Reply To: Calculation in kind methods
“It really feels like in the near future society will either evolve to socialism or descend into a feudal like society where machines produce the large sum of products while most people get by on some sort of UBI plan or become mere entertainment for the lords. I don’t forsee capitalism surviving automation.”
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TBH I am sceptical about the possibility of capitalism imploding as a result of automation. The employed workforce worldwide has, after all, been growing not diminishing in the face of increasing mechanisation, robotisation and automation – although the composition and location of the workforce has changed. For example over 80 per cent of manufacturing now takes place in the global South
Alarmist stories of jobs being decimated are, I think, a bit exaggerated. Partly, this is because what is being looked at is only one segment of the production chain. A machine might make three workers redundant when it once took , say, 5 workers to do the job in question , leaving only 2 workers needed to get done. But this is to overlook the additional labour required to produce the machine itself or the additional labour required to produce the inputs that go into making that machine
Partly also it is because what is more likely to happen is that the nature of the job will change rather than the job itself will disappear . According to a recent MCkinsey Report:
“Almost half the activities people are paid almost
$16 trillion in wages to do in the global economy
have the potential to be automated by adapting
currently demonstrated technology, according
to our analysis of more than 2,000 work activities
across 800 occupations. While less than 5 percent
of all occupations can be automated entirely using
demonstrated technologies, about 60 percent of all
occupations have at least 30 percent of constituent
activities that could be automated. More occupations
will change than will be automated away”
(McKinsey Global Initiative,
“A FUTURE THAT WORKS:
AUTOMATION, EMPLOYMENT,
AND Productivity”
June 2017)
I think from a socialist point of view the more interesting trend to focus on would be the growing proportion of “socially useless labour” in capitalism (not the same thing as “unproductive” or non-profit-producing labour) which you might be hinting at in your comment….