Automation Is a Myth | Hacker News Reader

Automation Is a Myth

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22 pointslukemunn24 comments

Some HNers might be interested in the book below, which is coming out in a couple weeks with Stanford, and which can be pre-ordered now. It uses a provocative claim to push against the myths of automation but also develop a messier and more interesting portrait of the 'future of work'. Happy to field any questions.

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For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."

Why do you feel politicians and tech executives like to say automation threatens to do all these things? How do they benefit from this narrative that has zero evidence to support itself?

In the tech case, there's a definite trend of overpromising, which wins funding, contracts, and so on, and then underdelivering. There's a few different examples in the book where half-baked 'automated' systems are rolled out, and then humans are placed under increased pressure to fill in the gaps and make things work.

In the politicians case, I think there's probably a mix of motives - being seen to be aware of technological change, forward-thinking, etc. But this gives too much credence to industry promises. The threat creates initative to study the effects of automation, but often at a 10,000 foot view, overlooking the specifics of labor conditions, technological adoption, and the workers themselves (race, gender, etc).

Why does automation have more of an impact on PoC and women?

I would have thought its biggest impact would initially be on the types of jobs typically dominated by male workers.

There's a lot of work that hasn't been done yet in studying what causes automation from an economics point of view.

A common thought experiment is "Why hasn't fast food been automated?" We certainly have the technology to make burgers automatically, to the same quality that MacDonalds does. This technology is at least 40 years old. Yet we still have kids running these stores. The reason seems to be: kids are cheaper than machines. This seems to suggest that it is low wages and economic precarity which is preventing automation, rather than that these are the jobs most threatened by it.

Fast food is significantly automated, though. Depending on the chain, you get various different parts of the process centrally automated, and standardized food components and ingredients are shipped out to restaurant locations or franchisees. Only prep and assembly are deferred to the very end, from the various standard components. The reason fast food works, and is consistent enough that you can expect the same Chalupa in California and New York City, is absolutely automation and centralization.

I think the bigger likelihood here is that JIT assembly of a few components into many distinct products with differences in technique or ratio is still cheaper to do with manual labor.

"few components into many distinct products with differences in technique or ratio is still cheaper to do with manual labor."

True, the more specialized the final product is the less likely it is that it will get automated.

Our current wave of automation will have its greatest impact on white collar jobs. Many of the jobs will get redefined into simpler functions and the very simple functions will be automated by software. Two I can quickly think of are Medical and legal services. These services will be greatly impacted in a few decades. The professionals won't go away but there will be a few elite ones that will have many assistants who will use information services to help them do their job.

I've started to see it. The medical offices I use have many more physician's assistants now than a few years ago to name one impact.

The idea of complete automation is unlikely to happen any time soon. I don't even think it will even happen in our grandchildren's lifetime but limited automation will have a great impact on our society.

We have to be careful with the word "Myth" since automation will have and is having a great impact on us.

It is a race to the bottom nevertheless. While on one side minimum wage is pushed higher, on the other technology gets cheaper. Eventually even burger flippers will find themselves out of a job.

> The reason seems to be: kids are cheaper than machines

I'd rephrase that as kids are cheaper to fix than machines. A burger flipper machine is almost definitely more efficient and cheaper per burger, but when it breaks its probably a lot more expensive to fix or replace than a kid.

It's the same idea, but I think that you need to separate the "cost per burger per hour per hour" and the "cost per burger per hour per year" since only one of those will consider the cost of unexpected costs.

Is your conclusion here not something that is already established? (Outside of Marxist theory, which would quite emphatically affirm the point, with the addendum that it is a fundamental "contradiction" within capitalism).

I think it seems obvious though, not only the fact that profit seeking would override productivity when they are at odds, but also that the economy needs to sustain unskilled worker reserves.

Also, I bet even teenagers still do a better job than robots for kitchen work, but your point still stands.

Productivity is defined as output ($$) per unit of input ($$), you seem to be confusing output maximization with productivity. If it’s cheaper to pay laborers to produce instead of machines, then it is both more productive as well as profit maximizing.

And yes, this is already well established theory within mainstream economics.

Automation has its limits. I've tried to automate many processes at work but only the simple ones will work over time. Once you put a bit of complexity to it then it starts to fall apart. It's impossible to account for everything so eventually something happens and things fail.

We can take a hint from our current industrial automation where it's common for a process to stop and have to be reviewed by someone before it can be restarted. The stop-and-go's are worth it since the cost can be spread out over millions of units.

Also, it has been proven that the more automation you put in, the least likely it is for the whole process to work consistently.

The idea that you can put raw material in one end and have a finish product at the other end without human help is mostly a myth. But you can simplify the process and automate parts and have a great impact on the product's cost and speed of production.

There's a place for it but what gets automated has to be a very simple process and it has to impact a large number of units.

Lucky for us then that good design makes complex problems simple.

Automation failures may be telling us we're trying to automate a something badly designed.

i think you are a software guy like me, some process are to dynamic to fully automatize and make excessive division would make the process less resilient and more prone to accidents, container are cool but real container are make of real material, ship problems happens, manufacturer them isn't cheaper or easy and this real physical scale make them expensive to storage. TL;DR the world isn't kubernetes

That's a great line - the world isn't Kubernetes. Yes, in the real world, things break and problems arise. Things that worked in one context break down in another. In one of the chapters, I talk about the huge amount of maintenance work needed to keep these systems running, 'unsexy' work that never gets mentioned in the founder's keynote. There's often an immense amount of labor, knowledge, and expertise behind the scenes, some of it well paid, much of it precarious and under-paid.

Yes, the promises of full automation have been around for at least a century, where we can go back to texts in the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc and see these claims of technical systems taking over work. In a lot of that rhetoric, the only problem is what happens to the superfluous human when that core block of identity - work - is removed. Of course, those promises have not materialized. There are many issues here in attempting to automate that huge constellation of tasks, gestures, roles, etc under the umbrella of 'work'. One growing area of work, as a quick example, is personal services - child care, elderly care, etc. This work is highly context sensitive, and often requires relational and affective labor, rather than repetitive, standardized, physical gestures. Many kinds of labor are non-trivial from a technical perspective.

While the title says "Automation Is a Myth," the description immediately retreats to "full autonomy" and "universal automation" are mythical. Those are very different propositions. That motte and bailey maneuver turns the title into clickbait and damages the credibility of the book from page one.

I'm not sure I understand this. You read that title and thought the book was going to argue that the literal concept of automation is a myth?

I for one did. Or at least that it was going to make the argument that "automation creates more jobs than it destroys" that you sometimes hear.

Yes the title is provocative, and can only be so long. The introduction chapter articulates more precisely what I'm arguing. Chapter summaries are available here: https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=34899&i=Contents.htm - I've pasted a section below that might help sharpen the claim.

Automation is a myth, a long-running fable about the future of work that needs to be reconsidered. Whether embraced as dream or cautioned as nightmare, automation is ultimately a fiction, a fantasy. "Myth" does not imply that automated technologies do not exist or that there have not been technically driven transformations in the nature of work over the past century. But these transformations have been piecemeal rather than total. They have taken place differently within different cultures and locations. And they have impacted particular races and genders rather than a generic humanity.

You're repeating "Automation is a myth" now in a context where there is no space constraint to writing "Full automation is a myth", or "AGI is a myth", either of which is supportable. To me that crosses over from provocative to misleading, as it doesn't fairly represent the far less provocative thesis.

Of course, as the author, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. :-) The first chapter establishes what is and isn't being claimed and the rest of the book fleshes those arguments out. The idea here is not some massive 'debunking' exercise, but rather pushing against automation rhetoric to explore actually existing work conditions and technological fallout. Certainly that's harder to see from a summary on a webpage though, without having the full book in front of you.

I was willing to accept the title until I read this. And now I agree with the GP.

You're clearly creating a strawman, stretching the meaning of automation into something nobody thinks it is so that you can proclaim it a myth.

The title should be "Total Automation . . ." or "Complete Automation . . ." so as not to mislead like this.

Full/Total/Complete automation is one of the fictions, but it's not the only one.

Automation is also framed as a universal phenomenon that will sweep across the globe, remaking 'the economy' and society. But there are economies plural and technology is cultural and contextual. So I push against this concept and point to automated technologies and how they differ from place to place, in the book zooming into Xinjiang in China, for example, to examine how technologies intersect with historical prejudice.

Automation is also linked 'the human', but historically some people are more 'human' than others and the history of labor is one of inequality. So some (PoC, women, immigrants, etc) bear the brunt of automated technologies while others less.

In other words, automation is not just a myth because its not full automation, but because its a story that obscures the messier and more devastating details that happen on the ground.

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