Watch the boulder

by
Peter Radford
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from Peter Radford

There’s a bold rolling down the hill.

We are watching it carefully. It is accelerating. It is enormous. It will mow us down. Lives will be lost. Or at least livelihoods will be lost. People will suffer. The boulder is terrifying.

But, hey, let’s keep watching.

That’s about the attitude of the people who keep on talking about the imminent tsunami of automation, AI, and other so-called disruptive technologies. Let’s keep watching because it’s bad — really, really, bad.

The good folks at Axios distribute a regular synopsis of all the hyperbole surrounding the future of work and today’s edition caught my eye. Buried deep in the summary is a short item headed: “A long disruption is ahead, with low-paying jobs“.

The contents are grim reading.

Here’s a taste:

“Their big picture: There may be a long, deep economic disruption lasting decades and taking millions of jobs. The economy will eventually come out of it. But wages for most jobs may be too low to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

Important background: In the 19th century, it took about six decades for U.S. wages to recover after the first industrial age automation of the 1810s. And the agriculture-to-industrial shift of the 20th century lasted four decades.”

This is hardly something to ignore. 

And the picture being painted is becoming commonplace amongst those who profess to have insight into the likely outcome of the storm moving in from Silicon Valley.

The banality of the analysis that gets us to this sort of commentary is beginning to annoy me. I think what irks me most is the matter-of-fact manner in which the apocalypse is announced. It’s as if we have no choice. It’s as if the democratic process was entirely incidental to the inevitability of capitalist development.

Perhaps I ought not get so vexed. After all the technocrats delivering their doom laden prognostications are trying to be informative. In this case a person called Karen Harris, who is something to do with what the Bain consulting firm calls its ‘Macro trends Group’, tells us that the “coming disruption may be the most disruptive to the work force in a hundred years”. In her opinion this means the displacement of about 2.5 million jobs a year, which is twice the amount of chaos caused by the last great shift, which was from agriculture to industry, and which rocked America to its core.

Let me register my objection to the word “disruption”. Chaos is chaos. The displacement of workers by machinery is just that. Disruption is an anodyne substitute for the reality and is designed to allow the disruptors to avoid facing up to the human consequences of their actions. Disruption sounds vaguely progressive because we all know change is upsetting but usually comes with benefits. And those benefits, as the right wing economists constantly lecture us, have accumulated into lashings of prosperity for even the lowest of workers. How many times are we told that even the worst paid contemporary employee is swimming in a sea of riches that the kings of yore could only dream of?

This is supposed to make us all feel good. It is supposed to stiffen our spines against evils of collective angst about poverty. The right wingers hector us with sermons about the current cornucopia, and that it is all a result of the magic of markets and the power of disruption. To heck, they say, with deploying the government in aid of those affected. Let them get educated. That’s the future of work. Getting educated.

Except, naturally, they haven’t yet explained how a midlife worker writhing under the benefits of disruptive displacement would actually afford to get educated. Presumably the market magic will figure that out.

Possibly.

Sometime.

Disruption has seeped so deeply into the lexicon of the libertarian technology freaks that they throw it about happily. They wear it as a badge. They seek to throw people out of work in the name of disruption. Why? Because the business school and right wing economic elite have declared it a good thing. The management consultants are giddy over disruption. Entire sub-industries have emerged to measure, account for, and glorify disruption. The only thing missing, to my limited knowledge, is a futures market in disruption. Can it be far off?

That boulder rumbling down towards us is a hugely good thing.

Seriously.

Don’t be a Luddite and resist. Embrace the heady air of disruption instead.

Our Karen Harris of Bain drones on:

“We can stipulate that given human history and adaptability, we can have a phenomenal future, but transitions are always challenging. Given where we are starting today, given inequality, changes in geopolitics, it’s hard to see a turbulent-free transition to this brighter future.” 

Stipulate?

Hang on. This means that the good folk at Bain are telling us that everything’s going to be just dandy. They are certain. How come? Because it was in the past. The future, you see, is a replica of the past when it suits the preferred narrative. Apparently we aren’t disrupting that. Prior epochal changes settled down eventually. So this will too. There will be, apparently, a “phenomenal future”.

That’s if you didn’t get flattened by the boulder.

And if you did? Well, that’s your fault for not getting an education. Smarten up is the message. Smarten up. Or get crushed.

The key in this choice is that you have no choice. What the disruptors desperately want to avoid is that we realize we do have a choice. There’s this thing called democracy. And we can use it to fight back.

For starters we should slap a great big tax on disruptive technologies to finance mass education.

Listen to the howls of opposition. No! A tax would penalize progress. It would stop civilization in its tracks. Heck it might even slow down the down-pouring of all that disruptive technology.

You know, like the Uber cars that are choking our cities, ruining public transportation, and raising pollution. Or the Facebook advertising frenzy based on the insinuation of technologic oversight of our every move.

You know. That kind of disruptive progress.

Mind the boulder!

Yes, I mind the boulder.