Why Innovate?

Now I don’t want to appear a Luddite, I appreciate the march of technology as much as most, but there ought to be a social benefit from that march. In the past the great waves of technological change have wrought equally great waves of social upheaval. We are all aware that the social and economic histories of the past two hundred years or so are deeply intertwined. We can reflect on the massive increases in standards of living that flowed from those past waves. We recognize that the average person today is far better off materially than even the wealthiest person of the pre-industrial age.

We are all better off in other ways too: we eat better and live longer than our predecessors.

Those previous upheavals forced changes in our political structure too. This is what, I imagine, must frustrate utopian thinkers of both extremes in politics. Instead of creating a seething and volatile working class that then seized power, industrialization and its aftermath simply multiplied the middle class. It opened the doors hitherto barred to most ordinary people. It spread opportunity and reward  more widely than at any time in history.

But we would be naive to extrapolate from that experience. Or, at least, we would be naive to assume that the progress we now reflect on as being the inevitable consequence of prior waves of technological innovation will be reproduced by the current wave. It took a long and difficult struggle to wrest generalized progress from those prior waves. Capitalists do not surrender their gains easily. We must remember the unrest that was necessary to force a more equal distribution of the social gains innovation produced.

What is different in this wave of change is the breezy technocratic framing given too its consequences. CEO after CEO blathers on breathlessly about the future. Wages, we are told, will never again rise across the board. No, not this time. This time only the skilled will benefit.

We didn’t have the same corporate structures before. In the past the battle was more raw. Workers and capitalists were in more immediate contact. Most large business empires were privately owned by their founders or their families. So conflict was more intimate and could be more easily characterized in utopian or ideological terms.

How do workers engage in battle with technocrats? How do they re-frame the discussion in the face of a managerial elite educated in endless technical justifications for efficiency and shareholder value as the exclusive goal of what we all call work? And how does society justify having to absorb the entire cost of an upheaval foisted on it by the motivation of private interests searching for private gains?

Most of us did not ask for all this automation. We did not necessarily agree with the redefinition of corporate objectives that excludes workers as being on a par with shareholders in the division of incomes. It is all just happening to us.

Let me reframe my thought: why innovate if the consequent changes don’t make us better off? All of us, not just the owners of the machines. There ought to be a congruence between both private and social gains. Otherwise we no longer live in a democracy. Because in a democracy the benefit of the majority is its defining characteristic. That’s why we invented democracy: to make sure the gains of innovation were fairly spread across the entire population rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Democracy is designed to undo the extremes of capitalism. If it fails, if we allow it to fail, then the dystopia hidden behind the blank technocratic blandness of the CEO’s quoted by LeVine will deprive the the majority of the inevitability of progress so often assumed by the cheerleaders of technology. Such a future would have no democratic legitimacy. It would be a fraud on the efforts of of bygone workers.