All Made Out of Ticky-Tacky
I wrote a post here a couple of years ago pondering the impact of technological change. It’s something I’ve touched on in blog posts for a long time (for example here and here) and quite often think about in idle moments. I found myself thinking about it again yesterday when listening to a podcast featuring George Zarkadakis discussing Artificial Intelligence (in a broad sense, not the fabled singularity of some recent SF).
Zarkadakis makes a point, not original in itself but nevertheless one that resonated with me while listening, that automation removed vast numbers of jobs based on manual labour, while AI looks set to do the same for those based on intellectual labour (and jobs based on intellectual labour are often careers). There are a number of ways of parsing this, but one obvious one is that AI does for the middle classes what automation did for the working classes.
It would be easy to get dystopic about this, and I’ll resist that temptation (though there is another post there at some point), but this all interests me in the context of the election of a leader for the Labour Party. I am not a member of the Labour Party, nor any other party for that matter, so in that sense it’s not my circus and not my monkey. What interests me is that the candidates all, to one degree or another, seem to be being judged against ideological positions formed in the 20th century, many of which are crudely expressed. It seems to me that those positions are not articulated in a way that adequately analyses the nature of society now, especially with regard to the relationships between the social and economic classes, because the structures that sustained those classes are attenuating at pace.
Yes, of course we face the challenges of inequality and all that go with it, along with continuing challenges of population, race and–especially–climate; yes we are looking at a world in which, to distort the words of Drew Philp, this generation may aspire to a career but have to settle for a job. But I think to properly articulate a context for the challenges (aside from the obvious moral ones) and to articulate solutions, we need to move away from an analysis rooted in an industrial culture and the social class divisions that grew out of it.
That old parody of The Red Flag The working class can kiss my ass, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last becomes meaningless when both labour and management are replaced by automata.
There is a lazy analysis which takes the ideas of Thomas Kuhn from the Philosophy of Science and applies them to social science, but even if viewed purely as metaphor, it seems to me that there is a paradigm shift going on and politics hasn’t caught up.
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