Against Automation Mythologies

Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots

J. Jesse Ramirez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Inspired by Roland Barthes's practice of "semioclasm" in Mythologies, this book offers a "technoclasm"; a cultural critique of US narratives, discourses, images, and objects that have transformed the politics of automation into statements of fact about the "rise of the robots".

Treating automation as an ensemble of technologies and science fictions, this book foregrounds automation's ideologies, exaggerations, failures, and mystifications of the social value of human labor in order to question accepted and prolific automation mythologies. Jesse Ramirez offers a study of automation that recognizes automation as a technosocial project, that uses the tools of cultural studies and history to investigate the narratives and ideologies that often implicitly frame the automation debate, and that concretely and soberly assesses the technologies that have made the headlines. The case studies featured include some of the most widely cited and celebrated automatic technologies, such as the Baxter industrial robot, the self-driving car, and the Watson AI system.

An ideal resource for anyone interested in or studying emerging technology and society, automation, Marxist cultural theory, cultural studies, science fiction studies, and the cultural history of technology.

Part I

Business Science Fiction

1 Future Expectations

Some of the most widely read and cited treatises on contemporary automation are works of business science fiction—they just are not labeled as such. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, which was awarded Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times and Forbes, has a degree from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014), are graduates of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School, respectively. Both currently work at Sloan and at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. The computer scientist and “serial entrepreneur” Jerry Kaplan wrote the best-selling Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (1994) prior to publishing Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2015). While Nicholas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (2014), has a humanities education, his writing career took off while he was an editor of Harvard Business Review in the early 2000s.¹ I call these and similar authors business sf writers not only because of their educational and institutional locations in the professional-managerial-entrepreneurial class, but also because of their exaggeration of the present and future of “innovation.” Before this term became a buzzword in the twentieth century, it was commonly associated with false prophecy. Business sf is one of the channels by which “the false-prophet innovator has been redeemed as the profit-making insight of the technological visionary.”² In its most ideologically crystalline form, business sf seeks to educate desire for a more fully automated capitalism managed by a technocratic alliance of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs.³

Like writers of fictional utopias and dystopias, authors of business sf extrapolate current socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes; their futures are speculative models of the present. My point is not simply that writers of business sf are directly and indirectly influenced by genre sf. Of course they are. I mean that all capitalist economics is a kind of sf. When economists predict trends with statistical models, investors assess the future price of a commodity, entrepreneurs create business plans, banks issue loans, or consumers pretend that paper, metal, and digits on a screen are money, and that their purchases will satisfy their needs and desires, they all act as if the objects and conditions of their practices were real and knowable, despite the fact that such objects and conditions are contingent on unobservable qualities and an uncertain future. The economic sociologist Jens Beckert explains that

expectations of the unforeseeable future inhabit the mind not as foreknowledge, but as contingent imaginaries. Actors, motivated by an imagined future state, organize their activities based on this mental representation and the emotions associated with it. Expectations under conditions of uncertainty and ascribed symbolic meanings may be seen as a kind of pretending.⁴

In other words, when business sf describes the future of automation, it channels the make-believe that fundamentally orients economic thought and practice in a society enthralled by the market’s structural unpredictability.

However, unlike most sf writers, the authorities in the contemporary automation debate benefit from the sober respect that American society routinely pays to visionary businessmen. Their books are not marketed or read as fiction. Amazon lists Rise of the Robots and The Second Machine Age as top sellers in “Industrial Technology” and “Robotics.” Deference to business expertise is one reason many Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016—they believed that only a “successful businessman” can run the country—and helps to explain why the vast majority of Americans accept the story that business sf is telling. According to a recent Pew poll, 82% think automation will take over much of the work currently done by humans.⁵ These Americans do not recognize business prognoses of the automated future as fiction, but as eyewitness reports from the “business world,” which, like an upside-down version of Plato’s realm of immaterial forms, is the bedrock reality of cash and calculation that underlies ordinary life.

The usual business of genre sf is to entertain, to incite wonder, or to provide critical distance from the present by symbolically transforming it into the past of a hypothetical future.⁶ Even the most politically conscious genre sf has a highly mediated relationship to action. In contrast, business sf claims to describe what is the case and starts from the premise of genre sf’s transcendence in order to influence future expectations. Brynjolfsson and McAfee constantly remind their readers that the technologies they describe used to be “the stuff of science fiction” and have since become “business reality.”⁷ Admitting to pretending would jeopardize their stature as authorities and their ability to elicit actions such as private and government investment in automation. Glossing Pierre Bourdieu, Beckert observes that “the nonfictional character of assertions is an ‘illusio’ to be maintained in the economic field; the belief (croyance) that assessments of future states of the world are accurate anticipations of the future present must be protected to maintain actors’ confidence.”⁸

It is a truism among genre sf authors and scholars that representations of the future are really about the time in which they were created, which includes that historical moment’s understanding of its past. To read sf futures as sheer prediction is to turn a blind eye to the worlds that ground speculation and against which speculation produces meaning for historically situated interpretive communities. Yet this blindness is precisely what business sf’s “illusio” wants to maintain in order to keep its speculations circulating as fluidly and widely as the capital that it seeks to attract. To unlock the sf side of automation discourse, to recognize business sf as a political and socially interested intervention in the present and past—this is the work of the following chapters.

Notes

1 Kaplan’s website (jerrykaplan.com) describes the author as a “serial entrepreneur.” Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999) is business sf’s most radically speculative writer. Note how Brynjolfsson and McAfee riff on Kurzweil’s title while subtly turning his quasi-religious “spiritual machines” into the more secular sounding “brilliant technologies.”

2 John Patrick Leary, “The Innovation Cult,” Jacobin, April 16, 2019, www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/innovation-language-of-capitalism-ideology-disruption. See also John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019).

3 In Marxist sf studies, the education of desire is one of the principal functions of utopia. See Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).

4 Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 9–10.

5 A. W. Geiger, “How Americans See Automation and the Workplace in 7 Charts,” Pew Research Center, April 8, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/08/how-americans-see-automation-and-the-workplace-in-7-charts/.

6 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 281–95.

7 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 11, 12, 19, 48.

8 Beckert, Imagined Futures, 73.

2 “Harbingers of the Robot Age”

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are two of our era’s most influential automation mythologists. In the words of Politico, they are the “Harbingers of the Robot Age.”¹

In 2013, Brynjolfsson was invited to a panel organized by the Obama Administration’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The Second Machine Age was then prominently cited in the Obama Administration’s report “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy” (2016).² The book’s appeal is due to the simplicity and optimism of its story: everything is about to get much better. We are on the verge of a “second machine age.” The original machine age was continuous with the Industrial Revolution, the first epoch in which technology was the prime mover of progress. The second machine age will be another radical transformation of human history, this time driven by digital technologies like self-driving cars, IBM’s Watson, and the industrial robot Baxter. These “brilliant technologies” have performed tasks that were once widely considered impossible for computers and have brought civilization to an “inflection point” after which further technological change, propelled by Moore’s Law, will unfold at an exponential and unfathomable pace.³ There will be bumps along the way, such as rising income inequality and unemployment, but with a few relatively minor reforms, we can look forward to a more productive and wealthy future. Add some concerns about diversity in the tech industry and one has described Obama’s own position on the future of automation, which was published in business sf’s house organ, Wired.⁴

Much of The Second Machine Age is a reprise of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s first book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (2011). While the earlier book is also optimistic, it is somewhat more alarmist than The Second Machine Age. “More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People,” announced the New York Times’s review.⁵ After all, Race Against the Machine was written in the wake of the Great Recession and appeared during the height of Occupy Wall Street and the revolt of the 99%. Amid a jobless recovery and popular anti-capitalist movements, the authors must have found it difficult to write about “a cornucopia of innovation,” which is how McAfee has described the book’s original focus.⁶ Given this political context, Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis can be seen as ideological triage, an attempt to shift attention from Wall Street and class struggle to a more impersonal, neutral-sounding, and thus depoliticized target: digital technology. In fact, since, as they claim, technological innovation is more robust than ever before, the apparent signs of capitalism’s corruption are effects of the system’s strength. Echoing William F. Ogburn’s old cultural lag thesis, Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that the reason for joblessness and economic inequality is low- and middle-skill workers’ inability to keep pace with ever-accelerating automation: “Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”⁷ The difference betwee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Technoclasm
• PART I Business Science Fiction
• PART II Original Automation
• PART III Disenchanted Objects
• Conclusion: Reification and Utopia in Automation
• Index