Whose Machine

Almost everyone has had the daydream at work: the machine that does your job, and you keep the pay. It is the plain promise of every labor-saving device ever built. A tool that does the work should mean less work for the person beside it, and for most of history that is what people expected machines to deliver: leisure, rest, the shortening of the day. The strange thing, the thing worth an essay, is that after two centuries of astonishing machines the promise has not arrived.

The vanished hours

Begin with the fact that always seems to surprise. Productivity, the amount a worker makes in an hour, has risen without pause and now stands where no earlier century could have pictured it. One worker today produces what a small crowd once did.

By the arithmetic of the daydream, the workday should have collapsed. Keynes, no radical, predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would work fifteen hours a week, and he reasoned soundly from the trends in front of him. People in wealthy countries work about as many hours as their grandparents, sometimes more, while producing several times as much per hour.

Where it went

It went to whoever owned the machine. This is the hinge of the matter, and it is so plain that it slides past notice.

A machine has an owner. When it makes a worker more productive, the extra product belongs, by the ordinary operation of property, to the owner and not the worker. The worker who now does the work of five is not paid five times over and sent home early. She is paid about what she was before, and the other four shares are kept as profit.

Two futures

This turns the whole anxiety about automation inside out. It is posed as a question about machines. It is a question about ownership.
Consider the two futures a labor-saving technology could bring. In the first, the machine does half the work, so everyone works half as long for the same living, or the same hours for twice the abundance. In the second, the machine does half the work, so half the workers are let go, the rest are told to be grateful, and the gains pool at the top.

The only thing that differs is who owns the machine, and that one difference decides whether the device arrives as a liberation or a layoff.

The wrong target

This is why the recurring panic points the wrong way. The fear is that the robots are coming for the jobs. It is not a baseless fear: people are discarded, whole trades do vanish. But the robots are not the cause of the loss.

A machine that does human work is, in itself, good news. It is the nearest thing to a free lunch that the material world offers. The harm comes from something else entirely: that in this economy a person cut off from a job is cut off from the means of living, because survival runs through employment, and employment runs through owners who keep the surplus. Blaming the machine for that is like blaming the harvest for a famine in a country whose granaries are locked.

The Luddites were right

The owners have always understood this, whatever they say in public. Every wave of automation has been brought in not to free workers but to manage them: to break a trade that had bargaining power, to replace a workforce that had organized, to move knowledge out of human hands and into company machinery.

The Luddites are the proof, though their name is now a slur for someone afraid of technology. They were nothing of the kind. They were skilled workers who saw exactly what the new machines were for, who owned them, and where the proceeds would go. They broke the machines not out of fear of the future but out of an accurate reading of the present. They lost, and the winners wrote them into the record as fools.

Held in common

So the demand is not to stop the machines. That would mean siding against the one force in the economy that could actually free human time. The demand is to change who owns them.
A society that holds its productive machinery in common does not meet a new invention as a threat, because no owner stands between the saved labor and the people who would enjoy it. The saving becomes what it always should have been: less work, or more plenty, shared out among everyone. The same invention that means unemployment under one arrangement means a shorter week under another.

The machine that does your work while you keep the pay is possible, has long been possible, grows more possible every year. It has been held back by nothing in the nature of technology and everything in the nature of ownership. Automation was meant to be the thing that finally freed people from toil.

The obstacle was the lock on the granary, and locks, unlike the laws of physics, can be picked.