The Perfect Slave: A Political Theory of Automation

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy II

Abstract

The robot appears on the stage of world history as a reiteration of the age-old figure of the slave. The word itself, coined by writer Karel Čapek in 1920 but referring back to the institution of serfdom (robota) in feudal Bohemia, operated as a short circuit between modern ideals of universal freedom and prosperity and ancient practices of domination. That his satirical term has long since been taken up in earnest by everyday language and scientific discourse is testimony to Čapek’s insight. This paper builds on that insight by providing a political theory of automation, that is, one which attends to the ways in which concepts of freedom, rule, and hierarchy have been central to how automation has been thought of. While the topic of automation has attracted significant attention from economists in recent years, political theorists have largely neglected it. This represents an unfortunate oversight given that, as will be explained, theories of automation were, since their first appearance, embedded within specific political visions of the future of capitalist societies. This paper begins to remedy this oversight through a critical analysis of the initial wave of automation theory of the late-1940s and 1950s, when the fundamental tropes of the discourse were first established. The thrust of my argument is twofold: I show, on the one hand, how the project of automation, including that of constructing artificial intelligence, was shaped by the fantasy of unfree, perfectly rule-bound, and obedient labor; I describe, on the other, how narratives of the imminent obsolescence of “menial” labor due to automation served as the discursive condition of possibility for the promise of a society in which everyone is wealthy.

The paper is divided into four parts. The first section investigates the concept of affluence as it came to develop in the first decades after the Second World War. It does this chiefly through an analysis of the thinking of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stressing the class dimensions of postwar visions of affluence and the crucial role of automation in such visions. Section two delves into the work of three early thinkers of automation: management theorists John Diebold and Peter Drucker and physicist Norbert Wiener. I argue that automation emerged as a negative concept, one defined by its opposition to labor devalued as “menial.” The devaluation of this labor as already “mechanical”, I claim, both made projects of automation thinkable in the first place and provided them with an ethical justification as means for the “humanization” of industrial production. I show how this promise of the humanization of economic activity implied, in fact, a hardening of the social division between workers and thinkers and examine how Wiener in particular deployed the image of slavery to make sense of what he saw as the maximally polarized potential of automation: either a general liberation from the drudgery of labor or the reduction of most of mankind to slave-like conditions. Section three deals with the most ambitious project of automation, that of constructing artificial intelligence as a mechanical substitute for human thinking. Through a close reading of the works of computer scientist Alan Turing, it explores the continuities between artificial intelligence and earlier efforts, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s, of reducing human labor to thoughtless operations. I demonstrate, most importantly, that Turing’s idea of the digital computer was modeled on the image of a worker without any degree of freedom, whose activity was completely governed by pre-established instructions and thus required no insight. Section four concludes by drawing some broader political implications of my analysis. It puts forward the suggestion that affluent nations’ increasing reliance since the latter decades of the twentieth century on non-citizen workers – both through offshoring and the use of migrant labor – was mediated by earlier postwar promises of the technological obsolescence of the working class.

Author

• Nicolae Biea, University of Chicago