Oh what the hell, while we're on the subject of work

[kortirion_among_the_trees]

I find the conjunction of this, dating from the year I was born:

(In particular the lines: 'We've got a machine can learn the knack / Of doing your job, so don't come back ... Watch out for the man with the silicon chip')

With this: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming (to be read in full)

Utterly fascinating.  MacColl as a prophet of the socio-economic consequences of 'machine learning' (!!) - who'd have thunk it?

P. S. It's also just occurred to me that the LRB is the only present-day equivalent in this country of a 19th c. толстый журнал.

Comments

[colinbj.livejournal.com]

The Wikipedia article is very good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

Is this too early for your specialist period?

[arda-unmarred.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I know all about Butler and 'Darwin among the Machines' - remember that my initial specialist area was 19th c. utopias/dystopias :) But this is about something else - the usual Victorian view is that humanity will be enslaved by the machine, as an extrapolation of the 'humans tending machines' status quo that they could see in every factory around them. What I was referring to was the opposite - that automation means the economy can dispense with human work altogether, human labour becomes redundant. It's the process that Lanchester talks about that has been happening again and again since the first industrial revolution and the Luddites - every time machines improve, humans lose their jobs, whole areas of skilled and unskilled labour disappear. The point about the 'silicon chip' is that it looks likely to send that process into hyperdrive. I absolutely loved his reference to Morris at the end - because the utopia of creative labour that automation in theory finally makes possible is of course the last thing that's likely to happen.