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re:publica 18 - Alle Sessions Podcast
Whose Future? Automation anxiety, ecological apocalypse, and the struggle for the future of labor

Whose Future? Automation anxiety, ecological apocalypse, and the struggle for the future of labor

re:publica 18 - Alle Sessions vor 8 Jahren

There has been much recent discussion about the impacts of new technology on work. There is a fear that robotics and computerization can displace and dislocate workers, and possibly lead to mass unemployment. While the technologies are new, this basic dyn

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Peter Frase For with each cycle of technical change, the same
social conflict recurs: will technology be used to ease life and
liberate us from labor, or to subordinate us even more to alienated
work? Will we, for example, use increased productivity to
drastically reduce working hours, or will new technologies merely
allow employers to more tightly control their workforces? Why are
we not working 15 hour weeks, as the economist John Maynard Keynes
predicted in 1930? I want to emphasize, ultimately, the political
and social *conflict* around work and technology. Just as much as
technology affects work, I argue, it is the collective struggles of
workers that shape the direction of technology. Thus I sketch some
of the political shifts that must occur in order for the future of
work to be one of greater abundance and leisure for all, rather
than a future in which increased wealth is monopolized by a small
class that owns the robots. A whirlwind tour through science
fiction, social theory and the new technologies already shaping our
lives, my talk is a balance sheet of the socialisms
we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms
we may be consigned to if those movements fail.