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

Sat Dec 12 19:59:57 CET 2009

another interesting take is that of giovanni arrighi in his book adam smith
in beijing; where he shows how east asia chooses industrious development
over industrial development; i:e: automation is not always an automatic
decision of capital in these regions of the world ...

On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 7:32 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
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