Abstract
The quest for scientific knowledge formed a central arch of the Enlightenment and the drive for modernity. Science has obviously brought humanity vast benefits, yet there is also concern that it shares some of the culpability alongside capitalism for the risks now faced by world society—including climate change and pollution, the incalculable dangers of nuclear/chemical/biological warfare and technological unemployment. We also need to remember that capitalism increasingly funds science and harnesses its knowledge for profit. A second theme examines how technological change increased worker productivity and hastened economic growth yet produced corresponding transformations in the nature, availability and security of employment. In the nineteenth century, employers wished to replace skilled craftsmen with machinery operated by cheaper semi-skilled labour. This culminated in the Fordist era of mass production and consumption and relative full employment in the first half of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, however, robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled to information technology, have rapidly reduced the numbers employed in many types of routine manual work, while a service economy has largely replaced an industrial one. Routine clerical, administrative and other jobs have also been taken over by computers. Many observers are predicting that robotization and AI will continue to threaten the jobs of growing numbers of workers—including many professionals and even some scientists—as technology becomes increasingly based on algorithms that can predict and control future situations and machines that perform ever more sophisticated human-type actions, including driverless vehicles. Since the cost of producing AI and robots continues to fall, capital has every incentive to replace humans with machines, and this will occur in the Global South too. It is happening in China now. Finally, we explore the situation faced by billions of people in the slums and villages of the Global South, who are already largely structurally irrelevant to global capitalism, and the prospect that a similar workless future awaits many, perhaps most, in the North. Why, then, do we allow science and capitalism to control our future without questioning the directions in which they are taking us?
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Notes
- 1.
These are discussed more thoroughly in Chap. 1 along with notions of modernity and modernization and their intersections with capitalism.
- 2.
Writing about factories in late-nineteenth-century America, Montgomery (1987) wrote how very often skilled workers at this time possessed ‘the manager’s brain’ under their workmen’s caps.
- 3.
This turn towards technological unemployment in the 1970s obviously reinforced the wider changes discussed in Chap. 3, that were also beginning to alter work experience in the advanced countries, and which were undermining the bargaining power and job security of a growing number of workers.
- 4.
Manning observed that in the case of care and health workers’ employment, growth is also explained by an ageing population.
- 5.
- 6.
Many observers have expressed alarm at the innocence and alacrity with which most people have greeted the cyber-age and jumped into using the social media. Morozov (2011 and 2015), for example, criticizes the ability of governments to exploit the social media as a path to increased surveillance of populations, among other dangers, while Dean (2009) balks at the ‘technology fetishism’ (38) bred by the communications revolution which engenders a shallow if not false sense of social solidarity and agency.
- 7.
In this context, any large-scale moves to replace the South’s agricultural workforce—whose members enjoy few if any alternative work opportunities—with robotized machinery seems politically dangerous. Thus, there is room to doubt their ability to afford the food they once produced for themselves, but which will then be churned out by high-tech, digitalized farming, once they have re-located to a more or less jobless life in the cities.
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Kennedy, P. (2017). The Juggernaut of Science and Technology: Friend or Foe?. In: Vampire Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55266-2_5
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