Cherry harvesting in Russia. Research across OECD countries shows wide variation in the number of jobs at risk of automation. Photograph: Valery Matytsin/Tass
Predictions about an unstoppable growth of automation in the workplace ignore a multitude of variable factors
Ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. Neoliberalism is a prime example. Less well-known but equally insidious is technological determinism, which is a theory about how technology affects development. It comes in two flavours. One says that there is an inexorable internal logic in how technologies evolve. So, for example, when we got to the point where massive processing power and large quantities of data became easily available, machine-learning was an inevitable next step.
The second flavour of determinism – the most influential one – takes the form of an unshakable conviction that technology is what really drives history. And it turns out that most of us are infected with this version.
It manifests itself in many ways. A prime example is the way the political earthquakes of 2016 – Brexit and Trump’s election – are being attributed to technology: if only Cambridge Analytica and other dubious actors hadn’t weaponised social media, normal life would have continued. Hillary Clinton would be bombing Syria, David Cameron would still be prime minister and Jacob Rees-Mogg would just be muttering into his Veuve Clicquot.
While there’s no doubt that social media played some – as yet unquantified – role in the upheavals of 2016, it seems implausible that the technology was the key element. Far more important were populist rage against the 2008 banking crisis – in which the wages of bankers’ sin were paid for by austerity imposed on ordinary citizens – and the social carnage wrought in some regions of western societies by decades of neoliberal economic policies, globalisation and outsourcing.
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