Blood in the Machine

In Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant argues that the story of automation is often less about machines replacing workers than about how those in power use technology to reshape labor:

The entrepreneurial elite is promoting a grand dream of a future where machines do all the work and deliver us economic prosperity. These visions of robots taking our jobs make us uneasy, but they also encourage us to stay fixated on the brighter and distant tomorrow, past the precarity, injustices, and the unpleasantries of now — while giving the elites who produce those very visions a smokescreen to obscure their decision-making and more leverage over their workforces. Bosses may not be able to automate away all of their workers, even if they’d like to, but they can deskill them, slash their benefits and protections, and reduce their wages. Some professions may be more vulnerable to the entrepreneurs and executives who move to disrupt them — the weavers, the factory line worker, the taxi driver, the travel agents – but those displaced workers are not victim of the robots.