Originally published for Jacobin. Ever since Robert Brenner published his essay “The Economics of Global Turbulence” in 1998, there has been a wide-ranging debate about his understanding of the period since the 1970s as a “long downturn.” Seth Ackerman and Aaron Benanav have recently been extending this debate in Jacobin. Some of the claims that Benanav puts forward in his reply to Ackerman, largely […]
Tag: Automation
Technological change is often be viewed as an exogenous force, a deus ex machina “outside the domain of economic theory” (Schumpeter 1911:11), or an endogenous force, subordinate to the institutional régulation of capitalism (Gentili et al. 2020; Montalban et al. 2019; Spencer 2017). Drawing on neo-Schumpeterian and régulation theory, this paper sublates these antithetical positions to form an alternative approach that re-examines the […]
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How Value Weaponises the Machine
See original here. For some time now, a façade of techno-optimism has obscured the political reality that technology is not neutral. While Marx saw both oppressive and liberatory potential in technological systems, recent narratives have tended to neglect how technology has historically been used to deepen exploitation, rather than to overcome it. In his new book, Breaking […]
See Novara for the original. In 2013, the academics Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne predicted that up to 47% of American jobs were at high risk of automation over the next two decades. Their paper provoked automation hysteria, reflected in pronouncements of the “second machine age”, “fourth industrial revolution” and “industry 4.0”. Seven years on, the reality […]
The coronavirus is an exogenous shock to the global economy, causing panic in the financial markets, a jobs apocalypse and an unprecedented crisis in health services. At the same time, the necessary safety measures are challenging the very nature of work and human sociality. Social distancing and lockdowns have been implemented around the world and in many […]
Below is a series of three blogs (part 1, part 2, part 3) I wrote for Autonomy last year on the history of intelligent machines. This serves as an introduction to anyone curious about artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future of digital automation in work and society more generally. Introduction The notion […]
Matthew Cole 