Activity

[...] we should ask who negotiates the terms of these collaborations, and if teachers and factory workers will have any choice but to accept them. In reality automation is largely presented to workers as an ultimatum, a forced collaboration driven by a vision of efficiency defined by scale and stat…

[...] We can and must act now to prevent that from happening -- and to redirect AI for the good of the many, not just the few.

These sorts of activities, however necessary they may be for the reproduction of capitalist class relations, are always the last to be rationalized, that is, made more efficient, and less onerous, by means of labor-saving innovations. I have already discussed in detail the reasons for this. In some…

The bottom tier of the job market made up in large part of service occupations is resistant to wholesale automation because labor-saving innovation is happening elsewhere in the economy: labor-process refinements in other sectors shed workers who, because they must work to live, are shunted into …

Here, though, we must be careful not to confuse jobs or occupations with tasks. What a particular occupation “does” is never one thing. A job is only ever a specific grouping of discrete tasks, some of which are more repetitive and easily mimicked by machines, others of which are more intuitive, su…