Slashdot Mirror
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs (nytimes.com)
The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change, argues Louis Hyman, director of the Institute for Workplace Studies at the ILR School at Cornell. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes. From a report: This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers. Consider the Industrial Revolution. Well before it took place, in the 19th century, another revolution in work occurred in the 18th century, which historians call the "industrious revolution." Before this revolution, people worked where they lived, perhaps at a farm or a shop. The manufacturing of textiles, for example, relied on networks of independent farmers who spun fibers and wove cloth. They worked on their own; they were not employees.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
It's been happening for centuries:
A programmable punch card loom replaced the need to have a group of four or more artisans spending weeks making one garment, and where no two were perfectly identical. The punch card operator just needed to make sure that the thread reels never ran out and even that was automated. That led to the Luddites. One that battle was over, looms could be powered by waterwheel power, then steam engines, then by electricity. Punched cards were replaced by electronics and then digital media. It only takes one Photoshop artist and a technician to operate 15 digital looms.
Automated traffic lights replaced the need for traffic police. Automated elevators replaced the need for elevator operators. Automated telephone exchanges replaced the need for telephone operators.
We had the Wapping dispute where print workers refused to modernize. They had left it so late to catch up, that by the time the management wanted to introduce new technology, those print shops consisting of copper drums, boilerplate and teams of men adding and removing metal print would be replaced by a commercial laser printer running PostScript and no-one was needed to convert journalist shorthand into metalwork. Their jobs had been vapourized overnight. This was before the internet so they couldn't retrain as web page designers.
In the 1990's, there was the goal of the "paperless office". By using high resolution large screens, there was less need to print documents out. The other advantage was that they could flatten management structures by going from a 1:3 ratio of directors:managers:supervisors:engineers down to a 1:10 ratio. Those managers either took retirement or moved into the financial industry.
The next phase is that engineers want to focus on one particular skill or set of skills, while project managers like to push engineers "outside their comfort zone" so that no one person is irreplaceable. That just leads to engineers choosing to be freelancers and contractors so that their duties are tied down in writing and they don't get nudged out of the way as new employees arrive.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There is a old Bible verse about feeding 5,000 people. It starts with one basket containing a few loaves of bread and fish.
As a people we produce more everday than we need. We have more than enough for everybody, but our economic system does not value human life intrinsically.
Thus we value the individual's ability to increase production capacity and wealth stores. Not all are equally suited to such advanced thinking and foresight. In a purely evolutionary system these once strong laborers, the former backbones of our economy, the shoulders upon which we have stood, would die off due to not being able to acquire and manage the resources to compete in an ever increasingly intellectually challenging economic game.
But there are those which ask the moral and ethical questions of "what am I working for?"... Are we merely working to i crease the wealth of a "noble few", while hoping to skim enough resources off the top to survive? Or are we working for some greater purpose? Are we working to ensure that all of humanity is free to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
The kinds of social decisions we can make, that is to say, the kind that are practical, are determined by the technology available.
You can't choose to have a city, and to have zero slave labor, if you tech level is only what the Romans had. The choice to abolish slavery was made only after the tech level made people productive enough that the city could function on the effort of paid laborers who are free to choose their own jobs.
And so on.
Actually, the Romans had access to a whole bunch of technology that could have replaced a lot of the slave labour but chose not to use it. They 1) thought it would be a bother to have a lot of jobless slaves and 2) figured slaves were cheaper in most cases. In other cases, they just didn't see the technology as something that could be useful for work and production, since they had slaves for that and didn't think there was any need to tinker with that.
Just like today, there are a lot of things you could easily automate (the technology exists), but it's still cheaper to have people do the work...especially if you can outsource the labour to a cheap and poor country. You can see today when you go from a country where labour is cheap to a country where labour is expensive, that in the latter, there is a lot more automation.
As for whether slavery was necessary in Roman society to build its cities...well, ancient China also had large cities, was technologically similar to Rome, but was much less reliant on slaves. Slaves existed yes, but were usually a much smaller portion of the population than in the Roman Empire and many emperors actively tried to ban slavery or reduce it.