DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.

12186

BOOK REVIEW

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should

Respond

Susskind, Daniel

Allen Lane: London, 2020. £20, 336 pages

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes suggested that due to technological progress, the average working
day would consist of just three hours by 2030. The decades since 1870 had seen average working
hours decline by roughly a quarter across industrial economies. The introduction of electricity and
steel to industrial processes and the rollout of the factory form, the modern production line, the
joint-­stock company and scientific management cumulatively drove a productivity boom. Now
the Great Depression had wiped out swathes of industrial jobs. In a coming age of fifteen hour
working weeks, one of society’s biggest problems would be to construct valuable ways for largely
idle populations to spend their newfound leisure hours ('how to use his freedom from pressing
economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’). But during the Second World War and after,
Keynes' prediction took a wrong turn. The war-­devastated economies of the rich world embarked
on a state-­led recovery, whilst the post-­war boom saw giant economies in the global south begin
sustained processes of industrial development (Brazil, India and China, followed by the Asian
Tigers). As capitalist industrialisation spread eastwards and southwards, ‘work’—­labour for a boss
conducted outside of the home—­became the default mode of existence for a significant minority
of the world’s population. And average working hours in wealthy democracies remained basically
unchanged for the next four decades (at around 50 per week).
In an important new book, Daniel Susskind argues that Keynes will be vindicated after all—­if not
quite according to schedule, then in short order thereafter. Let me summarise his argument. The world
of work has been subjected to repeated technological revolutions, argues Susskind, which have relent-
lessly transformed working methods and employment patterns over time. Thus far, these transforma-
tions have been quite evenly balanced between a complementing force and a substituting force. The
complementing force preserves existing roles (the ATM freeing up the bank teller to offer a more
personalised service, without displacing labour), whilst the substituting force undermines existing
roles and adds diminishes overall employment prospects (the industrial machinery which displaced
skilled artisans organised in guilds). Technological displacement has effected high-­and low-­skilled
occupations alternately, since some new technologies are either ‘skill-­biased’ (and push up demand
for technical workers capable of using them), whilst others are ‘unskilled-­biased’ (displacing artisans
by employing cheaper, non-­technical labour). Whilst these biases have short-­run negative impacts on
particular groups of workers and economic sectors, the assumption amongst economists until quite
recently was that they basically equilibrated over time.
More recently, things have changed. Since the 1990s, both skilled and unskilled workers have
benefitted from automation (in terms of employment opportunities). Meanwhile, middle-­skill
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© 2021 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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occupations—­and with them, the social base of advanced capitalist economies—­have quite rapidly
shrunk. The ‘ALM’ (Autor–­Levy–­Murnane) hypothesis explained this puzzle by pointing out that
jobs are, in fact, made up of multiple discrete tasks. Many middle class professions bundle routine
tasks with complex intellectual and emotional labour. Susskind provides an overview of new digital
technologies to demonstrate the vulnerability of many of these tasks to automation—­from driving
lorries to conducting legal reviews and making medical diagnoses. But the ALM hypothesis, argues
Susskind, whilst an advance on the skill/unskill-­bias dualism, reproduces its optimism bias—­by as-
suming that middle-­skill job displacement will boost incomes in general by expanding productivity
and consequently lead to new employment growth areas.
Here is where Susskind delivers his break with the existing economists of automation. He chal-
lenges the ‘canonical model’ of economic orthodoxy by arguing that there is no employment equili-
brating dynamic to technological innovation. The impact of technological progress on labour markets
is not a series of cyclical disruptions and resets, he argues, but a secular (and accelerating) process of
rendering more and more tasks automatable. The exponential increase in computational power means
that few tasks will remain out of reach of machines over the long run, beyond those minority where
we value the specifically human touch (an opera singer or a carer—­and even here, machines pose a
modest threat to human labour). For this reason, the 'Lump of Labour Fallacy’, which is commonly
used to counter arguments that there is a fixed quantity of work to be shared out in an economy, is
itself fallacious (the ‘Lump of Labour Fallacy Fallacy’). In a striking metaphor, he compares human
labour to that of horses. With the advent of fossil capitalism (Malm, 2016), whilst some horses were
indeed repurposed from dragging agricultural machinery, coaches and canal barges towards other
work, the rampant increase in energy intensiveness and productivity of modern economies saw them
quickly phased out to a negligible role in the transport and agricultural industries. Much the same fate,
Susskind suggests, ultimately—­if not imminently—­awaits human labour.
One of the key arguments most commonly deployed against this ‘singularity’ of labour is that
robots are presently a very long way off being able to replicate humans in a wide range of spheres.
Robots, for instance, might be able to trounce the world chess and Go champions. But they cannot
very well sew clothing (one of the most labour-­intensive sectors of global manufacturing). Nor can
they perform stand-­up comedy (at least in a form that anybody would want to watch). Given the gulf
between current AI and machine learning capabilities—­which look far more like brute force comput-
ing power than real consciousness—­and human capacities, ‘artificial narrow intelligence’ rather than
‘artificial general intelligence’ (of the kind that worried Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates) is the name
of the game for the foreseeable future. Susskind makes the important argument that there is no par-
ticular reason why AI needs perfectly replicate human deductive processes, or logical or behavioural
patterns, in order to improve on human performance at particular tasks. Google's AlphaGo Zero, for
example wins not by replicating thousands of years of carefully developed human strategy, but by
sheer computing force combined with unknown machine learning mechanisms (of which its own
programmers are not really aware). There is no reason, then, why robotics and AI in other applications
need replicate humans or human consciousness perfectly either in order to usurp their role in a wide
range of tasks.
I read one serious internal weakness to this argument. Susskind points to the dramatic job losses
in agriculture and manufacturing in advanced economies as evidence of what is to come. The deploy-
ment of artificial intelligence does not lie in some frightening future, he argues, but is here now. But
looking around the world (as Aaron Benanav (2020) points out), it is in the most robotised, automated
and high-­productivity economies (South Korea and Germany) that manufacturing employment re-
mains highest (25% and 27% of the workforce in 2019, respectively, versus just 10% in the United
States). Moreover, the timescales do not match. The US economy shed 7.4 million manufacturing
    
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jobs from 1979 to 2018. The vast bulk of these were during recessionary bouts prior to the crisis of
2008—­before ‘artificial intelligence’ could be said to play any substantial role in the labour process
of an average industrial plant. In the U.K., similarly, the proportion of the workforce in manufacturing
roles fell from about 15%–­8% from 1997 to 2008, but has since then remained steady. Susskind shows
a persistent fall in annual hours worked across OECD economies from 1970 (1960) to 2016 (1750).
But again, this latter figure was arrived at in 2008, since when the trend has stalled and labour hours
have remained basically unchanged (whilst mobile and remote work has begun to bleed into white
collar workers’ leisure hours). So the image of a wave of powerful artificial intelligence applications
sweeping across the economy and mercilessly disenfranchising workers is a misnomer. Susskind’s
treatment of the recent past carelessly conflates ‘typical' forms of industrial restructuring with specu-
lation on the AI-­induced restructuring to come.
Whatever the future holds, unemployment and underemployment are currently facts of life in the
global north and south. A substantial part of Susskind’s book is taken up in the proposal of solutions
to a world without, or with less, work. Susskind is at pains to point out that existing policies targeting
frictional unemployment (reskilling, industrial policies, etc.) will be of little value under circum-
stances of widespread technological unemployment. He argues instead for a conditional, rather than
universal, basic income. This formulation represents an attempt to shore up the national welfare state
under conditions of the absence of widespread work (industrial citizenship being a key mechanism
fostering social cohesion) and ensuring participation in civic life in the absence of an economic com-
pulsion to work. Building conditionality into basic income provision, however, would seem to leave
unemployed masses at the mercy of states’ more or less arbitrary decisions on ‘voluntary’ roles they
must perform to become eligible for payments. Absent the need for their labour, what power would or-
dinary citizens be left with to contest that of powerful companies and governments? Further, Susskind
views conditionality as a means of excluding geographical outsiders from access to a state’s welfare
system. This would self-­evidently serve to bolster existing border regimes by forcing governments to
devise citizenship based eligibility criteria for access to the means of bare survival. Would a wealthy
and humane leisure society devoted to human betterment be prepared to abandon illegal migrants to
homelessness and starvation?
Whilst no single book can do everything, two conceptual absences seriously weaken this text:
capitalism and class. The role of globalisation and financialisation (as opposed to advances in AI
and automation) in clearing out manufacturing employment in advanced economies is not really ad-
dressed by Susskind. But such macroeconomic dynamics surely contributed to the decimation of
many advanced economies’ manufacturing sectors by enabling labour arbitrage through outsourcing
and offshoring. On a global scale, things look very different to the picture of an automation onslaught.
The ILO provides figures running back to 1991, when 21.8% of the global labour force worked in
manufacturing. In 2019, this figure was 23%. Over the same timescale, the world’s labour force in-
creased in size by about 50% (to 3.46 billion workers). That translates to the generation of roughly 300
million manufacturing jobs over the past 30 years. The lower productivity of newly integrated workers
in countries like Mexico and China probably accounts for the generation of much of this additional
employment. Second, as Kim Moody (2018) argues, a capitalist economy means technological uptake
by employers is not automatic. Instead, investments must be made on a cost-­benefit analysis, weighed
against the growing availability of cheap labour. The more technological progress made, the further
layoffs will fill the pool of unemployed and weigh on wages of those in work. This will depress in-
vestment in labour-­saving technology and encourage labour-­intensive forms of work. Social upheavals
and new capital–­labour bargains are likely to be mediated by states (a feat Susskind's horses could
never have pulled off). And finally, ignoring capitalist dynamics means that Susskind does not touch
on the ‘productivity puzzle’: how is it that this supposed new wave of automation leading us towards
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technological unemployment has come hand in hand with the longest stagnation in the productivity
of labour in a century?
Second, the question of ‘who owns the robots’ (and so who gains from the deployment of automa-
tion technologies) is touched upon, but social class as a category of analysis is not dealt with system-
atically. Susskind proposes a tax on capital to redress the potential inequalities to which automation
may give rise. But whilst redistribution of gains from automation might help, capital seems unlikely
to tolerate this for long—­and why should it if it is no longer dependent upon workers? Again, such
a scenario would leave workless populations with little leverage over the owners of production tech-
nologies. But the prospect of challenging class structures does not arise here. Moreover, the role of
capital–­labour struggles is completely ignored in this text. A major reason for the deployment of new
technologies in industrial restructuring is as a form of cheapening expensive labour or disempower-
ing disruptive trades unions. Four decades of stagnant wage growth and cowed trade unions across
advanced economies should surely be understood as contributing factors to the striking disjuncture
between current technological capacities and their actual mobilisation in workplaces. Meanwhile,
with the cost of borrowing at record lows, sputtering corporate giants can avoid difficult decisions
by loading up on cheap debt and purchasing their own shares. In a world of low returns, why should
shareholders tolerate potential dividends being invested in risky automation ventures—­when finan-
cial innovations and share buybacks allow them to reap outsized rewards? One of the core political–­
economic questions facing advanced capitalist societies is not how to deal with the fallout of runaway
productivity growth, but how to encourage firms to research and deploy any labour-­saving technolo-
gies whatsoever to escape the productivity rut. A world without work may indeed come to pass, but
despite its intrigue, Susskind’s book will be of little use as a guide to how we will get there.

Steven Rolf

Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit), University of Sussex Business School,
Brighton, UK
Email: steverolf@gmail.com

ORCID
Steven Rolf https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0631-023X

R E F E R E NC E S
Benanav, A. (2020) Automation and the future of work. London: Verso.
Malm, A. (2016) Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.
Moody, K. (2018) High tech, low growth: Robots and the future of work. Historical Materialism, 26(4), 3–­34.