Automation and the Red Queen Effect

Product vendors and technology advisory firms often talk about accelerating automation. A popular way of presenting advice is in the form of an executive survey - look, all your peers are thinking about this, so you'd better spend some money with us too. Thus the Guardian reports a survey carried out by one of the large consulting firms, which concluded that almost half of company bosses in 45 countries are speeding up plans to automate their businesses. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many saw this as a great opportunity to push automation further, although more recent commentators have been more sceptical.

Politicians have also bought into this narrative. For example, Barack Obama's farewell presidential address referred to the relentless pace of automation.

For technical change more generally, there is a common belief that things are constantly getting faster. In my previous posts on what is sometimes known as the Red Queen Effect, I have expressed the view that perceptions of technological change often seem to be distorted by proximity and a subjective notion of significance - certain types of recent innovation being regarded as more important and exciting than other or older innovations.

Aaron Benanav takes a similar view.

Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion. It’s like the feeling you get when looking out of the window of a train car as it slows down at a station: passing cars on the other side of the tracks appear to speed up. Labor-saving technical change appears to be happening at a faster pace than before only when viewed from across the tracks – that is, from the standpoint of our ever more slow-growing economies. Benanav 2020

Benanav also notes that the automation narrative has been around since the days of Karl Marx.

Visions of automated factories then appeared again in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, before their re-emergence in the 2010s. Benanav 2019

Meanwhile, Judy Wajcman argues (referencing Lucy Suchman) that the automation narrative typically relies on overlooking the human labour that is required to keep the computers and robots working efficiently - especially the low-paid work of data coders and content checkers. Further evidence of this has recently been published by Phil Jones.

 

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Bosses speed up automation as virus keeps workers home (Guardian, 30 March 2020)

Is the pandemic accelerating automation? Don’t be so sure (Economist, 19 June 2021) subscription required

Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work. Part One (New Left Review 119 Sept/Oct 2019) Part Two (New Left Review 120, Nov/Dec 2019)

Aaron Benanav, Automation isn't wiping out jobs. It's that our engine of growth is winding down (Guardian, 23 January 2020)

Phil Jones, Work without the worker - Labour in the age of platform capitalism (Verso, 2021) Extract published as Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon (Rest of World, 22 September 2021)

Toby McClean, Automation Is Accelerating At The Edge To Improve Workplace Safety, Productivity (Forbes, 5 January 2021) 

Judy Wajcman, Automation: is it really different this time? (British Journal of Sociology, 2017)

Chris Wiltz, Grocery Automation Is Accelerating Thanks to the Coronavirus (Grocery News, 16 April 2020)