Who gets the benefits of technology?

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Politicians from those increasingly pea-in-the-pod parties, the Tories and Reform Ltd, have come up with a solution to the strike by train drivers on the London Underground: replace them with technology. Well, when I say ‘solution’, I (like them) am obviously referring to future strikes rather than the current one; whether the cost of automation is the £10 billion claimed by Sadiq Khan or some arbitrary lower figure pulled out of Farage’s flat cap (clue: based on historical trends in public infrastructure, Khan’s figure is almost certainly an underestimate, not an overestimate), it would take years to implement. The suggestion might generate the odd headline, but it’s not going to address the immediate dispute.

Promising to replace anyone who goes on strike with technology is an ‘interesting’ approach. Not only is it likely to be extremely costly, but (unless alternative jobs appear somewhere else), there is at least an outside chance that it adds to the numbers of unemployed people claiming benefits. They haven’t been imaginative enough though. Many of those whose journeys have been disrupted are commuters travelling to and from work – if they were replaced by technology, London wouldn’t need the trains at all. Maybe I shouldn’t give them ideas.

Whether in response to the disruption caused by strikes or not, it is clear that technology will eventually replace humans in a number of roles, and sooner or later, that is likely to include the introduction of driverless trains. Fans of automation like to claim that replacement of vast swathes of the working population by robots, computers and AI will actually create new opportunities, pointing out that that is what has always happened with new technology in the past. Perhaps they’ll be proved right, but the fact that it’s happened previously isn’t always a good guide, and even if it does, there’s likely to be a transitional period during which new jobs may not match, in terms of numbers and skills, those destroyed. One of the long-promised advantages of technology has been the idea that humans would have more time for leisure and cultural activities rather than being bound to a rigid timetable laid down by their bosses. Whether that’s ever achievable depends in large measure on how the benefits are shared. The omens are not good; as things stand, benefits are likely to flow to the richest rather than the no-longer-needed workers.

But, just supposing for a moment that we collectively decided that the benefits should be more widely shared, how might such a reduction in the need for workers be managed in a mutually acceptable way? One way of doing that might be through a gradual reduction in working hours without a reduction in pay running in parallel with the introduction of more and more technology. We can assume that capitalists and their political representatives will resist that all the way, as they have always resisted the idea that workers, not just capitalists, should benefit from innovation. By coincidence, it’s worth noting that at the heart of the current dispute on the London Underground is a demand for a reduction in working hours to 4 days / 32 hours per week with no cut in pay. Seeing the introduction of technology (and sacking workers as a result) as an alternative to that, rather than a potential complement, tells us a lot about the nature of the battle still to come over sharing the benefits of technology.