare system; that, though, is to presume that the only problem with a life of worklessness is a lack of money:

“The pursuit of individual freedom without constraint is a kind of promethean bourgoise version of Marxism. It is the other side of the coin to neo-liberalism and unwittingly represents the interests and preoccupations of a knowledge class. It would destroy the web of communal social relations and values that bind people together.”

Still, at least the Labour Party is having a debate about these issues – unlike their Conservative opponents, who govern as if tomorrow’s economy is going to be substantially the same as today’s.

Spoiler: it won’t be.

In most of the fifty States of America, truck driver is the most common occupation. Trump’s campaign managers knew exactly who they were appealing to.

They also knew what they were appealing to – a sense of working class industrial pride. While conventional politicians like to go on about ‘knowledge workers’, ‘the creative class’ and ‘global talent’, Trump reached out to those who strain their backs and muscles in the workplace, not the gym. And of all the blue collar occupations, which could be emblematic than the one that literally keeps America moving?

Writing for Bloomberg, Conor Sen summarises the importance of what truckers do:

“The trucking industry is unique because it’s the lifeblood of moving goods around the country, representing 70 percent of the nation’s freight volume by weight. Without enough trucks and drivers on the road, some combination of things is going to happen: Shipments will be delayed, and producers will have to pay higher prices to get goods to market.”

Ironically, a shortage of truckers is now one of America’s biggest economic headaches:

“Industry leaders have been complaining about a truck driver shortage for a while, but unlike other industries that have been complaining about worker shortages, we have real evidence both in employment numbers and in business activity that the shortage is starting to have an impact on the economy…

“The level of employment in the truck transportation industry… is essentially unchanged since the middle of 2015. This level happens to coincide with the peak attained in the last economic cycle in 2006.”

Why can’t the industry attract more recruits? Sen provides a surprising explanation:

“Everyone in business and the technology sectors is talking about a future of self-driving trucks – hardly giving prospective workers the incentive to commit to multi-week classes to attain a commercial driver’s license for an industry that might be going away.”

Does the idea that automation causes labour shortages count as an irony, a paradox or a non sequitur?

Perhaps it’s better to think of it as a vicious circle: the push for automation disincentivises investment in skills, with the consequent labour shortages leading to a harder push for automation.

Whatever you call it, this is only going to end one way. Automation will become so widespread as to render the labour shortages irrelevant. (Tesla has already unveiled a semi-automated electric truck that will enable a convoy of vehicles to be driven by a single human driver in the lead vehicle.)

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By Peter Franklin

Once the need for human input is greatly reduced or eliminated altogether, a key constraint on growth will be removed. Until that point, however, the constraints may tighten, throttling productivity, increasing costs and pushing up interest rates.

This will be problematic in itself, but worse it will blind governments to what will come next – a wave of automation that will end the limits on productivity, but also millions of jobs.

Donald Trump might like to remember that robots can’t vote.

On Medium, Phil Levin of the 99mph consultancy applies this framework to the impact of self-driving cars:

“A lot has been written about the ‘first order’ effects of autonomous vehicles (AVs): How they will reduce traffic fatalities, make rides more comfortable, or put truck drivers out of work. But the bigger story here is the ‘second order’ effects — how improvements in mobility will cause us to reexamine fundamental assumptions of how we live.”

The second order effect he’s particularly interested in is the impact of self-driving cars on property prices. Unsurprisingly, prices are highest were property is closest to where people want to be. However, the effect of self-driving cars will be to lessen the tyranny of distance:

“Autonomous vehicles make commutes more pleasant, so people will be willing to live further out: A 40 minute commute in traffic is a different animal if you are watching TV, napping or answering email instead of focused with hands on the wheel…

“…Autonomous vehicles may even shorten commutes: This one is hotly debated, but some believe AVs will reduce travel time by packing roadways with more cars per lane or increasing average speed through vehicle-to-vehicle communication.”

Levin and his team modelled the effect on the property market in and around America’s biggest cities. There will be money to be made:

“We conservatively estimate that ~$1 trillion of residential property value is going to shift across 13 major US cities due to autonomous vehicles.”

The shift, of course, will be from closer in to further out i.e. from city centres to suburbs.

Somewhat controversially, the model assumes that driverless cars will undermine public transport (the availability of which is currently a big plus point for city centres):

“Autonomous vehicles will eat away at public transit: This will be true for even the most convenient transit corridors. Public transit, which already struggles fiscally in most major cities and is starting to lose share to Uber, simply won’t be able to compete with the combination of convenience, comfort and price offered by efficient on-demand autonomous vehicle fleets…Expect a correction for anywhere that ‘public transit proximity’ is baked favorably into property values.”

Levin says one “doesn’t have to like this conclusion for it to be true”. Fair enough, but I’m not sure it needs to be true. Self-driving vehicle technology could actually be a huge boost to public transport – especially buses:

• Firstly, driverless buses and minibuses (and perhaps much smaller vehicles) will have lower costs.
• Secondly, advanced management of traffic flows has the potential to reduce congestion and increase transit speeds and timetable reliability.
• Thirdly, there will be less of a distinction between bus and taxi services, i.e. flexible routing in response to real time data will deploy vehicles to where the demand is.
• Fourthly, with improvements on price, speed, reliability, flexibility and convenience, demand will increase, providing an economic basis for more services.
• Finally, increased demand for all forms of driverless road transport may force the authorities to skew incentives towards vehicles that use up less road-space per passenger i.e. larger vehicles with more seats.

If this more optimistic scenario for public transport does prove true, I think we will still see the shift in property values that Phil Levin forecasts. Using advanced technology to extend the geographical area over which public transport is easily accessible and properly joined-up will make living outside of the city centres more desirable.

When a new subway line opens, the benefit is reflected in local property prices. Some people believe this enhanced land value should be captured for the public good, not left to land owners who contributed nothing to the improvement. If driverless vehicles do make it to the market – and if they are successfully integrated into city transportation networks, then it will be like a new subway line opening in every suburb at once.

That a lot of money will be made is beyond doubt. The only question is who makes it.

And yet, in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson reports on one industry moving in the opposite direction – the US beer industry:

“…between 2002 and 2007, employment at breweries… declined in the midst of an economic expansion.

“But in the last decade, something strange and extraordinary has happened. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of brewery establishments expanded by a factor of six, and the number of brewery workers grew by 120 percent. Yes, a 200-year-old industry has sextupled its establishments and more than doubled its workforce in less than a decade.”

One might suspect that American workers are drowning their sorrows, thereby expanding a market in which new entrants can find a niche. In fact, overall US beer consumption has declined, meaning that the smaller breweries are taking market share from the big players:

“Between 2007 and 2016, shipments from five major brewers—Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Heineken, Pabst, and Diageo, which owns Guinness—fell by 14 percent. Goliaths are tumbling, Davids are ascendant, and beer is one of the unambiguously happy stories in the US economy.”

It’s a story that runs counter to the conventional wisdom:

“Technology and globalization are supposed to make modern industries more efficient, but today’s breweries require more people to produce fewer barrels of beer. Moreover, consolidation is supposed to crush innovation and destroy entrepreneurs, but breweries are multiplying…”

Does that mean that the commercial success of the craft beer movement is just a load of froth? Is the bitter truth one of collapsing productivity? No, because while Americans are drinking less beer by volume, they’re paying more for it. Quality has trumped quantity – and furthermore the kind of quality that comes not from standardised perfection, but from specialised craftsmanship.

In December, I asked which were the jobs most likely to survive the march of the robots. This was was my conclusion:

“In a world where most goods and services become increasingly abundant as a result of automation, the ability to add to the human experience in an irreplaceable and enriching manner will become evermore valuable.”

Recommended reading

How to save your career from the march of the robots

By Peter Franklin

For many people, beer is one of the things that makes life worth living – not as a means of blotting out the world, but of experiencing it more richly. Controversially, I would venture that there’s more to life than beer alone – which is just as well because we can’t expect micro-breweries to employ everyone. Rather, we need an economy in which craftsmanship of all kinds can flourish.

Governments need to start preparing their people for the mass automation of the workplace. Like it or not, many of the jobs that people do today will be done by robots tomorrow. In finding something else for them to do, culture is a big part of the answer.

By this I mean culture in its widest sense, not just the privileged art forms that conventional ‘culture policy’ is concerned with, but the crafts – like brewing – that add shape and texture to everyday life.

It is here that we can build commercially-viable industries in which people can’t be replaced by robots. If the point of making something is to make living more enjoyable, not more efficient, then the human touch is irreplaceable.

“The trick is that you don’t pay, at least in person: a collection of cameras and sensors pair your selection to your Amazon account — registered at the door via smartphone app — which rather redefines the concept of ‘grab-and-go’.”

That means no check-outs, not even those annoying automated ones.

This is convenient for shoppers, but even more convenient for Amazon. As Thompson explains, paying a cashier to sell your products is a marginal cost. The more you sell, the more man hours you need at the check-out (and to supervise the cashiers and to manage the supervisors and so on and so forth).

If, however, you can automate the process – with shoppers providing the only human input – then you’ve got a very different business model:

“…the massive expense that went into developing the underlying system powering cashier-less purchasing does not need to be spent again… the output of that expense can be duplicated infinitely without incurring any additional cost.”

Like selling software or online advertising, retail becomes an eminently scalable business – and scaling-up is something that Amazon is famous for.

Expanding businesses tend to follow one of two models. The first is vertical integration, when a firm acquires capacity at different stages of a supply chain. For instance, a vertically integrated energy company not only sells electricity to consumers, it also generates that electricity in its own power stations. Such a business is its own supplier and its own client, with the benefits that brings in reliability and specialisation.

Horizontal integration goes the other way – i.e. when a business spreads out along a particular stage of a supply chain by growing its market share. This might happen by acquiring, merging with or closely cooperating with former rivals. Whatever the means, the benefits include a broader customer base, less competition, greater market power and the acquisition of new capabilities and product lines.

Thompson notes that “to be both horizontal and vertical is incredibly difficult”. Nevertheless, Amazon has managed it – diversifying and specialising at the same time. Its business model is, therefore, both complex and coherent, with a breadth of market share and a depth of know-how that is beyond the ability of competitors to emulate.

Of course, expanding in all directions requires money and lots of it, but that’s the point:

“…willingness to spend is what truly differentiates Amazon, and the payoffs are tremendous…spending is painful in the short-term — which is why most software companies avoid it — but it provides a massive moat.”

Amazon is like a charging elephant, simply too big and too fast to be taken down; but is that the only point of its business model?

In my view, the company has another objective in mind. By operating, up, down and across a broad front of supply chains, Amazon has total control over an entire retail ecosystem. That gives it the freedom to reconfigure and standardise products, packaging, logistics and just about everything that makes it all work. This vastly increases the scope for automation.

There is an ever-increasing list of individual tasks that be entrusted to robots. Most jobs, however, involve a number of inter-related tasks – and even if just one of these is too fiddly for a machine to cope with, then that presents a barrier to automating the job.

For instance, it is well within current capabilities to build a robot than can read the numbers on a conventional electricity meter. However, if it can’t also ring a doorbell, ask the householder if it can take a meter reading, walk into the house and locate the meter, then it can’t do the job currently done by humans. The trick, of course, is to do the job in a different way – in this case by switching to smart meters than can automatically send the required data straight from the customer to HQ via a phone line.

By controlling factories, warehouses, transportation networks and outlets – and the interfaces between each of these operational components – Amazon can go further and faster than its competitors in making itself robot-ready.

The implications are profound:

“Karl Marx was born 200 years ago. Technology like Amazon Go is the ultimate expression of capital: invest massive amounts of money up front in order to reap effectively free returns at scale. What has fundamentally changed, though, is the role of labor: Marx saw a world where capital subjugated labor for its own return; technologies like Amazon Go have increasingly no need for labor at all.”

Ben Thompson suspects that “in five to ten years the countries Amazon serves will be blanketed with Amazon Go stores.” I suspect he might be right. I also suspect that most of our politicians haven’t got the first clue what’s heading our way.

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It’s the war, stupid

By Nigel l Cameron

The United Kingdom is an arboreal laggard, with trees covering just 12% of its land area. That puts it way behind the other G7 nations: Germany (32%), America (34%), Italy (35%) and France (37%) are all in the same neck of the woods, with Canada (49%) and Japan (67%) leaving the rest in the shade.

Why is Britain so exposed? Geography is the main problem. Relative to its population, the UK isn’t very big and most of the land is flattish and accessible. Therefore, it tends to be farmed.

But what if we could combine trees with agriculture?

In a fascinating article for the Guardian, Bibi van der Zee investigates an “innovative technique called agroforestry”:

“The theory is fairly simple; trees are integrated into agricultural landscapes to create microclimates and shelter for animals or crops, also improving biodiversity and water and soil conservation. The trees also produce crops in their own right in the form of timber, coppicing or fruit.”

The idea is that you literally plant trees in your fields, albeit at a wider spacing than would be the case for woodland. This is unorthodox to say the least. Indeed, from a conventional farmer’s point of view a tree is just a big weed, something to be removed from, not added to, cultivated land.

One needn’t be a farmer to think of the objections to agroforestry:

“Won’t the trees take up valuable land and risk reducing your productivity – and your income? Don’t they compete for water resources? Don’t they cast shadow, when you want as much light as possible?”

Well, you’d be surprised:

“…tree roots don’t compete with the crops for water, for example, because their root systems go down far deeper than the crop; there is also potentially a 30% reduction in water evaporation from the soil. Anxiety about blocking valuable sunlight (seen as a positive thing in equatorial countries but less so in northern Europe) can similarly be dealt with by planting the tree alleys from north to south.”

And there are other benefits:

“…studies into biodiversity improvement have been positive, such as a University of Missouri study that found 40-50% more pollinators in agroforestry systems… In terms of soil conservation, studies have found higher levels of mycorrhizal association – the vital relationship between root systems and fungi – larger earthworm populations, and improved nutrient cycling.”

The trees themselves can produce crops, such as fruit and coppiced timber, that can diversify the farm commercially – and, of course, trees absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere.

Also on the British environment...

It’s the war, stupid

By Peter Franklin

One issue not addressed in the article is the impact on ploughing, spraying and harvesting. Wouldn’t trees get in the way of farm machinery? It may be that agricultural automation in combination with less intensive cultivation techniques will provide the answer.

The key is experimentation. For decades, the Common Agricultural Policy – and the subsidy schemes that preceded it – constrained farming practice. The main thing that was rewarded was crude production, even on marginal land where unsubsidised agriculture isn’t otherwise economically viable.

Brexit gives Britain a chance to fundamentally rethink support for farming. The environment minister, Michael Gove, has already promised a much greener agricultural regime; but just as importantly it should also encourage innovation.

As I’ve argued before, we don’t have to choose between technology and sustainability. If we get agroforestry right, we might not have to choose between trees and fields either.

The physician agreed (and wrote the prescription). So why did he begin with mild reluctance? Not an innate desire to avoid pharmacological interventions (else he would not have written the prescription.)

The conflict arose from a clash of algorithms. I had taken a statistical model to the surgery with me — a very informal one, but a model nonetheless; “Given the input of my family history, I believe my innate long-term probability of heart disease to be high, and wish to minimise that risk.”

Physicians tend not to think in terms of statistical model but the machines which sit on their desktops do. Dr P typed in various numbers (inputs) to describe me, which included family history, and various blood tests, and metabolic measurements, and lifestyle indicators… and the classification algorithm in his surgery’s software returned: “Medium risk.” The computer, in other words, said no.

On this occasion, and with this algorithm, the human discussants over-ruled its decision but with the rise of machine intelligence — a fancy-sounding name for “classification or prediction algorithms built on huge amounts of data” (to which Peter Franklin gives a very good introduction here) — the potential for conflict between the human users of the systems and the system itself, increases. And it’s not clear whose rights will take precedence.

Should you qualify for parole? An algorithm might determine that.

Should you be allowed to board an aircraft? An algorithm will determine that.

How should you drive from A to B?

Which irritating adverts will decorate your internet browsing experience?

Which film does Netflix suggest you watch next?

What insurance deal will the Halifax offer you on home contents cover?

Is it worthwhile spending money on a drug to prolong your life? An algorithm, increasingly, determines all of these.

Now in a sense there’s nothing new here. Statisticians have built classification models for aeons (slight exaggeration) but there’s a difference — morally, definitely and, surely, legally — between me (as a statistician) showing you (as user/customer/patient) the model I’ve built and you deciding whether or not you agree with its form and are happy with its predictive abilities — and a proprietary black box system, whose precise structure is not made available to you, deciding (for example) whether or not you should be sent home from court or locked up in a prison. You — as “user” — won’t have a say in how the model has treated your data. You won’t know how it combines the inputs; which inputs it rates most highly; the operating characteristics of its rule (how often it makes the wrong decision.)

What — morally, legally, culturally — should be done about this? It’s an open question. There’s a good discussion of the issue by Olhede and Wolfe¹ in Significance, the Royal Statistical Society/American Statistical Association co-publication[1.  Olhede, S. and Wolfe, P. (2017), When algorithms go wrong, who is liable?. Significance, 14: 8–9. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2017.01085.x].

Go figure, as the American statisticians might say. But figure it out quickly, before a machine-derived algorithm decides that it’s a waste of time to do so.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

It’s an issue that we’ve covered extensively on UnHerd – for instance, here and here. Indeed, our technology editor Nigel Cameron has written a whole book about it. But is there anything you can do to prepare for the impending jobocalypse?

Obviously, you need to develop skills and specialisms that are likely to stay in demand, but which can’t, or won’t, ever be automated. The difficult part, of course, is trying to predict which skills, which specialisms.

In a fascinating piece for the Boston Globe, Alan Wirzbicki indirectly provides us with some valuable clues. I say indirectly, because his essay isn’t about how to survive new technologies, but rather how to save old ones.

His first example is the 70-millimeter film format:

“Lauded for its crisper colors, deeper blacks, and higher-resolution images, fans see 70-millimeter as the highest expression of Hollywood artistry. The format was popularized in the 1950s to showcase movies’ technical superiority over television, and reserved for major productions like ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ But today, with Hollywood’s near-total shift to digital projection, the format faces an uncertain future — and is only held together, as a labor of love, by the efforts of a passionate community of movie fans.”

The onward march of technology means that older technologies and the skills required to use them can be lost. Wirzbicki makes the insightful point that “it’s the most recently developed skills that may be the most vulnerable to disappearing forever.” That’s because compared to, say, traditional crafts, newly obsolete tech may be too complex for enthusiasts to keep going.

For instance, to ensure that future generations can enjoy 70-millimeter films, all of the following would have to happen:

“Kodak would need to keep producing film; the sole remaining 70-millimeter lab would have to maintain the ability to produce and distribute new prints; theaters would have to spend years training new projectionists; companies would need to pass down an understanding of how to make obsolete parts for which the original designs may have disappeared.”

In Wirzbicki describes this as “an entire ecosystem of specialized crafts and esoteric skills” – and if any of the components is lost then the whole thing collapses.

Another example is the building and repair of traditional pipe organs. Again, there are digital alternatives, but these can only approximate the depth of experience provided by the original. Fortunately, the ‘ecosytem’ required to keep this technology alive appears to be well established:

“C.B. Fisk, a Gloucester organ builder that makes traditional instruments and has steady demand from universities and religious institutions… the firm offers an apprentice program, which attracts applicants worldwide. ‘There aren’t any schools for organ building in the United States, so the shop has always functioned as one.’”

There is a lesson here for all of us. I’m not suggesting that we all retrain as projectionists and organ builders. Rather we should think about the jobs we do now and what would be lost if they were done by an automated system. Would your electronic replacement be the equivalent of a digital pipe organ or an automated teller machine? Would something of enduring value disappear from our culture or would it just be a case of mechanising a necessary, but ultimately boring, economic function? If whatever spark of God-given creativity you bring your job were to be extinguished, would the loss be outweighed by the ability of a robot to perform the task ten times faster and at a tenth of the cost?

In a world where most goods and services become increasingly abundant as a result of automation, the ability to add to the human experience in an irreplaceable and enriching manner will become evermore valuable.

Examples of things that are super-abundant – or on the way to being so – include information, entertainment, data storage, food calories and renewable energy (at times of peak production). This is not true for everyone and in every place, of course; but as William Gibson once said “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

The growing scale and sophistication of automation will speed our progress towards universal super-abundance. But that leaves the question of the raw materials from which we make stuff. Robots will one day make just about any consumer good we could hope for, just not out of thin air.

Given the demands placed upon it by the hyper-productive industries of the future, will our battered planet be able to cope?

Maybe not, but according to Aaron Bastani in the London Review of Books, we won’t be limited to one world. Before too long, he says, the rest of the Solar System will be within our grasp – especially its mineral-bearing asteroids:

“A platinum-rich asteroid 500 metres in diameter could contain nearly 175 times the annual global platinum output, and 1.5 times the known world reserves of platinum group metals. One of the largest known asteroids in the solar system, 16 Psyche, is a floating chunk of iron, nickel, copper and other rare metals, including gold and platinum. Its value? Around ten thousand quadrillion dollars; annual global GDP is $74 trillion.”

Now that’s what I call post-scarcity. There is a catch, though:

“…how would investors… get a return? One solution would be to follow the example set by the diamond industry after the discovery of South Africa’s abundant reserves: artificially restrict the supply, and sell mined space commodities at a price marginally below the cost of production of any mine on Earth…”

Bastani is a man of the radical left, and believes the state would have to stop the capitalists from denying us the post-scarcity economy we deserve:

“…there is an alternative model of collective ownership that would see the price of precious metals and minerals, all with multiple applications, drop close to zero. Combined with the emergence of general artificial intelligence and ever-cheaper renewable energy, it would be the basis of what’s become known as ‘fully automated luxury communism’…

“As outlandish as it sounds, space exploration, like AI and renewables, is an important terrain on which a rising left must fight.”

I’m not as confident about our ability to mine asteroids before this century’s done, but Bastani raises a genuinely interesting question: would capitalism stand in the way of a post-scarcity economy?

The first thing to say is that capitalism has done a pretty good job of getting us this far towards post-scarcity – which, compared to the pre-capitalist age, is very long way indeed. Furthermore, capitalists have found continually creative ways of using increasingly plentiful commodities like computing power, food calories and clean energy to develop new and sought-after products and services. Abundance provides a foundation for new and profitable business models that sustain the cycle of investment, innovation and profit.

Many of the world’s biggest companies today – such as Amazon, Google, Facebook – didn’t even exist 30 years ago; and typically their business models are about making once scarce resources cheaply or freely available to consumers.

Capitalism can, therefore, maintain our progress towards abundance (if only of the material variety). We don’t need the state to seize the means of production.

What we might need the state to do, however, is seize the means of consumption. If robots are doing everything for us then who will earn the wages required to buy the products of unpaid robot labour? It’s another good question, to which I offer an answer here.

Chess playing software has had two decades to get better. Until last week, the best computer player in the world (and therefore the best player period) was a programme called Stockfish 8. But that was before it met AlphaZero, which played 100 games against the reigning champion, winning or drawing all of them.

What’s truly remarkable about AlphaZero’s achievement is that it taught itself how to play chess to this world-beating standard in just four hours. To many people, this is deeply disconcerting – if an AI system can pull off such a feat, what can’t it do?

Almost everything, as it happens — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to get smart about Machine Learning (which is a better focus for our interest than the fuzzier concept of Artificial Intelligence).

An excellent place to start is a recent Harvard Business Review briefing by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The authors pack a lot into a few pages, but a few key points stand out.

First of all, just because a Machine Learning (ML) system is good at one thing it doesn’t mean that it is good at everything:

“…ML systems are trained to do specific tasks, and typically their knowledge does not generalize. The fallacy that a computer’s narrow understanding implies broader understanding is perhaps the biggest source of confusion, and exaggerated claims, about AI’s progress. We are far from machines that exhibit general intelligence across diverse domains.”

With that out of the way, we can get what is truly powerful about ML:

“The most important thing to understand about ML is that it represents a fundamentally different approach to creating software: The machine learns from examples, rather than being explicitly programmed for a particular outcome.”

ML overcomes the biggest constraint on our ability to teach computers how to do things that humans can do – which is that, in many cases, we don’t know how we do the things we do. Specifically, we can’t write it down as a list instructions that can be programmed into a computer.

Of course, many of the things that people can do require things that computers have no capacity for anyway – like consciousness, creativity and imagination. What computers can do extremely well, however, is process lots of data really fast – and that opens the way to a different kind of learning:

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning come in many flavors, but most of the successes in recent years have been in one category: supervised learning systems, in which the machine is given lots of examples of the correct answer to a particular problem…”

If given enough examples of things that match certain pre-set criteria, they can find the commonalities between them – and apply that learning to identify the presence or absence of those patterns in new and unlabelled sets of data. For instance, the rapid progress made in image recognition – e.g. identifying a human face in a photograph – comes from feeding ML systems with labelled photos. You may have unknowingly labelled some of these photos yourself, for instance when uploading your snaps to a social media account or when asked by a website to complete an image recognition task as part of an access procedure. In proving that you’re not a robot, you’ve may have been teaching one.

The most advanced ML systems are capable of deep learning – meaning that the more examples that are fed into them, the more they learn:

“Deep learning algorithms have a significant advantage over earlier generations of ML algorithms: They can make better use of much larger data sets. The old systems would improve as the number of examples in the training data grew, but only up to a point, after which additional data didn’t lead to better predictions…”

You will have noticed just how keen tech companies are to get your data. It isn’t just so that they (and their clients) can sell you stuff. They also want to feed their pet AIs, which get stronger with every bucket of data they eat.

AlphaZero, by the way, is owned by Google.