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| 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.
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| 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.)
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| "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#