Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 14

The dystopian vision of work in the future is prosperity without people. The trends that have generated income and wealth inequality will be accelerated. Automation threatens to funnel rewards to the owners of capital as human labour is replaced by technology. Every previous revolution in technology has increased productivity and therefore prosperity while, at the same time, creating a new set of opportunities for work. The fear is that the rule of the robots will be different. A cloud hangs over the future of work; a cloud in cyber-space, annexing all of the routine functions on which an economy depends.

There are plenty of studies like the latest one from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in which it is estimated that half of all jobs, across thirty-two countries, stand at some degree of risk from automation. The Bank of England has calculated that a third of all jobs in Britain face a high risk and a further third face a moderate risk. This accounts for 15 million jobs in total, an apocalyptic forecast with no precedent. Of course, fears about the damage that technology will do to employment go back as far as the wheel. The Industrial Revolution, which brought prosperity to Bury, prompted anxiety, which was in the event unfounded, that human labour would be systematically displaced by machines. We have always adapted before, but perhaps the age of automation will be different. Progress in computing capacity has been truly astonishing. Genius machines can do complex mathematics, medical diagnosis, select stocks for a mutual fund portfolio and beat Garry Kasparov at chess. It may be that the combination of immense labour power in robots that never tire and the artificial brain capacity they now purvey will change all the economic rules.

In previous industrial revolutions the threat was confined to work done by hand. The threat of the revolution to come is that work done by brain is also colonised. The immediate threat, though, is to administrative, clerical and production tasks, precisely those that tend to command the lowest wages. This raises, in turn, the fear that automation intensifies material inequality. The more that an industry is mechanised the more its rewards accrue to the owners of capital and the less to the bearers of labour. This would be disastrous in the pursuit of equal life chances for all. This is the fifth condition of Britain question.