Donald Trump has already decided that his 2020 reelection campaign will be against “socialists,” the super-villains who want to protect health care, access to public education and college, social security, and the worst of four-letter words, J-O-B-S. Actually, we badly need some “socialism” with worker power before the world’s capitalist elite uses technology to swell their profits by eliminating their human workforces altogether.
In a recent New York Times essay, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for its Business Day section, reported on the time he spent moseying around the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland listening in to side conversations. According to Roose, “They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.” They call the “corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology” that will make workers obsolete a “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Three-fourths of the world’s corporations expect to be replacing people with machines by 2020. IBM’s “cognitive solutions” unit, which advices businesses on how to use artificial intelligence to increase efficiency and profit is the company’s second-largest division, bringing in over $5 billion in revenue from just October through December 2018.
Roose found the Davos crowd, at least in public, worried about the “negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers.” There were panel sessions where participants discussed things like “human-centered A.I.” and a social safety net to assist people who lose their jobs because of automation. But in private conversations, Roose heard the capitalist elite hungrily anticipating ways to “transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations” before their competitors regardless of the impact on workers. Change will come quickly, at least according to Kai-Fu Lee, a longtime technology executive. Lee predicts that within the next decade and a half artificial intelligence could eliminate 40% percent of the world’s jobs.
Capitalists have even invented a new euphemistic vocabulary to describe what they plan to do. Workers won’t be “replaced” by machines. They will be “released” from onerous tasks like work. Instead of massive lay-offs, companies will just be “undergoing digital transformation.” Mohit Joshi, the president of the India-based Infosys technology firm, claims many businesses think they can ultimately function with as little as 1 percent of the people they currently employ.
Roose argues that “all of this automation is happening quietly, out of public view,” because the capitalist elite wants their plans in place before progressives, workers, and populists realize what they are doing and have a chance to respond. One of President Trump’s great declared “victories” for working people was getting the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn to promise to place a new factory in Wisconsin. But the chairman of Foxconn has already gone on record that the company plans to replace 80% of its workers with robots in the next five to 10 years.
Advocates for replacing skilled workers with robots like to claim that workers can be “reskilled” for newer and more plentiful jobs. But while there have been some successful pilot programs, Roose makes the point that these have newer be tried on the scale that will be needed when the “digital transformation” goals have been fully implemented. The World Economic Forum estimates that only 25% of 1.37 million workers who will be fully displaced by automation in the next ten years can be profitably “reskilled” by private-sector programs.
Just in case you think you can always get a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s, think again. In Pasadena, California, Flippy, the $100,00 hamburger flipping robot, can make 2,000 burgers a day.
Some questions I have after reading the Roose article are: “Who is going to buy all their crap if no one has a job?” “Do robot arms watch flat-screen televisions?” “Have these business executives ever watched the Matrix or Terminator movies? What will they do when the machines turn on them?”
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