I can see the harms automation does in a capitalist society by putting people out of jobs, but what about in an anarchist society? By automation I am only talking about robotic automation for the production and delivery of goods or for services, not artificial intelligence or LLMs.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any automation. Automation is just a tool. It can be used to uplift as well as oppress individuals. It’s all about who controls it. Just as the luddites weren’t against technology and automated looms. But the wealthy owners that sought to discard and exclude them.
Ideally it would be wonderful to be automated out of a traditional job. And left free to explore your passions. Unfortunately current power structures east and west only want the former and not the latter.
Yeah, automation is fine, so long as it’s not in service to the profit motive.
You might get some disagreement from some of the anarcho-primitivists/indiginists/etc. (And I do think there’s a lot of good stuff to be learned from their theories.) But I don’t have a problem with “automation” per se.
In an anarchist society automation is amazing. In capitalism though it’s meh because as you say it puts people out of their jobs
I worked in the automation industry for about 6 years. I originally started out as just needing a job, but ended up attempting to get an electrical apprenticeship to gain a transferable skill to move to another country. I ended up leaving both the automation industry and the trades in general for a number of reasons.
In regards to automation, one of those reasons is that I believe automation and a lot of our technology which is made through automation is completely unsustainable. It’s also hard for me to separate the unsustainable nature of automation from capitalism. Automation requires so much extraction from other parts of the world to build and maintain. Not only is there a huge demand for metal to build the automation line itself for robots, fencing/safety, electricity, piping, and other structures related to an automation line, there’s a huge amount of plastic required for everything electronic.
Maintenance is also a huge issue. Things that move tend to wear down and break down over time. Everything eventually needs to be replaced. That’s more metal, plastic, grease, water and whatever else is required to run that line. A constant need to extract materials from one place to another. To me that is just the same as how capitalism works. Exploiting and extracting from one area for a resource and moving it to another area. Profits will be made. Then something will be done with that resource. Then more profit will be made and eventually it’ll end up in a junk yard somewhere.
There’s also a depressing amount of plastic involved. Every electronic requires plastic protection while being shipped because water and moisture don’t play well with electronics. Every cable is coated in plastic because electricity loves metal and there’s metal pretty much everywhere in the automation line. Sensors, electronics, computers, safety. Plastic. In the back of my mind, I can’t help but wonder how much progress will stall when people are unable to extract crude oil for all the plastics required for anything electronic.
My time in automation has made me believe today that we can’t have all the luxuries of modern technology without the “innovative” race to the bottom capitalism is currently trying to achieve. That we only got this technologically advanced because someone wanted to exploit a certain aspect of technology for their own personal gains. Innovations that are built on the ideas of exploitation. Today I can no longer in my mind separate the deep connection between computers, automation, and capitalism.
At this point, I am a bit overwhelmed by what’s happening with everything that I don’t even know what direction we can go from here. In order to resist, we still must use the technology provided by capitalism to organize ourselves. Like a drug, we are dependent and it’s an aspect of technology that fills me with frustration and confusion.
Personally, I do think it would benefit people as a whole to reconnect with nature in a sustainable way. Reconnect with the indigenous peoples from around the world and learn their knowledge of the lands. Learn to ween ourselves off from heavy technology dependence but still find a balance with technology that doesn’t depend so heavily on exploiting materials from outside our living areas. I think if we continue to use the tools provided by capitalism, we will continue to be addicted.
There are ways to automate without all that overhead. We can start over, with wooden cog logic and solar light free space transmission lines, living media power converters and recycled metal tools, and build sustainable machines we couldn’t imagine today.
Sure things will break, so the srtisan would have to stay close to the creation. There is no easy scaleup without oppression now - but I am sure more self-sustainable technologies are possible if we start caring.
Besides, there is matter of research. I think making small amounts of insustainable materials to discover more laws of nature and empower us to achive more harmony are ok, as long as we do it ourselves and not outsource to slave work half world away.
The two topics are hard to relate together for me. Machines and automation of them in our current system implies someone owns both the automated machine AND the output of said system. (Let’s conveniently forget the essential contributions of the human wage-slaves making the whole thing operate, cuz fuck ‘em)
So once we have figured out how to get people to move past greed-based concepts of private ownership of every fucking thing that moves, the ‘automation question’ you pose will automatically be solved too.
