From Logic Magazine:“Sadly, the jobless future for the masses doesn’t resemble the jobless present of the 1 percent
who live off dividends, interest, and rent, lifting nary a finger as their bank balances grow”
The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?
A woman wears a mask that measures her carbon-dioxide exhalation while she vacuums, in order to assess how much energy she is expending.
Somewhere, right now, a manager is intoning to a broke, exhausted underling that someone is willing to do the same job for less—or, that some thing is willing to do it for free.
Since the dawn of market society, owners and bosses have revelled in telling workers they were replaceable. Robots lend this centuries-old dynamic a troubling new twist: employers threaten employees with the specter of machine competition, shirking responsibility for their avaricious disposition through opportunistic appeals to tech determinism. A “jobless future” is inevitable, we are told, an irresistible outgrowth of innovation, the livelihood-devouring price of progress. (Sadly, the jobless future for the masses doesn’t resemble the jobless present of the 1 percent who live off dividends, interest, and rent, lifting nary a finger as their bank balances grow.)
Though automation is presented as a neutral process, the straightforward consequence of technological progress, one needn’t look that closely to see that this is hardly the case. Automation is both a reality and an ideology, and thus also a weapon wielded against poor and working people who have the audacity to demand better treatment, or just the right to subsist.
But if you look even closer, things get stranger still. Automated processes are often far less impressive than the puffery and propaganda surrounding them imply—and sometimes they are nowhere to be seen. Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid.
Remarkable technological changes are indeed afoot, but that doesn’t mean the evolution of employment, and the social world at large, has been preordained. We shouldn’t simply sit back, awestruck, awaiting the arrival of an artificially intelligent workforce. We must also reckon with the ideology of automation, and its attendant myth of human obsolescence.
Overselling Automation
This myth of human obsolescence was on full display when elites responded to the initial campaigns of the Fight for 15 movement. As exploited and underpaid fast-food workers went on strike across the country in 2013, agitating for little more than a livable wage, pundits scoffed that the protests would only spur employers to adopt fleets of burger-flipping robots. The Employment Policies Institute, a conservative think tank, took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to drive this message home—and presumably to persuade disenchanted food-service workers that they were lucky to have a job at all:
Today’s union-organized protests against fast food restaurants aren’t a battle against management—they’re a battle against technology. Faced with a $15 wage mandate, restaurants have to reduce the cost of service in order to maintain the low prices customers demand. That means fewer entry-level jobs and more automated alternatives—even in the kitchen.Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi got plenty of press attention a few years later with similar comments. “It’s not just going to be in the fast food business,” Rensi said. “If you can’t get people a reasonable wage, you’re going to get machines to do the work… And the more you push this it’ll just happen faster.” Employers, he continued, should actually be allowed to pay certain groups—high school kids, entry-level workers—even less than the meager amount they currently get thanks to the floor set by federal minimum wage law.
Soon after making these remarks, Rensi provided gloating commentary for Forbes.com that his warnings about automation had already proven true. “Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide,” boasted the headline. Rensi could barely contain his glee—though he did gamely try to shed a few crocodile tears for the burger behemoth’s now-redundant corps of line workers. “Earlier this month, McDonald’s announced the nationwide roll-out of touchscreen self-service kiosks,” Rensi wrote. “In a video the company released to showcase the new customer experience, it’s striking to see employees who once would have managed a cash register now reduced to monitoring a customer’s choices at an iPad-style kiosk.”See also:
In reality, what is actually striking when you watch that video is not the cybernetic futurism but rather just how un-automated the scene is. Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free, while young, friendly-looking employees hover nearby and deliver meals to tables.
Rensi certainly had grounds to gloat—what mercenary corporation wouldn’t want to substitute paid staff with people who pay for the privilege of doing the work needed to keep the company afloat? But to grace this latest move toward the casualization of low-skilled service work with the somber moniker of “automation” exponentially oversells the shifting workplace dynamic. McDonald’s customers aren’t on the brink of some hyper-digitized foray into commerce that we might recognize from sci-fi fare like Minority Report or Black Mirror. Instead, they’re, if anything, on course to re-experience the rather quaint dining chambers of the midcentury automat.
Hence, I propose making our idea of automation itself obsolescent. A new term, “fauxtomation,” seems far more fitting.
More Work For Everyone
In its more harmless form, fauxtomation is merely a marketing ploy, a way to make pointless products seem cutting-edge. (The Tovala “smart oven,” for example, is Wi-Fi-connected and scans barcodes to glean reheating instructions for pre-made meals available through a subscription delivery service. Overpriced TV dinners cooked in an expensive toaster hardly live up to the slogan, “Cook your own ingredients with your smartphone.”)
The gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible. But fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.
Where Hollywood’s sci-fi futurism and leading tech pundits lead us astray, however, socialist feminism can lend invaluable insight, inoculating us against techno-capitalism’s self-flattering claims. The socialist feminist tradition is a powerful resource because it's centrally concerned with what work is—and in particular how capitalism lives and grows by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it's not, in fact, work at all.
That women have special insight into technology shouldn’t come as a surprise: after all, they have been sold the promise of liberation through labor-saving devices since the dawn of mass consumerism, and this applies to kitchen appliances in particular. (It’s a short and rather sad leap from self-cleaning ovens to self-cooking ones.) Despite this, they have seen their workloads multiply, not diminish.
In her study More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave, Ruth Cowan sheds astonishing light on the way innovations like electric irons and vacuum cleaners only added to the list of daily chores for women confined in the cult of domesticity. These innovations also increased cleanliness standards—i.e., ramped up the productivity expectations for home workers as well as their workloads—while transforming housekeeping into a more gendered, solitary, time-consuming occupation. Here is an especially vivid reminder from our patriarchal past that automation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and hardly guarantees the absence of work.
But the relevant critique here runs deeper than simply observing that better living through technology was often an empty publicity slogan....MUCH MORE
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"The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work".
