[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/10/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

I still think the Brain scenario of automation as a threat to "jobs"
is something that makes sense mainly in the old mass-production
industries, with proprietary designs.  More below.

>  As above, it is getting cheaper and cheaper. In the 1980s, we had a GE
> Robot Vision system in the robot lab I managed. It was a huge box almost the
> size of a refrigerator. With addons, it must have cost approaching US$100K,
> which was worth twice as much then with inflation. Now, you can do the same
> with some US$30 webcams and a $300 laptop (well, and maybe a USB electrical
> interface card). So, a drop in price by almost a factor of one thousand.

One problem with traditional mass-production industry, with
proprietary design, was that it made it much easier for industrial
cartels to capitalize the immense productivity increases as rents
rather than passing them on to the workers, so that one had to work
forty hours to earn the money to purchase goods and services that
contained ten hours' worth of labor and materials.

The lower the capital outlays for production, the less viable this
becomes, and the less meaningful the "job"--and the distinction
between full-time employment and unemployment--becomes.

In a decentralized economy of garage factories with a few thousand $$
worth of machinery, and without embedded IP rents on design as part of
price, there are few barriers to the available work shaking itself
down and distributing itself among a large number of part-time
microproducers working far fewer hours to pay for stuff at the reduced
price.  And the lower capital  outlays, and the lower overhead to be
serviced, the fewer barriers to work sharing on the Emilia-Romagna
model, with no permanent unemployment--just people coming into and out
of the market for  particular products.

And the more decentralized production and the more distributed
ownership, the more likely that decisions on what technology to adopt
will be driven by the priorities of small craft producers rather than
mass-production industrial giants looking to substitute capital for
labor and deskill labor.

The thing is, it's hard to even *find* those kinds of industrial
producers any more.  The ones that have offshored from the U.S.
haven't for the most part been replaced by large factories overseas,
but have at the same time outsourced most of their former operations
to small job shops.

Brain's unemployment scenario is primarily a threat in circumstances
where capital substitution is still expensive, because automated
capital equipment is expensive.  In those circumstances, the people
who can afford the expensive machinery control access to the jobs, and
appropriate the increased productivity for themselves.  But when the
cost of automated machinery falls to a few hundred or thousand $$,
Marshall's scenario becomes meaningless.

>  The free market is going to drive this. We are one by one passing tipping
> points for all sorts of things. People are either replaced entirely or the
> jobs are deskilled so cheaper workers can do the work.

>  Even without robots, 3D printing, ShopBots, improved CNC machines, better
> design, better materials, and so on are all reducing production costs.

Again, though, when the cheapening of production technology makes it
affordable to ordinary workers, and most manufacturing is undertaken
in garage factories with capital equipment affordable by ordinary
workers,  who's  going to be making the business model decisions?  And
with such low capital outlays, and with productivity increases going
into imploding price rather than profit, i repeat that the traditional
model of "jobs" and "unemployment" becomes meaningless.  When you can
afford your own factory for a few months' wages, who's going to fire
you?

Throw in, also, the reduced cost of subsistence and the reduced range
of self-employment alternatives when the primary source of
manufacturing work dries up for a while and you have to ride out slow
business.  Consider the effect of reduced capital outlays for
producttion in the household sector, and the ability of unemployed and
underemployed people to meet a large share of their needs by producing
directly in the household for direct exchange among themselves.

If we wind up with a society under the kind of lockdown Brain
envisions, it will *not* be driven by the free market.  And it can't
even come about as a side effect of existing hierarchical enterprises
adopting the kind of automation technology he envisions, under the
existing legal regime.  It will require a massive augmentation of the
legal regime to *suppress* low-overhead, low capital outlay production
by self-employed people buying their own equipment.

>  Basically, you can re-engineer many processes by better designs and better
> materials to remove most of the craft aspects. And 3D printing is going to
> do much of the stuff previously done as craft. Within twenty years most of
> that work will be, at best, a human interacting with some sort of complex
> robot-like device, where the team can output what now would take ten or a
> hundred people.

Well, yeah, that's what's already in process of happening with
100kGarages.  But when the primary decision makers are the team of
people working with a 3-D printer and ShopBot, and their automation
choices are driven by their own priorities and interests as craft
producers, you've already got a significantly different scenario than
Brain describes.  And when capital outlays are miniscule, again, who's
got the authority to tell anyone they're "unemployed"?  The lower the
capital outlays and overhead, the fewer hours of work are required to
service it.

> > The Japanese deliberately chose Taichi Ohno's reinvented version of
> > craft production with flexible machinery and a skilled work force,
> > over robotization and deskilling of the work force.

>  Well, considering they now are struggling with an aging population and
> predictions of a labor shortage due to that, how long will that last?
> Besides, what you are describing is essentially a social policy of "make
> work" in a sense. How long will that last in a market system?

I disagree.  A lot of it has to do, not with social conscience or
makework, but with lean production's concept of efficiency which is
far, far different from the efficiencies of Sloanist mass production.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html