Re: <nettime> Driverless cars, pilotless planes -- will there be jobs left for a human beings

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 05/24/2013 04:50 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote:

> Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that
> the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from
> China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing
> ...  a world of what Summers calls automated "doers".
> They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
> The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the
> "doers", creating a bifurcation of the labour market that is already
> discernible.

Summers is just as dead wrong as Will Hutton, the author of this 
article. Summers assumes that production is the only job that counts, 
therefore, automation can only produce massive unemployment. Meanwhile 
Hutton, with the utopian visions of his conclusion, assumes that 
heightened production will free people for human development: care for 
the ageing, the solution of ecological problems, the explosion of 
creative professions. Neither will admit that the maintenance of a 
social order requires a very large number of professional educators, 
ideologists artists and thinkers. That is exactly the case of society 
today, whose predatory form of financial capitalism is maintained and 
developed by an oversized management sector, including politicians and 
technocrats alongside bankers, CEOs, strategists, advertisers, 
designers, human-resource psychologists, union bosses, entertainers, 
etc. We live under the grip of *that* professional universe, whose 
expansion and accumulation of power has marked the entire neoliberal 
era. If there is no counter-project, their power will only grow in the 
course of this crisis.

Breaking the neoliberal grip and learning to live otherwise, learning to 
imagine, desire and put into effect another kind of collective 
existence, would require large investments in education, in renewed 
forms of the humanities, in cooperative processes, in the maintenance of 
community and ecology, in the development of a philosophy of coexistence 
that makes exploitation obsolete. We can clearly "afford" those 
investments, since we can afford to print over $10 trillion, in the US 
alone, to bail out the current financial-ideologial system!  Today's 
managers know this, that is why there is a such a concerted and vigorous 
worldwide move to dismantle the existing educational apparatus and 
replace it with online job-training for the corporate sector. While 
profiting from the bailouts that sustain their vampire culture, they 
want to use technological unemployment to impose greater competitive 
discipline. For those currently at the top, squeezing uncontrolled 
thought and imagination out of the public sphere is just the same as 
squeezing labor out of production. Yet without a far-reaching change in 
education and in ethos, automation can only reinforce all the negative 
trends of today's societies, where classes are pitted against each 
other, mainly in an aggressive battle of the upper sectors against 
everyone else. What has been developed by the neoliberal managers is a 
bloodsucking form of suicidal society. But so far, even in the face of a 
tremendous economic crisis, there has been no change of these trends, 
only continuing attempts at the radical intensification of already 
failed policies.

The horizon of change today is artistic, cultural, social and political. 
It asks for fresh kinds of perception and imagination, wiser and more 
generous forms of thinking, a upsurge in the capacity of social 
cooperation, and the translation of all that, not only into new 
technologies for surviving and thriving, but above all, into a new 
governing system. None of these things can be accomplished by 
individuals or small spontaneous groups: they all demand the 
construction of coherent middle- and long-term movements operating under 
the influence of a kind of ecological common sense that takes the 
codevelopment of human and natural potentials as a guide, replacing the 
exclusive profit of a few which is today's measure of success. It's 
obvious that current governments and two-party systems will not create 
these movements or the common sense from which they could spring. They 
will have to be created outside existing institutions, through stuggle 
that is not only about dissent and violence. Revolution does not occur 
by just throwing out the old. It must be preceeded and carried forward 
by the constituent forces of a new way of living. How to become part of 
such constitutive forces? How to cooperate outside the neoliberal 
pattern of automation and competition? Isn't this the central question 
of the current crisis?

I would love to hear what people think.

best, Brian






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