Why even automate?
Actually quite a simple question: because people don’t want to do some jobs. Many people would want to be actors or musicians or chefs in a fancy restaurant, but no one really wants to clean sewers or work at a McDonald’s.
If a job is something people actively want to do, then they’ll probably get done as long as the people who want to do them are also allowed to do so (not kept so busy by something else they have no time left for it). Whether the job needs to be done is less relevant here.
If a job isn’t strictly needed and no one wants to do it, then we need to ask ourselves: is the job really worth it if the purpose of that job isn’t enough to pull some people towards it?
But what about jobs that need to get done but that no one wants to do? If a job needs to be done, then you have the inherent coercion of what happens if the job doesn’t get done:
- Don’t produce food -> we starve
- Don’t clean up the sewers -> sewers clog and we’re left with shit in our homes
But of course, we’ve done the studies, ran the numbers, and reached a conclusion: coercion isn’t exactly the greatest motivator, so we usually also give incentives, usually monetary, for anyone willing to get their hands dirty and do jobs no one wants to do.
But what if we REALLY want to avoid that job? Then there’s the other option: automate it!
This isn’t something new.
The industrial revolution actually saw some jobs no one wanted to do replaced by jobs people wanted to do. Before the industrial revolution, people usually worked the land manually. Spend upwards of 10 hours a day in the fields, often in conditions that were less than ideal. The industrial revolution replaced that by instead building machines that can do the work faster, without putting people out in the fields for 10 hours a day. The old jobs in the field got replaced by new jobs operating and maintaining the machines.
So how about we do that same thing with the other jobs no one wants to do. No one wants to clean the sewers? Build machines that can clean the sewers, either automatically or operated from a distance, and the jobs move to operating/supervising and maintaining the machines.
But that’s not really how it’s going…
In truth, if you’ve been paying any attention to the job market over the last couple years you’d know this is not how it works. Companies are often more eager automating jobs people actually want to do. Why have a human bartender who needs breaks and a wage when you can instead have a robot bartender that can work 24/7 for only the cost of electricity and without the risk of it demanding a raise. Why have a human programmer when you can instead Pay for a Copilot subscription and have it plagiarise someone else’s code instead. Why bother with a human artist with a distinct style formed over many years of practice when you can instead just ask OpenAI DALL-E to generate some images for you. And the list goes on and on and on.
And are you seeing a pattern with this? None of those are sucky jobs. They’re all things people actively want to do: Painting, composing music, writing, programming, medicine, hospitality jobs. Meanwhile the shitty jobs people only do because they need the paycheck at the end of the month? Corporations clearly don’t think they’re worth automating. And why? Because they’re already cheap.
Personally, when I push for automation, I do so in hopes we can let people only do things they enjoy, and leave sucky jobs to machines that quite literally couldn’t care. But when corporations push for automation, they do so to reduce overhead costs. They don’t care if the employees dread coming to work every day, they only care how much they end up paying for that labour, and if they pay too much then they’ll try to automate that job.
Is there no other way?
Under capitalism? Probably not.
If we want to automate the actually shitty jobs and leave people doing what they enjoy, we need to put people above profits, and the people at the top of a capitalist systems won’t do that.
Does that mean I’m whipping out the Communist Manifesto? Fuck yeah it does. Capitalist have proven time and time again they’ll put their bottom line above the needs of wider society, and that can only end in Elysium.
I have no idea what needs to be done to have a bright future for us and humanity as a whole, but I do know letting filthy rich capitalists (who sometimes make us wonder if they’re even human anymore) lead the way won’t get us there.
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