automation
-
Books: AI Is a Total Grift
Much of what’s known as ‘AI’ has nothing to do with progress — it’s about lobbyists pushing shoddy digital replacements for human labour that increase billionaire’s profits and make workers’ lives worse. Continue reading
-
The ‘Wrong’ Turning Brings on the ‘Fourth Turning’
For the last four hundred years, west Europeans have lived one very particular ‘vision’; one that stands poles-apart from that which went earlier. As Galileo pursued his experimentation in Italy, it was Francis Bacon who set out a clear theory of inductive procedure – to make experiments, and to draw general conclusions from them, to… Continue reading
-
Marx on technology
The longest chapter in Capital is the fifteenth, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.” At almost 150-pages, it’s really a book in itself, a staggeringly dense and expansive discussion that could easily standalone—not only as a brilliant exegesis of capitalist machinery, but also as a sweeping social history of technology. At its broadest reach, the chapter… Continue reading
-
“Digital” workers don’t delete Marx on May Day
“Digital” economy and work, like the imagined and claimed “4th industrial revolution”, are mesmerizing many scholars that lead them to chorus: “Blue-collars are gone, gone are smoke spewing chimneys, so is Marx”. But, do facts support those scholars’ choir “Cancel Marx” even if data related to blue-collar employees are ignored? Continue reading
-
Does automation spell the end of capitalism?
Capitalism will not ‘automatically’ morph into some ‘postcapitalist’ or socialist system due to technology replacing the human workforce. As the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY explains, ending capitalism will require a conscious, collective action on the part of ‘the many’ — the working class Continue reading
-
On Robots and Sheep
Today we are living in times of rupture. The ecological crisis poses a threat to the survival of many communities and animal species; immense inequalities increase economic and social instability that could explode with various forms of social destruction at any time. Ten years after one economic crisis we are facing another. Continue reading
-
4IR & the ideological prison By Terry Bell
Last month saw the idea of a new, 21st Century city, complete with bullet trains, widely broadcast, all within the framework of a “developmental state”. But what this really boiled down to was a rehash of 20th Century concepts that produced Shenzhen, Brazilia, Canberra — even London’s Barbican — and, of course, the bullet trains… Continue reading
-
Death to the DIY Society By Ted RALL
I admit it: My bias derived from self-interest. I was a bag boy. But that didn’t make me wrong when I reacted to the news that supermarkets would make customers bag their own groceries. This, I told my friends at the time, is the first brick in a road to perdition. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 