SoLiXG:Automation

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Automation

The concept of automation denotes a broad range of processes. It can be understood as a synonym of technical development in general: the process through which techniques and methods of production, distribution, and communication are “rationalized”, or rendered more “efficient”, so as to become increasingly “independent” of human labor.

Today, the term is perhaps most often used in discussions of “digitization”, the development of “smart” systems of different kinds, and AI. Understood in a general sense, however, a full history of automation would need to include all phases of technical and industrial rationalization, from the mechanization of manual labor during the first industrial revolution, to the robotization of intellectual or cognitive labor in the present.

The word comes from ancient Greek (automatos, self-acting), but the specific inflection “automation” – a verbal noun – is relatively recent: it was first used in the postwar cybernetic discourse in the US, to describe the development of feedback-operated, self-correcting and self-managing technical systems. (1) “Automation” has retained some of the techno-utopian connotations of this historical moment. New generations of automated or “intelligent” machines are routinely marketed as the outcomes of a linear and self-sufficient process of technical evolution. (2)

Critical studies of the history of automation have shown that it must instead be understood as a fundamentally social and conflicted process. The protocols of modern, industrial automation, as David Noble has detailed, were derived from the patterns of behavior, and the logics expressed, in collective labor processes. (3) Similarly, the data sets and the algorithms that make up the “inner code of AI”, as Matteo Pasquinelli has recently argued, are “constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but the intelligence of labor and social relations”. (4)

In this respect, “automation” has been and remains a necessarily ambiguous term, the differing implications of which outline a basic political opposition. Understood as the driving principle of the rationalization of methods of production within the framework of intra-capitalist competition, automation will inevitably run counter to the interests of workers, who risk facing inhuman labor conditions or unemployment. (5) (Automation is inevitable, as a General Electric executive is reported to have said in the 1950s, but “it takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice by a lot of people to bring about the inevitable”. [6])

On the other hand, automation also harbors a progressive, liberating promise: the promise of a world without degrading work, of an existence with more free time, leisure, even – in a romantic, utopian spirit – of a life that can be realized in its fullness as free play. More modest versions of such demands have been central to the modern labor movement, and are continuously being updated by new generations of workers, activists, and thinkers. (7) More utopian post-work imaginaries, meanwhile, have generally been the prerogative of avant-garde movements (think of the Situationist International’s “Never Work”). Common to automation’s progressive promises is that they are in contradiction with the continued existence of capitalist relations of production.

(1) Friedrich Pollock, Automation: A Study of its Economic and Social Consequences (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), p. 3.

(2) See e.g. Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (London: Penguin, 2017).

(3) David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011), p. 324f.

(4) Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023), p. 2.

(5) For a report that acknowledges this conundrum, but provides an optimistic path forward, see The Changing Nature of Work: 2019 World Development Report (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2019).

(6) Quoted in Noble, Forces of Production, p. 230.

(7) See e.g. Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), Ursula Huws, Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies (London: Pluto Press, 2020), and James Muldoon, Platform Capitalism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (London: Pluto Press, 2022).