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You are reading issue #14 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.

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Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings.



This week I am going to talk about trade unions and automation, and why we should put the labour movements money into shaping automation for our use.



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Why trade unions should fund automation



Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was a fascinating figure. He is probably best known for his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine which founded the discipline of cybernetics. Cybernetics combined information theory, biology, computing and many other discipline to study the command and control of systems. Besides that he was a pioneer of early computing and automation, and was active in social activism, later in life for example resisting military use of scientific research. Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was a fascinating figure. He is probably best known for his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine which founded the discipline of cybernetics. Cybernetics combined information theory, biology, computing and many other discipline to study the command and control of systems. Besides that he was a pioneer of early computing and automation, and was active in social activism, later in life for example resisting military use of scientific research. Recently I came across a letter he had written in 1949 to Walter Reuther, a legendary leader of the U.S. trade union movement. Wiener had worked on automating anti-aircraft guns during the second world war, and through his studies saw that automation was about to hit manufacturing and thus union jobs. Wiener wrote the letter after a company contacted him for a consulting job about automating human labour, in the letter he writes that: "I would give a guess that a critical situation is bound to arise under any condition in some ten to twenty years; but that if war should make the replacement of labor mobilized into the services an immediate necessity, we should probably have a concentrated effort put into this work which might well lead to large scale industrial unemployment within two years. I do not wish personally to be responsible for any such state of affairs. I have, therefore, turned down unconditionally the request of the industrial company which has tried to consult me [he had been asked by a corporation to help automate jobs]. However, it is manifestly not enough to take a negative attitude on this. If I do not put this information in the hands of the industrialists, it is merely a question of time when so obvious a method of procedure will be urged upon them by other people." Thus he offered Walter Reuther a recommendation: "What I am proposing is this. First, that you show a sufficient interest in the very pressing menace of the large-scale replacement of labor by machine on the level not of energy, but of judgment, to be willing to formulate a policy towards this problem. In particular, I do not think it would be at all foolish for you to steal a march upon the existing industrial corporations in this matter; and while taking a part in production of such machines to secure the profits in them to an organization dedicated to the benefit of labor. It may be on the other hand, that you think the complete suppresion (sic) of these ideas is in order. In either case, I am willing to back you loyally, and without any demand or request for personal returns in what I consider will be a matter of public policy. I wish to warn you, however, that my own passiveness in this matter will not, on the face of it, produce a passiveness in other people who may come by the same ideas, and that these ideas are very much in the air." No response has been documented by Reuther, and most likely the union leader ignored the eccentric academic. Since then, however, automation has been used to break union strongholds, the degree of automation of something like dockwork being the perfect example of this.

"So, it seems strange to me just how much automation policy focuses on the ‘impact’ technology will have on jobs and society, as if particular technological futures were an unavoidable force of nature. That way of looking at technology suits the interests of incumbent developers, and unduly privileges the trajectories of development that they want to make happen. If you look carefully at groups working in open hardware networks and makerspaces for example, you’ll see they are subverting, adapting and appropriating many of the technological ingredients of ‘automation’ - computation, sensors, actuators, computer numerically controlled machine tools, design software, microelectronics, internet platforms, 3D scanners/printers, video, etc. But the technologies are being taken in directions and used for purposes quite different to industrial automation. They’re working along technological trajectories inspired by social visions quite different to the ‘cyber-physical systems’ of Industry 4.0 advocates. Instead, activists are pursuing ideas for commons-based peer-production, knowledge as commons, free culture, solidarity economy and commitments to social values like sustainable development."

Links

Here are some links with interesting news from the past two weeks.

Google Plans Not to Renew Its Contract for Project Maven, a Controversial Pentagon Drone AI Imaging Program - Gizmodo Under pressure of worker organising, Google has decided not to renew its contract for Project Maven, a US military project to use Google's AI capabilities (among others) to improve drone surveillance capacities. Organising by workers inside Google now forced them to back down, a great sign for the future. Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general, has always had strong relations with the military in the US (going all the way back to companies like Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and Fairchild). That workers can be organised against that is a very hopeful sign.



Bye... This was issue #14 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.



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And although evidence has come out that automation has not been the only cause for loss of employment in traditional union bastions, outsourcing or a "spatial fix" in the words of Beverly J. Silver , also contributed greatly (maybe more than mainstream economists want to admit ). Nevertheless automation has had a negative effect on union strength throughout the western world.Today we are probably at the edge of a new wave of automation, driven by new technologies such as AI. And even though I think effects have been mischaracterised (read my recent piece in New Socialist about it!), this new wave can most certainly be targeted towards remaining union strongholds and ascending sectors of workers who are organising.So what are we to do? "Stealing a march" on existing capitalism might not be a bad idea. Not necessarily by organising a robot tax, as Wiener seems to suggest, but byIn the last newsletter I interviewed Adrian Smith of Sussex University about automation, here's a quote that particularly inspired me:Automation is not simply a process that is apolitical and rolls over us like a wave, rather it's human driven process that reflects the biases of the developers and designers that make the systems.Why does, for example, Airbus fund academic chairs in the digitisation of manufacturing, but don't trade unions fund similar research into human-oriented uses of automated technology? Why don't trade unions work with hackerspaces to design and test devices that could improve the working lives of their members? Why don't they steer the target of technological research away from profit and towards human gain?Of course this might easier said than done. Developing the capacities to steer technological research and development are hard, and certainly cannot be taken for granted. If we, however, want to take control over the direction technology takes, changes need to take place in who funds its development and what priorities are made. Trade unions, inherently rooted in our workplaces, occupy a great space to do this. Designing the future - New SocialistGreat article reviewing Economic Science Fiction , a new book on science-fiction and how it can allow us to imagine new economic systems. Science-fiction holds great potential to break what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to limit our vision of something beyond, epitomized in the famous quote: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." Science-fiction, and particularly left-wing science-fiction, can break that mold and allow us to imagine something beyond the end of capitalism. Workers and Technological Change in the United States - Labor HistoryAn academic article analysing the relation between worker's power and technological innovation. Generally this relation has been characterised as a negative one, hence the old right-wing adage that unions are backwards and hold back progress. This article empirically researches the opposite: whether worker's power in the workplace actually stimulates technological innovation by blocking off the possibility for employers to increase profitability through worse working standards for workers (lower wages, speeding up work, unpaid overtime...). A working paper version of the article can be found here for free, really a must read.