Do not fear the Machine

To which I respond:

Are we easily forgetting the passage of history under the Industrial age. The Luddites were rebels without a cause destroying factory mills, cotton gins, because they believe the machines were taking their jobs. We need to stop developing this buggy-whip mentality and think along the tides of the present condition.

Its not a matter of what; but of when. Robots will take over most jobs with 30 years If and only if we win this fight against the golden arches, what of the realistic implications technology is having at redefining the industrial based economy? What needs to happen is to embrace the change, but the current wage system needs to also adapt.

Before I continue, I am going to put a disclaimer, that I am going to head onto theoretical thinking about machines. Many people have the misconceptions of the “machine” in a sequential fashion but never think about it in an inversion.

The misconception follows that machines are simply “replacing” “substituting” “controlling” labor; rather than machines connecting and incorporating social machinery together.

Marx says this in "Das Kapital"(13th Chapter):

"How the instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what is the difference between a machine and the implements of a handicraft."

The similarities of both tools and machines is that they both start off as utilitarian functions for the socio-economic order. However, this orderly fashion does not sit still for machines. Tools are instruments of work--having a low entropy they enclose and centralize (state machine); whereas machines have a higher entropy--in which they open up and decentralize(social machine). What machines do then? They connect and incorporate different social realities together. The key word in all of this is connection not substitution.

In "Anti-Oedipus" by Deleuze and Guattari say this,

"It is no longer a matter of confronting man and machine to estimate possible or impossible correspondences, extensions and substitutions of the one or the other, but rather of conjoining the two and showing how man becomes a piece with the machine or with other things in order to constitute a machine.”

It’s literally a symbiotic relationship not for humans, but onto other machines as well; not this perverted take on “substituting” or “displacing” the worker. Which is another take. We are no longer work-related creatures, constituted under the industrial paradigm--that era is withering away. We are slowly detaching ourselves from that, and into something else I cannot describe, something in close relation to “intellect” both abundant and valuable.

Intellect is really the next manifestation of labor, and while Marx viewed the General Intellect as an absorption to fixed systems, the reality now, is quite different. We see it through Wikipedia, Blockchain, Steemit, etc. where it is the “verbal cooperation of a multitude of living subjects.”

Or how eloquently Gerald Rauning states,

“Here pre-individual human "nature", which lies in speaking, thinking, communicating, is augmented by the trans-individual aspect of the General Intellect: it is not only the entirety of all knowledge accumulated by the human species, not only what all prior shared capability has in common, it is also the in-between of cognitive workers, the communicative interaction, abstraction and self-reflexion of living subjects, the cooperation, the coordinated action of living labor.”