#Aaron Benanav

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Aaron Benanav's interview "Automation Isn’t the Cause of Unemployment — Capitalism Just Can’t Generate Enough Jobs"

[bravecrab]

PODCAST EPISODES OF LEGITIMATE A.I. CRITICISMS:

Citations Needed Podcast

Factually! With Adam Conover

Tech Won't Save Us

[nanmykel]

BLUE COLLAR BLUES

Work and the future of it in the age of automation is the focus of Alyssa Battistoni’s article/book reviews in the Nation’s Fall Books issue.  She is the author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, and she draws upon Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav and Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe. Benanav reminds us that automation theorists hold that technological…

[dipnotski]

Üç yeni kitap:

 

➊ Phillip Cole – Kötülük Miti, çeviren: Reha Kuldaşlı, İş Kültür Yayınları

➋ Charles William ve Chadwick Oman – Karanlık Çağ Tarihi, çeviren: Ekin Duru, Say Yayınları

➌ Aaron Benanav – Otomasyon ve İşin Geleceği, çeviren: Diyar Saraçoğlu, Nota Bene Yayınları

 

#phillipcole #kötülükmiti #rehakuldaşlı #charleswilliam #chadwickoman #karanlıkçağtarihi #ekinduru #aaronbenanav #otomasyonveişingeleceği #diyarsaçlıoğlu #kitap #yenikitaplar #yeniçıkanlar #book #neokuyorum #kitapkokusu #dipnotski #kitaponerisi #kitaptanitimi #kitapokur #kitapöneri #kitaptavsiyesi #kitaplık #bibliophile #goodreads #whattoread #bookworld #kitapchallenge

[thelonguepuree]

In the aftermath of World War II, proposed public-investment-led full employment programs were forcefully combatted and soundly defeated, at a time when left-wing organizations were much stronger than they are today (of course, most of those left-wing organizations were fighting for more than public investment: many were calling for the socialization of production). Large asset-owners understood, correctly, that public investment posed an existential threat to their prerogatives regarding where and how much of society’s resources to invest in the expansion of production—and hence whether economies would expand or slide into recessions. It was not so much full employment they feared, but rather full employment achieved via public investment, which would have neutralized the capacity of large asset owners to throw society into chaos through threats of disinvestment. Throughout the postwar period and into the present, capitalists have ensured that they retained a tight grip over this heavy artillery of the class conflict: the capital strike. By threatening to disinvest, capitalists have ensured that the private investment decisions of large firms are respected, as the condition of maintaining or restoring high levels of employment. Today, firms’ grip over the capital-strike weapon is stronger than it was before, since investment levels are depressed and underemployment is widespread. Moreover, in a world where private investment is weak, fear that public investment could displace its private equivalent as the main driver of economic activity becomes all the stronger, since so little investment is taking place overall. It is a mistake to imagine that capitalists would ever agree to their own planned obsolescence. To challenge capitalists’ control over investment decisions, even under the guise of a New Deal-style capital-labor accord, is not a compromise. As Oskar Lange pointed out in 1938, “To retain private property and private enterprise and to force them to do things different from those required by the pursuit of maximum profit would involve a terrific amount of regimentation of investment,” upsetting “the financial structure of modern capitalist industry” and encouraging firms “to use their economic power to defy the government authorities (for instance, by closing their plants, withdrawing investment, or other kinds of sabotage).” Facing potential insubordination from powerful actors, radical Keynesians would need to threaten firms with full socialization. In order to make good on those threats, they would need to have already developed and disseminated a clear plan for doing away with private enterprise. But then, to have any chance of securing their aims, radical Keynesians would also need to have won the backing of major social movements. Only movements that presented a truly existential threat to asset owners’ wealth would be able to bring capital to heel. Yet if those social movements were powerful enough to force capital to submit to a public-investment-driven economy, why would they not demand more? Such movements would not willingly allow for power’s further concentration in the hands of the state (instead, they would demand a devolution of power to democratic organs of the people themselves). As we will see, automation theorists’ UBI proposals suffer from a similar failure to reckon with the weapons capital wields, above all in an era of economic slowdowns. Capital disinvestment neuters all worker-empowering policies as soon as they are born.

Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work

[roseproductivity]

Abundance is not a technological threshold, but a social relationship.

Aaron Benanav

[stoweboyd]

A rich and varied life beyond work is only possible if work is organized in a way that is fair, rational, and resistant to whatever forces might emerge to subjugate human beings once again. | Aaron Benanav https://t.co/qcK3se0LRE pic.twitter.com/s70lsvHxPJ

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)

April 7, 2021

[probablyasocialecologist]

When people have found themselves in possession of an abundance of goods, they have generally seen those goods not as resources to be deployed in the service of economic expansion, but rather as so many excuses to throw gigantic parties, like the ones that presumably took place at Göbekli Tepe or, for that matter, at Stonehenge. In many cultures, giving away or even ritualistically destroying one’s possessions at festivals has been a common way to show one’s worth. That people all over the world continue to spend their meager incomes on elaborate marriage celebrations and funerals is something mainstream economists can understand only as anomalous.

Aaron Benanav, Making a Living

[edwad]

In reality, technological development is highly resource intensive, forcing researchers to pursue certain paths of inquiry at the expense of others. In our society, firms must focus on developing technologies that lead to profitable outcomes. Turning profits off of digital services, which are mostly offered to end users for free online, has proven elusive. Rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements. The result is that, like all modern technologies, these digital offerings are far from “socially neutral.” The internet, as developed by the US government and shaped by capitalist enterprises, is not the only internet that could exist. The same can be said of robotics: in choosing among possible pathways of technological progress, capital’s command over the work process remains paramount. Technologies that would empower line workers are not pursued, whereas technologies allowing for detailed surveillance of those same workers are fast becoming hot commodities. These features of technological change in capitalist societies have important implications for anyone seeking to turn existing technical means toward new, emancipatory aims. Profit-driven technological advances are highly unlikely to overcome human drudgery as such, at least on their own, especially where labor remains cheap, plentiful, and easily exploited.

— Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (2020)

[antoine-roquentin]

The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers. Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft’s long-term business plans.

Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low. The flip side of falling rates of business investment is a slackening pace of economic growth, which economists have termed “secular stagnation.” It’s this decades-long slowdown that has generated the insecure labour force on which Uber and Lyft rely.

In slow-growing economies, labour markets are weak. Older workers who lose their jobs have trouble finding equivalent forms of employment. Meanwhile, young people just starting out in their working lives are sending out hundreds of applications only to end up in dead-end retail jobs. Rideshare companies such as Uber and Lyft feed off the insecurity that is omnipresent in the modern economy. When the alternative is working irregular shifts at coffee shops, driving for rideshare companies on one’s own schedule can seem like a dream. Management by algorithm appears similarly utopian compared with management by nasty bosses. In the early years of their operation, rideshare companies even offered rates of pay that were good relative to available alternatives.

Of course, Uber and Lyft were probably planning to have fired these workers by now and to have replaced them with robots. But like many promises of automation, driverless cars are still some way from becoming a reality. Uber and Lyft started squeezing these workers’ incomes to staunch their own bleeding of cash reserves. At this point, drivers started fighting back.

This fight for workers’ rights is grounded in a growing recognition that the expansion of the digital economy does not simply reflect the triumph of an unstoppable technological change. Behind Silicon Valley rhetoric, much of what appears to be technological innovation turns out to be a means of circumventing legal regulations, including minimum wage laws. By misclassifying its workers, Uber avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars into US state unemployment insurance schemes. Yet during the Covid-19 economic crisis, Uber lobbied the federal government to step in and pay its drivers’ unemployment benefits anyway.

Why should Uber be entitled to have it both ways? It makes sense to demand that companies hire workers in stable jobs, or not be allowed to hire them in the first place. Yet in an environment of weak economic growth, this demand will be insufficient to win economic security for all. Capitalist economies have been able to extend security to widening circles of workers only in periods of rapid economic growth, when low rates of unemployment made it possible for more and more workers to demand better wages and working conditions. The era of high-speed economic growth ended long ago and is not coming back.

High rates of economic growth in the mid-20th century – the reference point for any politics that seeks to restore economic growth in the present – were premised on a historically exceptional period. The restoration of stable international trade following two world wars made possible the largest growth of economic productive capacity in human history, not just in Europe and the United States, but worldwide. By the 1970s, rapid expansion had given way to worsening global overcapacity, resulting in rising competition and falling rates of investment in internationally traded goods. People were left scrambling for work in the growing service sector, where the potential for labour productivity growth, and hence economic growth, is significantly lower.

Workers’ inability to find stable employment is thus not the result of recent advances in automation technologies, which, like driverless cars, have mostly failed to pan out. Their plight results from an everyday reality of low profitability in economies saturated with capital, and insufficient opportunities for its reinvestment, such that dividends and share buybacks have increasingly become the norm for surplus cash holdings. With shrinking opportunities for investment, enormous pools of capital have rushed into highly speculative ventures such as Uber and Lyft that have little capacity for demonstrated profitability.

That governments turned a blind eye to Uber and Lyft’s misbehaviour for so long is no surprise. Governments are complicit in making workers more vulnerable. Facing persistently slow economic growth and high rates of unemployment, governments have spent decades trying to coax companies to invest by making it easier to deny workers’ benefits and to avoid paying taxes. Again, this bid to restore conditions of rapid economic growth, much like supply-side and trickle-down solutions that failed to produce generalised prosperity, was a failure. The Covid crisis has only made economic prospects less auspicious.

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Aaron Benanav's interview "Automation Isn’t the Cause of Unemployment — Capitalism Just Can’t Generate Enough Jobs"

[theburialofstrawberries]

thanks to legendary terror blog & las vegas natasha lyonne impersonator @areyougonnabe for the tag, here we go

five songs I've had on repeat:

rules by doja cat (after watching that one james fitzjames fancam 😔😔😔)

betelgeuse by king creosote

don't get around much anymore by ella fitzgerald

up by cardi b

ride by clans (and everything else in the this way up soundtrack)

last movie watched:

dirty dancing probably? I don't remember.... (uh oh y'all it's getting kinda hazy)

currently reading:

the william battersby biography of james fitzjames (😔😔😔), gendering caste by uma chakravarti, automation and the future of work by aaron benanav, the panchatantra translated from sanskrit by chandra rajan which is actually hilarious after it stops being annoying which it really really is, as it is essentially a long-winded lecture on statecraft to spoiled prince brats told through strange and often morbid animal kingdom stories, and chandra rajan has translated these stories so that everyone sounds like they're in a victorian parlour.......these are among the books I'm currently reading that I haven't tacitly written off as a lost cause & am actually hopeful of finishing at some point so inshallah, everyone pray for me 🙏🏽

currently watching:

the terror (2nd watch), rupaul's drag race as episodes release, ditto nbc's superstore which btw this website is sleeping on....very funny, diverse cast, low key advocating for a people's revolution

tagging @shortcrust @moriarty @arunima @post-brahminism @suburbanpunk

[purrspectiving]

In a capitalist economy, managers are able to make clear-cut decisions about cost-effectiveness only because they are allowed to ignore all of the non-economic costs of their decisions, which include destroying communities, immiserating workers, depleting non-renewable resources, and filling the world with garbage. Economically rational decisions at the level of the firm add up to an increasingly irrational society

How to Make a Pencil by Aaron Benanav

[thevividgreenmoss]

Given current technologies, it would be easy to meet everyone’s needs, while also working less, if the incomes of high earners were radically reduced, and if profitability considerations no longer guided investment. Why are contemporary Keynesians so unwilling to take on board Keynes’s post-scarcity economy?

Part of the reason is certainly that the end of scarcity would ultimately mean the end of an elite-dominated order (to say so is to mark, of course, a tension in Keynes’s own worldview). Trade Wars Are Class Wars offers no shortage of criticisms of elites—a natural outgrowth of the book’s attention, not only to rising inequality, but also to the one-sided class war from which inequality arises. But like other members of today’s Keynesian revival, they want to convince the elites to submit voluntarily to rational state direction, altruistically surrendering their accumulated wealth and power. This position can only end in confusion. As their own account amply demonstrates, no country—whether Germany, China, Japan or the imperial United Kingdom—has voluntarily made adjustments that cut deeply against the interests of elites, whether because the state is composed of members of the elite class or because it cannot act against elite interests without inviting the economic catastrophe it is trying to prevent. As they admit in their conclusion, America’s position within the global order entails major benefits for its elite—but this is to concede that there is little chance for change from the top. The alternative—which promises at least coherence, if not a substantially more optimistic outlook—would be to accept that hope lies not in the emergence of an enlightened elite, but rather, in an evening-up of class struggle—that is, from the side of the working class. To think class politics, you need not only Hobson and Keynes but also Marx and Engels.

Aaron Benanav, World Asymettries

[transhumanitynet]

Aaron Benanav on Automation, Technological Unemployment and UBI

Prof. Aaron Benanav has devoted his life to studying unemployment. Given that automation, technological unemployment, and universal basic income have become hot political and economic issues across the world, it was about time to have a podcast episode exclusively on those topics. I hope you enjoy it and learn as much from Aaron as I did.

During this near 2-hour-long interview with Aaron Benanav, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: why he is a historian of unemployment; the biggest issues humanity is facing today; why we should all care about unemployment and the problems of defining and measuring it; the relationship between automation, jobs, productivity, and output; why the term technological unemployment is inaccurate and misleading; productivity growth, job churning, labor demand and economic growth; the false alarmism on technological disruption and his own research on automation and the future of work; the capitalist incentive to replace rather than to enhance and empower; technological unemployment and universal basic income [UBI] from the left and the right; oversupply of capital, undersupply of investment opportunities and secular stagnation; John Maynard Keynes and the Economic Possibilities of Our Grand Children; modern monetary policy, post-scarcity, and capitalism.

My favorite quote that I will take away from this conversation with Aaron Benanav is:

Don’t fear technological unemployment but long term tendency for stagnation.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is Aaron Benanav?

Aaron Benanav is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He will be moving to Humboldt University in Berlin this summer to join the Excellenzcluster “Contestations of the Liberal Script.” His research focuses on the global history of unemployment. Benanav’s first book, Automation and the Future of Work, is forthcoming from Verso in late 2020. He is currently working on a second project on postwar efforts to achieve full employment worldwide. He can be found on the web at aaronbenanav.com and on twitter at @abenanav.

Aaron Benanav on Automation, Technological Unemployment and UBI was originally published on transhumanity.net