Afternoon Must-Read: Robert Skidelsky: Review of Simon Head’s “Mindless”

Robert Skidelsky: The Programmed Prospect Before Us: “Head’s indictments are impressive,

but at heart his book is a lament for a vanished world, that of the 1950s and 1960s, when gentlemen were still gentlemen, when digital controls were still in their infancy, when manufacturing was the main occupation of Western workforces, when services were still personalized, and when academics were paid to think, and not to produce useless papers to meet Key Performance Indicators. Of course, in Britain (at least) the gentlemen were grossly incompetent, the cars often broke down, the services were often grumpy (expressing something of the British attitude to such things), shops opened late and closed early and stayed closed over the weekends, the food was mostly dreadful, consumer goods shoddy, consumer durables clunky, and the unions rampaged. Still, there was something undeniably “human” about those years that gives them an elegiac charm. In his effort to recreate a worthwhile world of work, Head never faces the possibility that the machines may be destroying jobs permanently.

If digital control systems can reduce workers to something close to human robots, why not dispense with unruly humans and just have robots—that is, complete the automation process?… It is currently cheaper for the company to employ lots of minimum-wage human workers to trudge fifteen miles a day between items in warehouses and packing stations. But at some point robots will surely win this race. There will be no pressure on managers to share with the robots the productivity gains they make possible. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus famously argued that artificial intelligence cannot mimic higher mental functions. No activity that requires intelligent behavior can be done by computers, he wrote, because algorithms cannot adequately structure the complex situations that are addressed by intelligent thinking. However, in most of the business activities described in this book, no intelligent behavior is required… the workers only have to follow the rules of highly simplified situations….

Simon Head wants to make humans partners rather than competitors of machines, in a manner that restores the dignity of work. But he underestimates the scale of the reversal of contemporary business culture needed to retain worthwhile jobs for the majority…. Less (human) work, less consumption, more leisure is the lesson for the future I draw from Head’s probing book. It is not the lesson he intends. But it seems to me more attuned to the possibilities opened up by continuing technological progress than does his nostalgia for a world of “good” jobs.