Henry Dampier

…and I will probably be quite lonely in that belief, which I am confident is true.

People who state that automation will replace human labor entirely tend to be stock pumpers for the California tech firms who have become a little too proud for their britches, or are otherwise beguiled by said stock-pumpers. As a sometimes stock-pumper (all within the law), I am cynical about flimflam world-changing prospectuses, especially when they come from California, where they probably put LSD in the water supply.

It will take a long time to make this argument to my satisfaction, so this is the tentative outline for my position.

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1. Value is subjective.
   • Humans set the prices for labor, because machines have no independent judgment or desire. A machine by itself generates no demand.
     • Prognostications about artificial intelligence are entirely premature.
     • Machine learning is not artificial intelligence.
     • The people who conflate machine learning with artificial intelligence except in a metaphorical way generally have jack-all to do with actually working in machine learning.
     • If machine learning did not require massive human input all the time, companies like Google would be entirely autonomous, instead of requiring an enormous staff of people and contractors to tweak the outputs of their machine learning algorithms constantly.
       • The human labor force to achieve this is actually quite massive. It’s just not entirely contained within the walls of the Mountain View campus.
       • Similarly, most of the humans involved in building iPhones do not work out of Cupertino. They’re in China. And it’s a lot of manual labor, some involving machines, some not.
       • Anyone who has worked on these projects can tell you at length how much is automated, and how much isn’t, and how any given improvement algorithm is often trumped by large numbers of semi-retarded people looking to exploit the predictable algorithmic outputs for fun and profit.
       • Again, the ‘machine learning’ revolution in Silicon Valley is much, much more labor intensive than it appears on the surface of it — competition in manipulating all the algorithmic outputs also creates competitive races that suck up more and more labor and budget for companies throughout the economy.
   • Because value is subjective, there are essentially as many potential jobs as there are feasible human desires.
     • These jobs can take many strange forms.
       • Ex. Today, we have ‘dog bakeries’ in upscale neighborhoods which serve fancy treats to dogs.
       • Much of what makes up an economy is not based on ‘needs’ but ‘desires’ which are often arbitrary and in continual flux.
         • Beanie Babies are a hot item until they aren’t
         • Open-toed heels are hot one year, then it’s knee-high boots.
         • Netbooks are the next big thing, and then it’s tablets.
           • None of these things are ‘needs’ — they are all more like ‘whims.’
       • In the past, the nobility and middle class employed servants to dress them in the morning… or even to just watch them get dressed.
       • That jobs may be demeaning, hold low social status, or are only feasible and sub-minimum wage or indenture levels do not make them no longer valid social roles.
2. Automation has limits.
   • You’ll notice that products produced by mass manufacture are of inferior quality to artisan products.
   • Artisan production requires long training periods and cannot scale to mass production.
     • The New Deal and related labor legislation going back to the abolition of slavery has interfered in the creation and enforcement of apprentice contracts which facilitate artisan training.
   • Our legal system tends to favor mass production and penalizes artisanal production
     • ex. the FDA will send military raids against your raw dairy farm, but may even subsidize a mass-production dairy farm
   • The DOE will send agents to shoot you if you want to put together a startup power plant.
   • The states and the Feds tend to oppose alternative electricity distribution systems which would be more amenable to decentralized industrial production.
   • You are forbidden from starting a factory without going through lots of red tape, harming the ability of small-run, more artisan production to happen.
3. If all the good and beautiful progressive people believe in something, it is probably a lie.
   • This thesis is popular because it provides an excuse for substantial unemployment throughout the Western world.
   • The unemployment is in large part caused by the Western tax-regulatory regime.
   • The good and beautiful people do not want to reform the regulatory regime…
     • So they invent a scapegoat called ‘automation’ which has been routinely used since even before the invention of the assembly line.
     • This is conflated with science fiction visions of hostile artificial intelligence.
     • The boogieman of artificial intelligence, which is nowhere near reaching maturity (especially as limits to computer hardware enhancement are appearing), is used to justify welfare programs
     • Degree-bearing bums who want a handout are gleeful for an intellectual-sounding acronym to use to beg for a handout with (‘UBI’)

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This is the skeleton of the argument that I want to flesh out. It’s also cribbed from the first book project which I temporarily iced built off of this post.

None of this meas that automation is not a major actor driving market behavior. It is just that dogmatic statements that it replaces all forms of human labor are intensely speculative and should be held up to withering scrutiny. My position is not Krugman-esque “internet has no more impact than the fax machine” drivel.

Further, if you disagree, that is fine: I don’t have to convince you, and I don’t even necessarily want to. I just have to profit from your shoddy thinking about technology.

Underlying much of these prognostications about automation is the labor theory of value. To the extent that they believe in that theory is the extent to which they believe that automation alone ‘destroys jobs.’ There are many more factors at play in what goes into the market for human labor.

What is needed is political confrontation. People frightened of direct confrontation with prefer to write up exculpatory narratives about why they don’t have to pick up a spear and point it in the right direction. People tend to be bamboozled easily by technocratic jargon about technology that has absolutely nothing to do with how those technologies really work.

There is a great deal of public panic about technology that ought to be smothered, rather than encouraged. Understanding the limits of both existing technology and foreseeable is not something that most people are willing or eager to do. Panic or surrender to ‘inevitable processes’ is both easy and effeminate.

Instead, it’s better to form a more accurate perception of labor as it relates to technology, human society, and the laws that have been erected to impact what sorts of labor arrangements are legal.