Paul Mason

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“The Subject Is Gathering Increasing Urgency”

July 18, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

James Surowiecki, a very bright guy, asked on Twitter which jobs have been completely automated out of existence in the last 50 years. I think the final tally included just elevator and telephone operators, though you could probably add anyone who worked a dictaphone or in a typing pool. The bowling-alley pin boy just exceeds the time frame he uses. 

The thing is, if we’re talking about automation as a threat to human employment, this question is the wrong one, even if it’s an amusing intellectual exercise. Factories that have been reshored to America in the past decade still employ workers in many of the same positions as when they left, but the numbers needed are far fewer thanks to improved machinery and systems. It’s a thinning of the herd, not it’s utter elimination, that’s most troubling. The argument that a lack of productivity increase proves that automation isn’t killing jobs doesn’t really make sense because manufacturing positions in America certainly have seriously diminished and that’s not all due to globalization.

The right question to ask is this: Will AI and automation cause enough jobs to disappear and rapidly shift to the point that trying to get by becomes too chaotic for most? That’s really all that’s required for things to go haywire. It’s not a an all-or-nothing type of situation. Not every position has to go the way of the pin boy for all of us to wind up toppled.

Two excerpts follow from new Guardian pieces, one about the impact on small American towns of Walmart’s decline in the face of Amazon’s algorithmic might and the second a Paul Mason essay about robots and Brexit that’s interesting if probably too dire.

From “What Happened When Walmart Left,” an Ed Pilkington article:

Much has been written about what happens when the corporate giant opens up in an area, with numerous studies recording how it sucks the energy out of a locality, overpowering the competition through sheer scale and forcing the closure of mom-and-pop stores for up to 20 miles around. A more pressing, and much less-well-understood, question is what are the consequences when Walmart screeches into reverse: when it ups and quits, leaving behind a trail of lost jobs and broken promises.

The subject is gathering increasing urgency as the megacorporation rethinks its business strategy. Rural areas like McDowell County, where Walmart focused its expansion plans in the 1990s, are experiencing accelerating depopulation that is putting a strain on the firm’s boundless ambitions.

Hit hard by the longterm decline in coal mining that is the mainstay of the area, McDowell County has seen a devastating and sustained erosion of its people, from almost 100,000 in 1950 when coal was king, to about 18,000 today. That depleted population is today scattered widely across small towns and in mountain hollows (pronounced “hollers”), accentuating the sense of sparseness and emptiness.

The Walmart supercenter is located about five miles from the county seat, Welch, which still boasts imposing brick buildings as a memory of better times. But the glow of coal’s legacy has cooled, as the boarding up of many of the town’s shops and restaurants attests.

When you combine the county’s economic malaise with Walmart’s increasingly ferocious battle against Amazon for dominance over online retailing, you can see why outsized physical presences could seem surplus to requirements. “There has been a wave of closings across the US, most acutely in small towns and rural communities that have had heavy population loss,” said Michael Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University who is an authority on Walmart’s local impact.

On 15 January 2016, those winds of change swept across the country with a fury.•

The opening of Mason’s “Brexit Won’t Help Britain Survive the Rise Of the Robots“:

What do a Japanese robot and the world’s first tidal turbine have in common? They are not in Britain. While the British government destroys itself over Brexit, the parts for a third industrial revolution are being assembled elsewhere. This is an industrial revolution where you don’t “catch up” – you catch the economic backwash. This is what would keep ministers awake at night – if they were serious.

In the past 12 months, Japan has started to produce a lot of robots. Its production index for industrial robots stood at 25 in 2009, achieved 175 last year and rocketed to 225 in June this year. Three-quarters of the units made were exported, helping Japan boost its total exports by 11% in the past year. In turn, the industrial surge of robots has stimulated a surge in semiconductor production in Japan and South Korea. This is big and real.

Japan is ahead in robotics not only because it has a decades-old semiconductor industry and an ageing population, but because it has an industrial strategy. Its government demanded a new industrial revolution in 2014. In 2015, its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry issued a “New Robot Strategy,” stipulating sales targets for robotics in various sectors and urgent measures to train and retain technologists.

In robots for nursing care, for example, the strategy spells out a detailed five-year plan – from supporting manufacturers and changing International Organization for Standardization regulations to new health regulations and the creation of a marketplace between healthcare providers and robotics firms. The policy was not made in a vacuum. Japan’s industrial strategists were worried about big US spending commitments on robot research and development and a €2.8bn (£2.5bn) robotics project, funded by the European commission, called Sparc.

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“There’s Something Unique About Information Technology”

October 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I try not to use the word “never.” Not ever. That term will almost always eventually be wrong, even if we’re not still around when our serious theories become laugh lines.

Paul Mason embraces this dangerous word in a Medium essay, arguing that “maybe the economy never recovers.” Wow, that’s a big statement.

But Mason needn’t be right forever. If salaries are depressed for too long and wealth inequality grows too wide, we can see serious social fraying, even collapse. That may not be plausible, but it certainly is possible if the levers of change–protests, unions, legislation, etc.–fail.

If new and better jobs emerge that replace those disappeared into the zeros and ones, that’s fine. But not everyone who’s a truck driver can become a Self-Driving Car Engineer. In fact, it’s tough to believe any of those engineers will be needed soon enough. Machines should be able to engineer the machines. Neither will it be necessary for long for autonomous taxi and truck companies to have owners. With a few modifications, they can be self-sustaining outfits.

Even if good jobs not prone to automation surface in the long-term future, it will be awfully difficult to get from here to there without significant policy changes. As Mason notes, positions are being automated “faster than new work can be invented.”

The essence of his answer is that we need to “actively [promote] automation, but at the same time…end reliance on wages for work.” Universal Basic Income, he believes, should be used to support those doing healthcare and environmental work, for instance, those jobs being uncoupled from capitalism.

Mason believes we’re in the early stages of a “500-year event,” but I’ll bet like with everything else in today’s souped-up society, the action and reaction will occur in a much briefer time frame.

An excerpt:

Capitalism is failing to adapt

So how could one of the greatest technical leaps forward ever be causing something bad in economics?

The answer is — there’s something unique about information technology, which suppresses capitalism’s capacity to adapt.

When the system is in big trouble, over the past 240 years it usually adapts. It morphs radically, so that the old generation look at it and say — “this can’t be capitalism”. Usually when it adapts, it creates a new synthesis between technology and society — so you get the factory system in the 1800s, you get railways plus heavy engineering in the 1850s, you get the scientific management revolution before the first world war; you get the science-led postwar boom of 1948–73.

I think the problem is: the new technology is suppressing the economy’s ability to adapt.

Let’s think about what normally happens. Old jobs are automated, but new jobs replace them, with higher wages. New commodities command higher prices. Carlota Perez calls this the techno-economic paradigm and each time it’s happened so far it produces an economy based on higher value: higher wages, higher prices, higher living standards.

But information disrupts this process in three ways: in its effect on work, and its effect on ownership, with the emergence of new models of sharing and collaboration.•

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“Why Should A Pizza Be Delivered By A Drone, But Not A Bomb?”

October 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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We live in interesting times, as the sly old Chinese blessing/curse says.

Paul Mason, a passionate humanist who can be a bit all over the place because that’s where the trouble is, brings laser-sharp focus to a Guardian piece on the Aleppo atrocities, particularly the besieged hospitals, which he believes could signal the end of the Geneva Conventions, a chilling possibility that may be played out in the macro should another world war occur. 

He’s right, but even if most nations could agree to double down on Geneva, two potential stumbling blocks remain: states ruled by a central authoritarian figure and those barely ruled at all. The former are run by dictators who can purchase increasingly powerful tools for little more than the cost of a tin pot. In the latter category, improvements to store-bought drones will only allow for more mayhem by terrorists, which was the first thought that came to my pessimistic head when I became aware of them five or so years ago.

Two excerpts follow: one from Mason and the other from Brian Dowling of the Boston Herald.

From Mason:

Since Iraq, state-sanctioned barbarity has of course been ruthlessly mirrored and bettered by the war criminals of Isis, for whom the Geneva conventions’ prohibitions read like a to-do list.

But there’s something deeper at work, eroding in our attitudes to mercy. The men and women Dunant inspired had a horror of war born of their experience of it: the more total it became, the more interest the population had in moderating military behaviour.

Modern media coverage sanitises war. Broadcasting rules in the UK, for example, place strict limits on showing death, mutilated bodies and the agony of wounded people – all the things that inspired Dunant to change the world.

Our grandfathers’ generation were surprised and shocked by the ways in which the Nazis broke the Geneva conventions. We have come to expect they will be broken in all wars.

Though the US has apologised for the Kunduz attack, and disciplined 12 people in the military for the errors that caused it, initial coverage in the US media actually justified the attack on the hospital because it was said to be treating al-Qaida fighters.

Now, as the Russian airstrikes against hospitals in rebel-held areas of Syria reach a crescendo, there is a campaign of justification centred around the accusation that the Syrian White Helmets –a medical relief group funded by both the US and EU – is “not neutral”. Regardless of the White Helmets’ funding by western powers, the issue of its neutrality is secondary to the fact that it is a medical organisation. It runs ambulances rescue services – and both are entitled to protection under the Geneva conventions, just as a British military hospital would be.
 
The danger should be obvious. If we do not stop and punish the targeting of hospitals in the asymmetric wars, then the next big war – should it occur – will see the Geneva conventions go out of the window. Guernica showed a generation what the second world war would be like; Aleppo shows you what any future conventional conflict will descend to, if we don’t act.•

From Dowling:

A store-bought ISIS drone packed with explosives that killed two Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq this month is raising fears the terror group could attack U.S. troops there and American civilians here at home, with lone wolves launching airborne IEDs to bypass security checkpoints and deliver deadly blasts to crowded events.

“The truth is it’s just a matter of time before someone figures this out,” former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis told the Herald. “The bottom line with these things are as the drones get more sophisticated and more powerful, it’s all about payload.

“The danger is real, and there are companies that are working on anti-drone strategies, but they aren’t fully baked yet,” said Davis, who noted Boston police were involved in the 2011 case of an Ashland jihadi-wannabe who planned to bomb the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol with remote-controlled planes.

RAND Corp. terror analyst Colin Clarke said weaponized drones, which have also been used by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, are the “tip of the iceberg” for where terror groups can go with the latest technology.

“Why should a pizza be delivered by a drone, but not a bomb?” Clarke said.•

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“Is It A Rerun Of The 1930s?”

August 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

This week, Trump's most ardent supporters took a break from the campaign to take advantage of July 4th white sales.

Mentioned a couple days back that Donald Trump’s gross adoration of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats recalls similar warm feelings some American oligarchs felt for Fascists during the 1930s. In an impassioned Guardian essay, Paul Mason, who believes we may soon find ourselves post-capitalism, compares the gathering clouds of that earlier decade to our own WTF moment, with the ugly political rise of the hideous hotelier clearly not an isolated case of extremism. 

Mason concludes history isn’t exactly repeating itself, that we’re better off today in our globalized system, save one toxic sticking point, that “an entire generation of humanity has been brutalized.” The writer points to ISIS slayings and minority scapegoating and racist social-media trolling to support his point that we’re worse in this important way eighty years on. Perhaps, but I’m not wholly convinced. Antisemitism in Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century was deeply pernicious and the Jim Crow South was far more heinous than anything that exists in contemporary America, for all our continued instances of racial injustice.

The best argument in favor of our destabilized media, that communication breakdown, is our unmatched access to answer these outrages, to organize against them. There have never been more ways for people of good conscience to refuse to remain silent. Mason is aware of this, acknowledging “we have billions of educated and literate brains on the planet; and we have the concept of universal and inalienable human rights.”

His opening:

Things are happening with machine-gun rapidity: Brexit, the Turkish coup, Islamist massacres in France, the surrounding of Aleppo, the nomination of Donald Trump. From the USA to France to post-Brexit Britain, the high levels of public racism and xenophobia, reflected now in the outpourings of politicians with double-digit poll ratings, have got people asking: is it a rerun of the 1930s?

On the face of it, the similarities are real. Britain’s vote to leave the EU parallels its panicked decision to quit the gold standard in September 1931 – the first major country to quit the global economic system. Labour’s incipient split mirrors the one that left the party out of power for 14 years. And of course the economic background – a depression and a banking crisis – has echoes in the present situation.

But a proper study of the 1930s reveals our situation today to be better and more salvageable in many ways, although in one respect worse.•

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“The Solution Is To Begin To De-link Work From Wages”

February 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

APTOPIX South Korea National Assembly

Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism, believes the day might soon come when technology frees us from most forms of labor and one of our dominant economic systems. Corporations can be people-less automatons, driverless-car fleets can own themselves and work can melt into play. The rise of the machines and end of scarcity will depend, he believes, on whether policy and mindset make way for the future. The work ethic as we know it would be among the first casualties. “A low-work society is only a dystopia if the social system is geared to distributing rewards via work,” Mason writes in a new Guardian essay.

AI will likely take longer than many believe in assuming so many tasks, and that’s not just because of political and personal will. But Mason’s scenario is possible in the longer run. In that new order, capitalism would have to be seriously recalibrated, becoming perhaps a piece of a bricolage of systems operating within states.

The opening:

When researchers Frey and Osborne predicted in 2013 that 47% of US jobs were susceptible to automation by 2050, they set off a wave of dystopian concern. But the key word is “susceptible”.

The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen. The real dystopia is that, fearing the mass unemployment and psychological aimlessness it might bring, we stall the third industrial revolution. Instead we end up creating millions of low skilled jobs that do not need to exist.

The solution is to begin to de-link work from wages. You can see the beginnings of the separation on any business flight. Men and women hunched over laptops and tablets, elbows so close that if it were a factory it would be closed on health and safety grounds.

But it is a factory, and they are working – some of the time. They flip from spreadsheet to a movie to email to solitaire: nobody sets a timer – unless in one of the time-hoarding professions like law. At the high skill end of the workforce we increasingly work to targets, not time.

But to properly unleash the automation revolution we will probably need a combination of a universal basic income, paid out of taxation, and an aggressive reduction of the official working day.•

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“Information Technology Strips Away Value”

November 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism, is set to be published in the U.S. in early 2016, so some related work has been preceding it in North America, including a desultory London lecture published on Medium and an interview with Paul Kennedy of the CBC. I’m looking forward to reading the book, and I certainly think capitalism is in for a serious reconfiguration, but Mason is attempting to predict the product of an equation not yet completely written. Not an easy thing to do. Predict turbulence and you will almost always be right; foresee complete collapse and you’ll be wrong nearly every time.

An excerpt from the Kennedy interview:

Paul Kennedy:

Haven’t we heard this message before, that capitalism is failing?

Paul Mason:

Well, for 250 years we have had economists predicting the end of capitalism. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx all discussed the problem of capitalism’s self reproduction. How much longer can it go on reproducing itself?

Now, my idea is that it can go on reproducing itself for a long time, as long as it can adapt. So every time there is a downturn or any time a societal business model falls apart, what you usually get is a mixture of technological innovation and some changes in the structure of the economy and we’re off again.

Paul Kennedy:

So when did you get the idea that we had come to the end of the line?

Paul Mason: 

If you study the old uprisings — the 1840s in Britain, the 1890s, after the Second World War — what you always see is a synthesis of high-value work and high-value production.

The problem is that information technology makes that very difficult, I argue almost impossible, to do. Because information technology strips away value. Information technology allows us to produce things that could be and should be cheap or free.

And so we are not making, as the Victor record company did in 1910 or so, shellac records. We are making mp3 files, and it is very hard to make money out of them.

Paul Kennedy:

What I have been led to believe is that this new information revolution is going to free me up.

Paul Mason:

What has happened is that information allows work and wages to become delinked. It allows work and life to become blurred. We will answer emails from our boss at midnight.•

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“Information Technology Has Reduced The Need For Work”

August 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

According to Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism, technology has reduced the economic system to obsolescence or soon will. While I don’t agree that capitalism is going away, I do believe the modern version of it is headed for a serious revision.

The extent to which technology disrupts capitalism–the biggest disruption of them all–depends to some degree on how quickly the new normal arrives. If driverless cars are perfected in the next few years, tens of millions of positions will vanish in America alone. Even if the future makes itself known more slowly, employment will probably grow more scarce as automation and robotics insinuate themselves. 

The very idea of work is currently undergoing a reinvention. In exchange for the utility of communicating with others, Facebook users don’t pay a small monthly fee but instead do “volunteer” labor for the company, producing mountains of content each day. That would make Mark Zuckerberg’s company something like the biggest sweatshop in history, except even those dodgy outfits pay some minimal fee. It’s a quiet transition.

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reviews Mason’s new book, which argues that work will become largely voluntary in the manner of Wikipedia and Facebook, and that governments will provide basic income and services. That’s his Utopian vision at least. Tett finds it an imperfect but important volume. An excerpt:

His starting point is an assertion that the current technological revolution has at least three big implications for modern economies. First, “information technology has reduced the need for work” — or, more accurately, for all humans to be workers. For automation is now replacing jobs at a startling speed; indeed, a 2013 report by the Oxford Martin school estimated that half the jobs in the US are at high risk of vanishing within a decade or two.

The second key point about the IT revolution, Mason argues, is that “information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.” For the key point about cyber-information is that it can be replicated endlessly, for free; there is no constraint on how many times we can copy and paste a Wikipedia page. “Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant.”

But third, “goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.” More specifically, people are collaborating in a manner that does not always make sense to traditional economists, who are used to assuming that humans act in self-interest and price things according to supply and demand.•

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“Capitalism’s Replacement By Postcapitalism Will Be Accelerated By External Shocks”

July 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Guardian piece, Paul Mason, author of the forthcoming Postcapitalism, argues that in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, information technology is toppling capitalism in a way that a million marching Marxists never could, with the new normal unable to function by the dynamics of the old order.

I agree that a fresh system is incrementally forming–especially in regards to work and likely taxation–though it’s probably a heterogeneous one that won’t be absent free markets in the near term and perhaps the longer one as well. “Abundance” is a word used by a lot of people, including the author, in describing the future, but it may not be what they think it is. Food has been abundant for many decades and there have always been hungry, even starving, people.

Mason quotes Stewart Brand’s famous line “information wants to be free,” but let’s remember the whole quote: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.”

At any rate, I’m with Mason in thinking we’re on the precipice of big changes wrought by the Internet and its many offshoots and can’t wait to read his book. An excerpt:

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.•

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“A Repeat Of the Keynesian Era Is Unlikely”

April 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Have not yet read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so I have to reserve judgement, though I’m always skeptical about anyone who believes they’ve cracked the code of economics, which, like nature, seems almost beyond understanding–just too many variables and black swans. But I’m still looking forward to it. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Mason at the Guardian explaining why the economist believes the relative equality of the postwar period is unlikely to recur:

“For Piketty, the long, mid-20th century period of rising equality was a blip, produced by the exigencies of war, the power of organised labour, the need for high taxation, and by demographics and technical innovation.

Put crudely, if growth is high and the returns on capital can be suppressed, you can have a more equal capitalism. But, says Piketty, a repeat of the Keynesian era is unlikely: labour is too weak, technological innovation too slow, the global power of capital too great. In addition, the legitimacy of this unequal system is high: because it has found ways to spread the wealth down to the managerial class in a way the early 19th century did not.

If he is right, the implications for capitalism are utterly negative: we face a low-growth capitalism, combined with high levels of inequality and low levels of social mobility. If you are not born into wealth to start with, life, for even for the best educated, will be like Jane Eyre without Mr Rochester.”

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