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| 1. Excerpts from 'Robots and Capitalism' by Tessa Morris-Suzuki; in 'Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution', edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirsch and Michael Stack, published by Verso, 1997; page 16. |
| A
single image, captured in countless recent press photographs, expresses
a central paradox of contemporary capitalism. The picture is one of a worker,
typically a highly skilled spray painter, guiding the arm of a robot through
the motions of a precise and complete task. The machine - a continuous-path
play-back robot - will then be able endlessly to replicate the exact movements
of the human being. Almost certainly, the worker who has been selected
to teach the robot is the most experienced or the most efficient of this
section of the factory's workforce. According to one's point of view, the
picture may be seen as representing the ever-progressing triumph of technology,
or the ultimate irony of automation - the mechanization of a dreary and
potentially dangerous job, or the moment at which years of carefully acquired
skill are transferred to an inanimate object, and the human individual
is simultaneously rendered redundant ...
Robots and the limits of Capitalism
In his work Late Capitalism, first published in the early 1970s, Mandel argued that the process of automation constituted the critical contradictory force within the development of capitalism:
... The present situation is obviously very far from the state of total automation which Mandel depicts as the limit of capitalism. But if we accept his view that automated enterprise can make profits only parasitically, by absorbing the surplus value created in other parts of the economy, and that the rising level of automation must therefore be accompanied by increasing exploitation of the remaining labour force or by falling average levels of profit, then it would seem that major capitalist economies are rushing towards their doom like Gadarene swine ... The Fission of the Labor Process
To understand the nature of this fission we need to consider, very briefly, the relationship between knowledge, labor and machinery. We can begin by observing that all labor involves the purposeful application of human knowledge to the natural world. In its simplest form, this application occurs directly without the intervention of tools or machinery, as when the women of hunter-gatherer communities picked reeds and grasses and wove them into baskets. Tools, and later machines, contain not only labor but also knowledge: they preserve and diffuse slowly accumulating human understanding of ways by which labor can be made easier and more productive. So knowledge has been a crucial element in production at all times, but for much of history its significance has been obscured by the fact that it could play a part in production only when embodied in the worker or in the machine. The separation of knowledge from labor and machinery, and its emergence as an independent commodity and element in production has been a gradual process dating back to the very beginnings of capitalism. Essential steps in the process were popularization of the printed book, and later the creation of patent and copyright systems. These latter measures were crucial because the special properties of knowledge (its lack of material substance; the ease with which it can be copied and transmitted) mean that it can only acquire exchange value where institutional arrangements confer a degree of monopoly power on its owner. Software represents a special form of the commodification of knowledge. Its origins go back at least to the invention of the jacquard loom in the 19th century, but it was only with the development of computing in the 1950s and 1960s that it began to have real economic importance. Software in essence consists of instructions for performing a particular task, and a major technological key to the growth of computing was the creation of means by which these instructions could be readily stored and fed into a machine. It is this technological key, applied to industrial production that provides the impetus behind the current wave of automation. The distinctive characteristic of the robot is its ability to be programmed to perform a number of different tasks, or to vary its action in response to changing external circumstances. For this reason, robots, unlike conventional mass production techniques, are particularly applicable to the production of small batches of varied products. In the earliest robots, movements were controlled by altering electrical connections in a plugboard. More recent versions are programmed by the playback system (described at the beginning of this article) or by a 'teach box' in which buttons or a joystick are used to define the movements of the machine. But increasingly, the trend is towards large automated systems - so-called 'flexible manufacturing systems' - controlled by software written in specialized programming languages. This enables robots to perform complex and coordinated actions, and to mimic more closely the flexibility and responsiveness of the human worker. The significance of the application
of software to manufacturing, therefore, is first that a single machine
may be made to vary its movement without alteration to its mechanical structure;
but second, and most important, that the worker's knowledge can be separated
from the physical body of worker and may itself become a commodity. Until
now, the productive process has always implied the bringing together of
machinery and human labor (in whatever proportions.) Those who controlled
the process extracted more labour from their workforce than they paid for.
But it was still correct for Braverman to observe that :
But with the use of software in production the situation is fundamentally altered. As can be seen in the case of the spray-painter and the play-back robot, the worker does in a very real sense 'surrender to the capitalist his or her capacity for work'. The physical coming together of worker and machine is sundered, and we are left with, on the one hand, machines which work automatically, endlessly responding to instructions provided by workers who may be physically far removed from the production site; and, on the other, the increasing channeling of living labor into the process of designing, composing and altering those instructions themselves. |
| [Reminder
from Essem: This presentation is only an extract. Please read the
full article for a more comprehensive understanding
of the subject.]
DISCUSSIONS:
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| 2. Excerpts from 'The Digital Advantage' by Jim Davis and Michael Stack; published in 'Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution', edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirsch and Michael Stack, published by Verso, 1997; page 121. |
| 'Information
Superhighway' and 'National Information Infrastructure' are popular labels
applied to recent political, technical and economic trends in the communications
and information industries ... The data packet traveling digital networks
is the boxcar of the Information Economy. The deployment of digital communications
and transport thus has economy-wide repercussions ...
Communication is the transfer of information from one store to another. For communication to take place, the sender and receiver must agree on a vehicle of conveyance. This is the signal, a detectable physical phenomenon such as staccato pulses of light traveling through glass fiber or sound waves through air. An agreement must also exist between the communicators as to how the signal represents information ("Two knocks mean yes, one means no"). This is the code. For example, the computer networking standard called ethernet is a code that specifies how computers signal data over connecting wires. Language is thus a social agreement on the physical expression of mental compositions. The Digital Rendition
The more bits that are allocated to the rendering, the more degrees of detail that can be represented. These degrees correlate with machines and media resources. Finer, more detailed renderings consume more resources. Terms such as 'sampling rates' and '24-bit color' describe the degree of renderable detail of which the particular recorders and playback machines are capable. Although a digital rendition involves a compromise between the continuous phenomena of nature and the pointillist representation of the digital bits, the technical advantages of bits yield compelling economic arguments for widespread and rapid digitization:
We live amidst a babel of information representations, a variety of technologies having having been developed to record various types of phenomena. Visual images have been written on photosensitive film. Sound has been saved as analog scratches on petroleum derivative platters, or as analog patterns on magnetic tape. Statistics, reports and other information have been recorded as language codes on paper. When phenomena are written digitally (coded into sequences of 1s and 0s), the recorded image floats free of the method or capture and its complementary object media. Digitized images, sound and other forms of data may instead be stored by any number of methods: electromagnetically, optically or even as punched holes in paper. At the levels of 1s and 0s, all recordings are equal in their representations. A compact disc can contain music, video, text or a mixture of all three. Economies of scale push down the cost of recording, storage and playback. With a medium-independent rendering, storage can be chosen on the basis of factors such as retrieval speed or longevity, not on the content that is being stored. In the same manner, digital channels, whether wired or wireless, are information indiscriminate. Multiple conduits like cable, fiber or microwave can transport the digital rendition: each has its advantages and drawbacks. But where before there might have been only one means of conveyance, now what is being carried no longer dictates the mode of delivery. With digital's discrete representation, once digitally rendered , a copy may be made across media and machine-verified for exactness. Digital copies are exact copies: a copy of a copy of a copy will be identical to the original. Copying - analogous to 'printing' on an offset press, or 'pressing' phonograph records - is extremely cheap, using virtually no human labour or materials in the process, as digital machines transfer the original digital sequence to new media. This benefit applies irrespective of what is being copied, whether it be a $700 QuarkXPress computer software program, a sound recording of John Cage's 4' 33", or an image of the Mona Lisa with a mustache. Digital Machines
There is nothing mystical about computers. Computers are simply sophisticated machines, acting on electrical signals at specific, addressable locations. A machine's action can be made conditional upon physical phenomenon such as feedback from other areas of the machine, or on signals fed from the outside, for example, by a human operator. So also with computers: an exterior agent may send a signal such that, in concert with defining etchings and in consideration of just-previous conditions, the computer produces a well-defined result (which is also a signal). This output may be saved in other computer chips, or in some storage medium for later recall. Amplified, this signal may play a sound or turn a servo motor in a robot. joint. With a multiplicity of possible input combinations and feeding sequences, computers may - as theorized by Alan Turing - 'solve almost any logical or mathematical problem' ... The penetration of production and distribution by digital machines is already profound. Increasingly, sophisticated tasks are represented in software in a wide range of industries. Programmable digital switches and voice-recognition software have been used to decimate the ranks of telephone operators. Movie locations and actors can be digitally added to film and animated, saving production companies time and money (and labor) as more of the shoot is done under controlled conditions in the studio. A $100 software program holds sufficient balance between cliché, new variables and rough prose to replace a $1,500-a-month sports reporter. Aircraft and other industrial design work can be done within a virtual, computer-constructed reality - Boeing's 777 airliner as designed, modeled and tested digitally before any planes were built. The phrase 'dark factories' - where the lights are rarely turned on, because no humans work the production lines - describe the emerging production site. Resource Conservation
Digital representation makes possible savings in more than just computer hardware:
Both wired and wireless communications channels now carry digital signals instead of the traditional analog ones. Communications are increasingly cast in the universal digital mold, because digital communication has compelling advantages that are difficult, if not impossible, to realize in analog mode: compression technologies increase data throughput, sending more information in the same amount of time; error-correcting algorithms ensure accurate transmissions, reducing the need to retransmit messages ; encryption technology scrambles the information content so it is concealed from unintended readers, providing an efficient security mechanism; while switching instructions may be encapsulated in the message - like an address on the outside of an envelop - to enable automated delivery over intelligent networks ('packet switching'). Fiber optics uses laser-generated digital light pulses to carry greater capacity at lower cost and at lower maintenance than the copper cables it is fast replacing. Digital wireless networks are static-free and allow technical tricks that squeeze more capacity out of the available electromagnetic spectrum. Consequently, space is being allocated on the spectrum for digital versions of current analog transmissions: digital high-definition TV (HDTV), digital cellular packets and digital audio radio service.
THE DIGITAL ADVANTAGE Most of the compass of human experiences - voices, images and even smells - can be captured in various degrees of verisimilitude in object media: all representations can be reduced ultimately to the esperanto of 1s and 0s. Once digitized, information acquires the digital advantage: a universal rendering that is resource conservative, cheap to store and transport, and easy to copy, meter and manipulate. Digital rendering thus liberates information from the constraints of any particular medium and raises the possibility of the liberation of 'information' from the constraints of scarcity and rationing by price: easy and cheap replicability means that whatever can be digitally rendered can be made universally available ... Although digital technology is expensive to install - usually requiring the complete replacement of previous-generation technologies - digital storage and distribution costs are qualitatively different. Unlike traditional transport and communications, a digital infrastructure consumes relatively little in the way of energy, resources or labour, regardless of the load ... As in the past, contemporary industry is both shaping and being shaped by transportation and communications systems. Present day communication and transport technologies enable capital to make the entire planet its playground, allowing production to be dispersed to the peripheries for the exploitation of cheap labor and lax environmental laws. New systems of production organization, enabled by recent developments in communications, have also emerged with such names as 'virtual corporation', the 'temporary company', the 'flattened organization', and 'telecommuting'. Finally, just as the railroads were were the leading industry of the 19th century, telecommunications will be America's foremost export and the world's number one business by the year 2000 ... SORRY! THIS ARTICLE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION |
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