LABRST 2M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Basic Income, Weak Ai, Not Safe For Work
Document Summary
There are three dominant ways of understanding the relationship between . 1) technology as a liberation from work, enabling new advances in human development, creativity, and leisure. 2) technology as a labour productivity multiplier, enhancing the efficiency of workers. 3) technology as a labour displacing tool, undermining labour"s bargaining power, increasingly managerial control, expanding the surplus population. In spite of the hype, there are considerable barriers to full automation, including: 1) sunk capital costs making it expensive and risky for businesses to invest in untested technologies. 2) the inability of robots and software to display advanced levels of adaptability, affect, and agility. 3) the dependency of machines on human labour to monitor, regulate, correct, teach, and fix flaws. 1) emphasis on education and retraining, reorienting the workforce towards new fields and industries. 2) a radical reduction in working time, thereby freeing up people to engage in self-directed, non-market activities.