Thursday 7 August 2014

Here Come The Robots?

Criticism of Silicon Valley's blueprint for a future society has begun to gather some momentum over the last couple of years. Privacy of communications is still perhaps the biggest source of public concern, along with cybercrime and the security of online shopping and banking, but questions about automation and its effect upon employment are now starting to be raised too. This is a concern that resurfaces periodically with every major wave of technical innovation.

In the 1960s the prospect of the abolition of work by automated machinery could still be treated as a utopian goal by groups like the Situationist International: back then trade unions were sufficiently strong that it was taken for granted that wages could be maintained as working hours shrank. The neoliberal reversal of the last 30 years has ensured that labour lacks any such power nowadays (if it ever had it). The matter cropped up again in the early 1980s when it looked as though the personal computer "revolution" might do away with millions of white collar jobs, but that turned out to be a false alarm too. In fact PC operating systems and application programs were so primitive and unreliable that many new jobs had to be created in IT departments tasked with trying to keep them all running.

The latest version of this problem is being raised just now, thanks to dramatic advances in robots controlled by AI ("artificial intelligence") software. Google's driverless car is one uncanny example, and the giant online retailer Amazon has been rumbling about employing pilotless aerial drones to deliver ordered goods to customers. It seems extremely unlikely that the powers who control airspace will permit this any time soon, but Amazon more realistically talks about AI-driven automation of the location and retrieval of inventory in its chain of huge warehouses, which poses a genuine threat to jobs that are already scandalously underpaid. In a recent interview with the online magazine Slate, Professor Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, was asked by interviewer Niall Firth "Are robots really taking our jobs?" and he replied by offering these three alternative scenarios:
  1. Robots will take away jobs in the short term, but more will be created and a new equilibrium reached, as after the first Industrial Revolution
  2. Robots will replace more and more professions and massive retraining will be essential to keep up employment
  3. The sci-fi-horror scenario in which robots can perform almost all jobs and "you just won't need a lot of labour" 
McAfee believes that we'll see scenario three in his lifetime.

When asked further about any possible upside to this automation process, McAfee described the "bounty" he saw arising as a greater variety of stuff of higher quality at lower prices, and most importantly "you don't need money to buy access to Instagram, Facebook or Wikipedia". One doesn't need to have actually read Keynes to recognise that though McAfee might know a lot about robotics, his grasp of political economy is rather weaker. If employers "just won't need a lot of labour" then they just won't need to pay a lot of wages either, unless forced to do so by some agency whose identity is very far from obvious right now. If no-one outside that fraction of a percent of the population who own the robots has money to spend on food or housing, then the prospect of free access to Instagram and Facebook is unlikely to appease them very much. It's entirely possible that they will employ their spiffy new 3D printers to reconstruct Madame Guillotine, and Prof McAfee might perhaps be misremembered as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette for that line.

This blindness to the political - perhaps the most important victory the neoliberal ascendancy has achieved - is amplified a thousandfold in a survey conducted at the start of 2014 by the US Elon University and Pew Internet Project, in which 1,896 highly-qualified practitioners in the fields of AI, robotics and networks were asked to comment on this question of job loss. One of the survey questions asked respondents to share their answer to the following query:
"Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from that."  
Respondents were fairly evenly split between three scenarios similar to those that McAfee proposed, and I was fairly unsurprised by the lack of any mention of real politics by any of them. I searched the summary of the survey results, to discover only a single occurrence of the word "politics". To be sure there were 20 occurrences of the word "political", but most of those instances conformed to a similar, vague template, something like:
"...our political and economic institutions are not prepared to handle..."
"...economic, political, and social concerns will prevent the widespread displacement of jobs..."
"...humans are in control of the political, social, and economic systems that will ultimately determine..."
"...unemployment should be addressed primarily by creating a smarter political system that serves the citizenry..."
These really are little more than pieties: mustn't appear too technologically deterministic, ought to mention social effects, there... done. Among this stratum of techno-utopians actual politics is regarded as something rather old-fashioned that happened before social networking, a type of natural disaster that only re-emerges at times of social breakdown (and some of them are of course actively engaged in deploying the new technologies to suppress dissent under those circumstances). If McAfee's third scenario were to come about it would certainly generate a faster rise in inequality even than at present - even than that envisaged by Thomas Piketty - and it would be likely to precipitate some sort of social breakdown. The question is, what sort of breakdown?

If the notorious 1%, the rentier class and their heirs, did end up with more or less all the money and all the property, what kind of economic model could they operate? Not even the most pony-tailed of tech-utopians believes that robots will be able to design themselves by 2025, and so a tech-elite will still be required to do that job. Here Slavoj Zizek's notion of the "surplus wage" comes in handy once again: the owning class can pay very generous salaries to those people who invent the robots for them, and those who work on their fabrication. Such a surplus wage, one not directly related to productivity, can always be withdrawn to suppress dissent, making membership of the tech-elite into a sort of lifeboat, with a queue of people waiting for your seat if you should stumble. (That implies that some degree of technical education must be retained to keep the queue full).

This wouldn't be an entirely unprecedented state of affairs as something quite like it already prevails in the popular entertainment business - movies, TV, music - at all levels below that handful of top stars who can extract enough to set up as producers themselves. Under such a model any resurrection of a labour movement and trade union power becomes all but impossible, since people who have neither jobs nor workplaces can't easily unionise, even if there were a will in the Labour or Democratic parties to reform anti-union legislation (which there isn't). For the same reasons any revival of Leninist/Bolshevik communism is improbable - no workplaces to organise in - while anarchist/mutualist movements like Occupy similarly lack any purchase on the real economy, as well as any adequate source of funding.

The most likely scenario would be emergence of some kind of new Jacobins, renegade members of the privileged tech-elite who stir up and manipulate mobs of the unemployed to attack the rentier elite. The US Tea Party already displays many characteristics of such a movement (it would need to turn against its Koch brother backers, but such about-faces aren't uncommon in the history of right-wing extremism). Putin's FSB-oligarch state has some of the right stuff too. In China such renegade factions already pose a threat to the ruling party, as recent purges of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang suggest. A succession of such revolts would install more or less identically impotent juntas, who might persecute and expropriate the super-rich for their own gain but fail entirely to restore employment (a bit like Argentina then). Fairly quickly the capacity to conduct advanced electronics research would be eroded and the robot age would grind to a rusty halt.

Personally I doubt that McAfee is right about his third scenario, not because large corporations lack the will to throw most of us out of work (they do not) but because the abilities of AI have always been hyped way beyond the reality, in order to extract grants from ignorant and gullible politicians. Everyone forgets that the fighting drones which the USA wields to such devastating effect in Afghanistan and Pakistan are controlled by people, not by AI computers. The Russians have just announced an autonomous war robot, a small armoured car on caterpillar tracks equipped with a radar-, camera- and laser-controlled 12.7mm heavy machine gun. It's being deployed to guard missile sites and will open fire if it sees someone it doesn't like the look of. Now there's an IT department I wouldn't want to work in...

Nevertheless such speculations are far from useless. Like the climate change debate, they concentrate minds on what a short time window we have to prevent such horrible future outcomes. Preserving incomes at the cost of profits is a matter for politics, and for unfashionable class politics at that. We  need to be inventing and researching a swathe of new policies, from John Lewis-style mutual ownership, through universal basic incomes or negative taxes to job shares and reduced working weeks, that might gain electoral appeal if McAfee's second scenario turns out to be the more likely.

Monday 28 April 2014

Gilt by association

"Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you!"
Anon

To be frank I can't be arsed to Google for long enough to discover the originator of this well-known aperçu (it may have been Joseph Heller, it certainly wasn't Nirvana, though they did put it into a song). All that matters about it to me is that while I once thought of it as a joke, I've recently begun to consider it as a profound truth. And I'm not talking, as you might perhaps expect, about the NSA and GCHQ and their clandestine mass surveillance of our communications. I'd accepted long ago that was happening, and what's more - regardless of whether you accept them or not - there are publicly-aired justifications for such actions as necessary functions of the modern State.

No, I'm talking about an altogether deeper and more dangerous kind of paranoia, on a par with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the Zinoviev letter or the Fu Manchu novels, fantasies about tiny cabals of malign actors who have the power to alter the course of history. As a marxisant social commentator I've spent the last 50 years rejecting, refuting (perhaps even pooh-poohing) all such paranoid theories. Capitalism isn't a thing, let alone a person who could have malign intentions. It's a form of organisation of human labour that has no overall director apart from abstract property laws, and which follows its own unpredictable logic to produce a multitude of different outcomes, some better, some worse, for some people and not for others. This tendency to imagine dark conspirators plotting the spread and development of capitalism is something I've been resisting for most of my life.

So what happened to make me start doubting the viability of such scepticism? It was reading Paul Krugman's review of Thomas Piketty's seminal book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" in the New York Review of Books. But surely neither Krugman nor Piketty is a conspiracy theorist? Of course not. What Piketty has done is analyse the overall development of capitalism over the last centuries, using new and powerful analytical tools. What Krugman's review does is to explain Piketty's analysis with admirable clarity, and bring out its social implications, which are so alarming that it was they that introduced this doubt into my mind. Given the facts presented in this review (I've yet to read Piketty's book itself: regrettably too busy for next few months), the only way I can explain Krugman/Piketty's findings to myself is by supposing that the financial crash of 2008 may have been in some way an act of deliberate sabotage by some conscious group of actors, rather than just the working out of impersonal market forces.

Krugman's excellent review is entitled "Why We're in a New Gilded Age", a nod to one of the key facts emerging from Piketty's analysis, namely that income inequality is set to revisit levels last seen during the first US Gilded Age between 1870 and 1910. That was the period when the great monopolistic fortunes were being accumulated in oil, railroads, steel and banking by family dynasties like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and Morgans. I won't waste space and your time by repeating all the facts Krugman picks out here: do try to read his review for yourself. He reproduces a pair of Piketty's graphs that plot After Tax Rate of Return to Capital and Growth of the World Economy from antiquity (0 BCE) up past the present day and projected forward to 2050:


The profit graph is nearly flat for most of recorded history, with only a shallow rise from the Renaissance to World War 1, then a precipitous V-shaped descent spanning the whole 20th century which represents the dramatic decrease in inequality between the two world wars caused by the power of organised labour. The growth graph rises steadily from the 1500s up until the 1970s, a steady 500-year increase in equality caused by growth spreading wealth more widely.

That growth rate has been declining now for more than 60 years and the graphs crossed sometime in the '80s so that by 2050 Piketty projects that inequality will be back to levels not seen since 1820. There's a significant difference between earnings inequality and inherited inequality, and inheritance of wealth among the top 0.01% has become such as to generate a new crop of dynasties (highly visible among Hollywood and Rock brats in the pages of Tatler for some years now). Krugman also remarks that one difference between this New Gilded Age and the first is that income inequality now trumps asset wealth by numbers, though not by total worth: those managerial and financial classes who pay themselves multi-million-dollar fat-cat salaries far outnumber the 0.01% who live solely off ownership of huge corporations.

What struck me so forcibly was that Piketty's book and Krugman's review bring together, and make sense of, several disparate themes that I've been banging on about in this blog, and in my book reviews for The Political Quarterly, for the last decade: a crucial turning point in the mid-1970s when labour began to lose out, which is often blamed on the "oil crisis" but actually far more than that; and the concept of the "surplus wage",  paying salaries that are no longer remotely connected with productivity as a legal way to loot the assets of companies.

One of the more important books I've reviewed in recent years was Winner-Take-All Politics by two US economics professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in which they painstakingly unravel the ways in which the Republican party helped turn the tide against organised labour since 1971, in the face of complacency, collaboration and incompetence from the Democrats. Contrary to conservative mythology it wasn't Reagonomics that turned that tide but a blunder by Carter Democrats in refusing tax and regulatory measures offered by Nixon that were more liberal than anything Obama can dream of. It was also a tax law of Nixon's that permitted clever and diligent Republicans to pay for George W. Bush's upper-class tax cuts by trapping the middle-classes in a higher tax band, thus turning them into enraged tax-cutters and paving the way for the Tea Party. By dominating those boring committees that actually run America, Republicans have permanently shifted the balance from labour back to capital. As Krugman has it:
 "Nor is this orientation toward capital just rhetorical. Tax burdens on high-income Americans have fallen across the board since the 1970s, but the biggest reductions have come on capital income—including a sharp fall in corporate taxes, which indirectly benefits stockholders—and inheritance. Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem."
And there you have the germ of my paranoia, "a lot less outlandish than it might seem". Krugman's statement is fairly radical for a mainstream US economist, in that it acknowledges that the Republican Party pursues class politics (a forbidden topic that neither party nor the US voting public like to hear spoken). My concern however goes way beyond that: is it "too outlandish" to suggest that a small cabal of libertarian Republican bankers and lawyers actually forsaw and abetted the crash of 2008?

Harvard Law School, Skull and Bones, Goldman-Sachs' boardroom, the ratings agencies, the Fed under Ayn-Rand-libertarian Alan Greenspan. It doesn't require the hypertrophied imagination of a Thomas Pynchon or a Bruce Sterling to conjure up from those ingredients the possibility, if not probability, of a small, informal clique with the determination, technical know-how and prescience to understand that unfettering mortgage-lending might bankrupt the public finances, thus cripple the State's regulatory capabilities and open up a once-only opportunity to reverse all the gains made by labour over the course of the 20th century...

The conclusion of Piketty's book, more or less endorsed by Krugman, is that in democracies we could still do something about this rising inequality if we wanted, the more obvious measures being steep progressive taxation on both incomes and wealth, transaction taxes and the breaking up of monopolies (as was done by the Anti-Trusters before World War 1). But it's perfectly clear that the political will is lacking for such measures both in the UK and the USA, where both parties and electorate have largely bought into an anti-tax, austerity agenda. Add to this the fact that US democracy itself has now become so dysfunctional as to prevent any significant reforms from being passed.

To add to my paranoia, we're entering a period where our giant corporations are no longer the railroads and steel but in electronics, and they're finally poised on the brink of a technical revolution that's dogged both the radical political and science fiction imaginations for a century - the possibility of employing robots to displace human workers. Superimpose this onto Piketty's projections of wealth-concentration and dynastic succession and you glimpse the outlines of a very grim society indeed, dominated at one end by shanty-towns and favelas (the World as Detroit) and at the other by gated communities and private islands.

In that world only a minority of the population would be in paid employment, medicine and policing are privatised, and the suppression of civil disturbance is automated and terribly effective. Sounds like a script treatment for yet another dystopian sci-fi/action movie starring Vin Diesel, but it's not that far from the vision Guy Debord arrived at in his (paranoid?) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. Another theorist I greatly admire was Thorstein Veblen, he who best analysed the first Gilded Age and influenced the first Anti-Trust movement: so I'll fade out to a characteristically sarcastic comment of his on unearned income:
"... in modern times and in the civilised countries, those immemorial principles of privilege equitably vested in the master class have fallen into discredit as being not sufficiently grounded in fact; so that mastery and servitude are disallowed and have disappeared from the range of legitimate institutions. The enlightened principles of self-help and personal equality do not tolerate these things. However, they do tolerate free income from investments. Indeed, the most consistent and most reputable votaries of the modern point of view commonly subsist on such income."
 The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919) 











Saturday 11 January 2014

after rain


after rain, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.
This photo of mine has gone viral on Flickr with 6000 views in a day

Thursday 19 December 2013

Monday 2 December 2013

Onward Into the POO


Slightly ashamed that I haven't written anything for this blog for some six months, but the current state of UK politics is so depressing that I don't feel obliged to offer much else in the way of excuse. Anyway, here's a small philological contribution just to keep it rolling.

In a thoughtful essay on the openDemocracy website Professor Cas Mudde recently analysed the prospects for a return to social democracy in Europe. He was not optimistic, expressing a view that "(Real) social democracy is not just unknown to several generations of voters, but it is contradictory to their individualist or ethnicized worldview", a case for which he offered several strong arguments.

I commented on his essay to say that a major part of the problem was the refusal of the rump of New Labour to even utter the words "social democracy". Here's an extract from my comment:

"I believe a crucial first step is purely semantic: getting people to even use the words 'social democrat', which Labour Party people will tie themselves in knots to avoid saying. The fact that for those 30 successful years following WW2 most of Europe and the USA were social democracies *in effect*, though not in name needs to be better explained. The difference between social democracy and authoritarian state socialism needs to be resurrected and preached in non-technical language, since few to the left of Labour appear to understand it. Even Russell Brand's recent quasi-anarchistic TV outburst was couched in a rhetoric that rejected representative democracy and hinted at coercive expropriation - oppositional youth nowadays appear drawn to the worst of anarchism in unholy mixture with the worst of state socialism."

As a sometime dictionary author I'm greatly impressed by the power of language and the need for accurate nomenclature. As well as restoring the meaning and usage of the term "Social Democracy" we need some equivalent that describes the form of wonky capitalism that's been sprouting in the post-2008 epoch in the UK, USA and Europe. I suggest that a suitably descriptive term would be "Property-Owning Oligarchy", or POO for short.

Oh, and a Merry Christmas to one and all!
  

Saturday 14 September 2013

Ressentiment?


ressentiment, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.
"We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Tuesday 20 August 2013

A Caustic Prediction Come True

 
A fake bomb detector: Photograph: City of London Police/PA

"Modern society, which up to 1968 went from success to success and was persuaded that it was loved, has since then had to renounce these dreams; it prefers to be feared. It knows full well that 'its innocent air will no longer return.' A thousand conspiracies in favor of the established order tangle and clash almost everywhere, with the overlapping of networks and secret questions or actions always pushed harder; and the process of rapid integration is pushed into each branch of the economy, politics and culture.

The degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and special activities continually grows in all areas of social life. The general conspiracy has become so dense that it is almost out in the open, each of its branches starts to hinder or trouble the others, because all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without exactly knowing why, or encounter each other by chance, yet without recognizing each other with certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate intentions can only be suspected with great difficulty and almost never understood."

Guy Debord: from "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" 1988 (chapter XXX)  

[Read the whole text at http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html]

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...