They are already being displaced. I've read about factories being run completely by robots. The issue with that, of course, is that under capitalism, the workers will be simply left to die.
Is automation a meme ?
Adrian Lewis
Ethan Stewart
Looks like Marxism failed then. There is no "proletarian uprising", only the bourgeoisie accumulating more power and bringing in post-scarcity without having to forfeit power to the hands of the lower classes.
Leo Robinson
Anyone who has worked a serious job in physical labor knows that automation is decades away from even conceptually threatening to take over. To make such a thing function would require a complete reworking of all physical infrastructure from the ground up, which will necessitate a period of spending that will never satisfy private interests.
Jaxon Miller
So shit like self driving cars, drone deliveries and what not are just memes?
Brandon Nguyen
...
Carson Jackson
Kinda what's happening now lol. If anything the capitalists can give the proles a tiny fraction of what they make for bread and circuses and they'll be content as ever.
Jackson Foster
Labour productivity growth (which can be used as a rough proxy for rate of automation) has been on a downswing since the early 2000's. The technology you listed creates the potential for mass automation, but it isn't happening because it isn't profitable (at least in the short-term). We won't see mass automation under capitalism in our lifetimes, unless their is a huge increase in the price of labour or decrease in the price of automative technology.
The automation meme in the bourgeois press is actually a type of subtle capitalist propaganda because it implies that working time could be reduced under a system in which humanity is enslaved by market forces. Bourgeois economists have been predicting technology will radically reduce working hours for a long time ( See Keynes on "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"), but they fail to understand that technology isn't used in a neutral or rational way under capitalism. It is used to facilitate ever greater capital accumulation rather than improve working people's lives.
Evan Fisher
this is data on employment in England from 1856 to 2015. They industrialized and de-industrialized. yet employment rates have gone up or remained the same.
Camden Rivera
HHH?
Chase James
Based Marxposter. Where's the automation? I don't see it. The bourgeois press has been promising us that robots will be walking around for years but I don't see any. It's much easier and cheaper to push production further out into the periphery. Automation primarily becomes a means of proletarian control, their labor still exploited as ruthlessly as ever and now managed up to the second through "gamification" systems. Although there are also possibilities for algorithms to further shatter the psyches of the population like the recent case of YouTube's algorithms steering pedophiles toward families' home movies of their kids in bathing suits – entirely on autopilot.
nytimes.com