The Institute for Public Policy Research seems to think it is expounding some new ideas on the dangers of future technology (Poorest to fare worst in age of automation, 28 December), but in fact these ideas are half a century old. Norbert Wiener pointed them out in his book on Cybernetics, written in 1947 and published in 1948. His argument, in paraphrase, was that the first industrial revolution – the coming of steam power in the late 18th century – represented the devaluation of muscle, so that humans only found purpose as controllers of machines, in factories. The second industrial revolution, in the last century through automation and the digital economy, represents the devaluation of the human brain. If you devalue a man’s (or woman’s) muscles and also his brain, what has he got to sell in terms of his labour?
The consequence is, as the IPPR points out, a hollowing out of the world of work. We shall still need design engineers, computer programmers and brain surgeons; we shall probably still need people to clean offices, streets and toilets. It is the middle-ranking jobs – the much derided “back-office jobs” – that are going. Does the Guardian still have a typing pool, I wonder?
The plain fact is that the old capitalist model – a foundation of barter surmounted by layer upon layer of systems of credit, the first being money – is no longer viable, and we must think of something else. Is universal basic income the answer, or will we also have to devise other means of incentivising people to do the tasks that are still reserved for humans? I’m 83, and I leave you young things to work that one out.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge
• Your story refers – correctly – to the increasing inequality of income and of employment prospects caused by the way that those with power in society choose to use automation. But this is only one half of the story; a similar exacerbation of inequality happens at the receiving end. When the Department for Work and Pensions bullies old people who want to continue to use paper validation and to collect their pension in cash, when station ticket offices are closed, when local councils demand that library books are borrowed and returned without interacting with a librarian – and countless similar examples – essential services become harder and more stressful (and sometimes even impossible) for many poorer and more vulnerable people to access.
And that’s without considering the underlying issue of how these changes are making our day-to-day world increasingly inhuman and inhumane in the name of “efficiency”. Perhaps our brains are supposed to be more psychologically efficient if we go about our lives avoiding human interaction?
Albert Beale
London
• Your report on the potential impact of automation on jobs rightly mentions a historical context. The luddites destroyed machinery not because they hated it in principle but as a way of managing its introduction on terms favourable to labour rather than capital. That task was taken on unevenly by trade unions, and they are still at it.
Raphael Samuel’s lengthy study of Victorian automation, The Workshop of the World, published in an early issue of History Workshop Journal, suggests that the process is much more complex than the IPPR thinks. Some labour processes are not easily mechanised. Others are, where employers can get away with it, provided by such low-paid labour that investing in machines to do it hardly makes sense.
Elsewhere the idea – and here the IPPR report is closer to reality – is to raise productivity (a significant issue in the UK economy) or to de-skill labour by replacing complex processes delivered by high-paid skilled workers with less-skilled cheaper ones. That rarely happens without significant resistance. In short, it is what people do, not machines, that will dictate the world of work of the future.
Keith Flett
London
• Larry Elliott’s article about the IFS report (More jobs at risk of automation if minimum wage rises, 4 January) refers to shop cash-register operators losing their jobs to “automation” or being “replaced by machines”. What happens when supermarkets get rid of cashiers is not automation: customers have to do the work that was previously part of the service. Automation would mean that cashiers’ work was indeed performed by machines, not by customers.
John Wilson
London
• Those fat cats are truly amazing, earning as much in the first three days as the average worker can only manage in the entire year’s work, especially since most of those cats are still in the Caribbean (An honest year’s work? Excessive pay in focus on ‘Fat Cat Thursday’, 4 January). A good target for automation or auto-replication surely.
Christine Weaser
Sevenoaks, Kent
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