Tuesday, April 14, 2020

“It Was Automation”

Years ago — 1963 to be exact — the late and sometime great Alan Sherman (1924-1973) released one of his trademark parodies, “Automation,” to the tune and somewhat twisted lyrics of “Fascination” (music from 1904, lyrics from 1905, featured in a gazillion films).  It was the second cut on the first side of Sherman’s My Son, the Nut album.

Yeah. It creeped me out as a kid, too.
In competition with Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter From Camp), the first cut on the flip side of the album, it never achieved the cult status of some of Sherman’s other pastiches, but it’s . . . we’ll say poignancy is particularly . . . er, poignant these days of human workers laid off due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now, Sherman was no Weird Al Yankovic (but then, Weird Al is no Alan Sherman), but the subject of automation should be revisited and given serious consideration.
For at least the last 250 years (and probably a few thousand years before that if we bothered to do the research), the theme of technological advances displacing human labor from the production process has taken the shape of a more or less acrimonious debate between those who assert that advancing technology creates more jobs than it eliminates, and those who assert that advancing technology simply eliminates jobs.
The truth is somewhere between the two extremes, and even the extremes are partly true, but only up to a point.
Let us first address the claim that advancing technology creates jobs.
Charles Babbage
This is completely false . . . mostly.  The whole point of technology is to replace the human input to production with a non-human input.  This is the only reason for adopting any kind of technology, whether we’re talking a stick to club a rabbit (and skinning it with a sharp stone) instead of running it down and catching it with bare hands (and skinning it with your teeth . . . yes, that’s how it was done), or an automated factory completely guided by a computer program.
As Charles Babbage (credited with inventing the first computer, something he called an “analytical engine” but never actually built) pointed out in his essay, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835), technology makes for an independent though not autonomous addition to the mere animal power (labor) of humanity (although advances in cybernetics may soon make capital autonomous as well as independent in the production process).
Advancing technology does not, however, change a human being’s physical capabilities.  As Babbage pointed out,
(4.) The advantages which are derived from machinery and manufactures seem to arise principally from three sources: The addition which they make to human power. — The economy they produce of human time. — The conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable products.
(5.) Of additions to human power.  With respect to the first of these causes, the forces derived from wind, from water, and from steam, present themselves to the mind of every one; these are, in fact, additions to human power, and will be considered in a future page: there are, however, other sources of its increase, by which the animal force of the individual is itself made to act with far greater than its unassisted power; and to these we shall at present confine our observations. (Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.  London: Charles Knight, 1835, 6.)
"Ned Ludd" and friends.
In other words, if machinery did not result in more production more economically than labor alone, there would be no reason to use machinery.  The net effect of adopting advancing technology is necessarily to remove human labor from the production process, that is, eliminate jobs.
That being said, yes, there may be some other jobs “created” by advancing technology that did not exist before.  If production per labor hour did not, however, increase and become profitable beyond what labor alone could provide, the technology would not be adopted.  That, by the way, is one reason why “production per labor hour” is such a lousy measure of productivity.  What is being measured is an increase in the capacity or output of non-labor inputs, not labor at all!
Thus, the Luddites did have a legitimate complaint.  The new machinery took away their ability to make a living with their handlooms, and replaced it with someone else’s ability to make a fortune with power looms.  Further, instead of years of learning how to weave on a handloom, tending a power loom could be learned by a child in minutes . . . thereby dramatically increasing the demand for “infant labor” by owners of the power looms.
This answers the objection of the other extreme.  It is completely false that advancing technology simply eliminates jobs.  The problem, of course, is that the abuses that often accompany the new jobs, and the income lost as a result of the old jobs that are eliminated, means that human labor is, in the net, removed from the production process.  The new jobs created do not, on a per capita production basis, make up for the old jobs that were eliminated.
Nor are the traditional solutions really solutions.  Create jobs that are not needed for production simply to justify giving someone money for doing what amounts to nothing?  Straight redistribution?  Less complicated and more honest than “creating jobs,” but still demeaning.
So, what is the answer?  We’ll look at that when we look at this subject again.
#30#