Sue Halpern’s piece (How
Robots and Algorithms Are Taking Over) in the New York Review of Books is
a great read:
John Lancaster has a related piece (The Robots Are Coming) in the London Review of Books:
Lancaster concludes:
“It’s also worth
noting what isn’t being said about this robotified future. The scenario we’re
given – the one being made to feel inevitable – is of a hyper-capitalist
dystopia. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the
work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but having fun playing
with its gadgets. (Though if there’s no work, there are going to be questions
about who can afford to buy the gadgets.) There is a possible alternative,
however, in which ownership and control of robots is disconnected from capital
in its current form. The robots liberate most of humanity from work, and
everybody benefits from the proceeds: we don’t have to work in factories or go
down mines or clean toilets or drive long-distance lorries, but we can
choreograph and weave and garden and tell stories and invent things and set
about creating a new universe of wants. This would be the world of unlimited
wants described by economics, but with a distinction between the wants
satisfied by humans and the work done by our machines. It seems to me that the
only way that world would work is with alternative forms of ownership. The
reason, the only reason, for thinking this better world is possible is that the
dystopian future of capitalism-plus-robots may prove just too grim to be
politically viable. This alternative future would be the kind of world dreamed of
by William Morris, full of humans engaged in meaningful and sanely remunerated
labour. Except with added robots. It says a lot about the current moment that
as we stand facing a future which might resemble either a hyper-capitalist
dystopia or a socialist paradise, the second option doesn’t get a mention.”