Weekly Project: Imagine Full Automation

This project asks you to respond to some of the concepts from our week on automation. While some authors, such as David Noble, suggest that full automation is a myth, the philosopher and labor activist James Boggs believed that automation could eventually replace all factory workers and radically transform human labor. In 1963, Boggs described his and a friend’s discussion in which they imagined the operation of a fully automated factory, and the consequences for society of such a technological transformation of work:

This worker has come to the conclusion that the only sensible solution is for the company to put in new machines as fast as it can, while every guy who is displaced by these new machines continues to receive his weekly paycheck. His idea is that the sooner the machines become fully employed and the people become fully unemployed, the better.

My friend has put some thought into how this would work and has decided that if the old philosophy that man has to go to work must be retained, then the displaced workers could continue to go to the plant and just sit around and watch the machines. He was quite sure that if this happened the workers would be continually putting forward new suggestions as to how to redesign the machines to make them more efficient and displace more men, instead of doing what they are now doing, constantly trying to think up new ways to fight the machine so as to keep their jobs. We both agreed that there is nothing more agonizing than holding back the ideas that every worker is constantly getting as to how to increase productivity.

I told him that I could foresee a time when machines would be so perfected that there would be no need for the great majority of people to go into the plant except occasionally and that I was quite sure that, once released from the necessity to work, men and women would come up with new ideas for increasing productivity that would astonish the world. Fishermen just fishing for fun would come up with new ideas for fishing, guys puttering around their lawns would think up new ways to grow grass, people with nothing to do but sit around and observe would be constantly producing new ideas and bursting to share them with others. It is only the necessity to work, forced labor, that has created in man the need to fight new modes of production and to keep new ideas about increasing production to himself. (240-241)

Note that Boggs’s image is not of a world without “work,” exactly: work still exists! Humans in his imagined future still use their hands and minds to produce socially necessary goods–they just do “for fun,” and in order to advance society, rather than in exchange for a wage that grants them “the right to live.” Boggs believed that the full development of automation technology was totally incompatible with the idea of wage labor.

While Boggs imagines automation’s utopian potential, other writers suggest it might create a dystopia: in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano, factory automation creates mass unemployment; most individuals live in poverty, relying on state benefits that barely cover their basic needs. Other dystopian visions of automation, such as the 2008 Pixar film Wall-E, or E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” imagines a world in which automation provides abundance for humans, who in turn start to lose certain of their most human capacities.

The Assignment: Imagine a world transformed by some form of automation. In this world, machines have replaced some or all forms of human labor as we currently conceive it. Will this world be a utopia, or a dystopia?

Write 300-500 words describing this future society. You may write this response in any style: it could be a short work of science fiction, a mini-essay, or a stream-of-consciousness reflection. In it, address following questions:

In your imagined future, what sorts of machines will replace what sort of human work? What new forms of human labor will emerge as a consequence? What new social problems might emerge?

In lieu of 300-500 words of prose, you may produce a different mode of fiction, such as a comic book, a short video, an epic poem. In this case, make sure to include a few sentences at the end explaining your ideas in prose.

Upload your work to your Google Folder by 11:59pm on December 10th.

Further ideas to consider: You may imagine imagine a world in which the new machines deliver fully on their promises to replace human work. Or you may imagine a world (like that Noble describes in The Forces of Production) in which new technologies are adopted before they are ready, despite their failures and shortcomings.

You may also ask yourself (like Boggs does) whether the new technologies demand a complete reorganization of economy and society. Can the same technology be utopian in one social context, and dystopian in another?