The great speculative AI and jobs debate has been coloured by changing economic conditions. AI Apocalyptics had a major impact in the high unemployment aftermath of the 2008 crash. When, a decade later, recovery was declared and employment levels restored (at least in the US), Business-as-Usual pundits regained their confidence. The tone of most recent managerial reports and policy advisories on the traumatic effects of the fourth industrial revolution is neither ‘denial’ nor ‘doomsday’ but ‘daunting’, with discussion of major Marshall Plan-sized projects for retraining workers. Great uncertainty thus continues to dog the AI and jobs debate. Behind the euphemisms and promises, however, there is visible the likelihood of a world of proletarian woes, with large sectoral job losses and chronic insecurity. And even in the most optimistic estimates of new AI-related job creation, there remain other important questions about its consequences for class relations, to which we now turn.
PANOPTICS, PRECARITY, POLARIZATION AND PROLETARIAN SCHOOLING
As Valerio de Stefano (2018) has pointed out, discussions about AI-related job loss and creation focus on quantitative rather than qualitative employment issues. While the size of the reserve army of the employed affects class decomposition and recomposition, so too do management techniques, the space and temporalities of labour, divisions within the workforce, and the forms of training and education through which that workforce must reproduce itself. As one commentator remarks, it might be true that ‘robots will create more jobs, ... but what if these jobs are less good and less well paid than the jobs that automation kills off?’ (Elliott 2017). We consider four points: panoptics, precarity, polarization and proletarian schooling.
automating the social factory
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