Can Robots Free Us?

With capitalism once again running into choppy waters, its administrators, of whatever party, will be casting about them for policies to keep it on an even keel. But, as usual, the problems which have always baffled them continue to do so. There has been a stagnation of wages and a stubborn increase in insecure employment, and after all this time they are still talking about urgent measures to solve the housing problem.

Lacking knowledge of the real cause of these problems, workers will cast their vote in despair from one capitalist party to the other. It is only the Socialist Party which says “a plague on all their houses” and works on for the day when the alternative of common ownership will be known on a mass scale and capitalist society will be no more.

We are in the middle of a technological revolution. Once, the craftsman had to give way to the factory worker. Now, the factory worker has to give way to the programmer. Eventually, the penny will drop that we possess the means of producing and distributing wealth which can belong to everyone. This will mean that computers will be used to satisfy the needs of everyone. It is not possible to predict exactly the uses to which computers will be put, because it all depends on the will of the majority of people at the time and none of us is a mind reader. But it is useful to think about what computers could be used for, because this gives us an insight into what socialism could be like. The possible uses are:

• matching production to needs;
• “electronic democracy”
• automation of dangerous or unpleasant work;

Matching production to needs:
If you want to know what people need, you ask them, or better still, arrange for a computer to ask them for you. It saves you travelling all over the world, asking monotonous questions such as: "Do you use aftershave?" — useful information for someone who does his/her bit by brewing aftershave. In turn, the aftershave manufacturers could enter into the computer the raw materials that are needed and in what amounts. The computer would transmit this information to the suppliers.

“Electronic democracy”
If a computer can count aftershave users, it can also count votes cast for and against any proposal presented by any person, such as "Should we continue making aftershave?" It is likely that the system will be polycentric, a local computer counting votes for local proposals, a regional computer counting votes for regional proposals and a world computer counting votes for world proposals. Bigger decisions affect more people and so would be decided by delegated democracy. This system could be implemented today. Ask yourself why governments which spend millions on supposedly defending democracy are not willing to spend even thousands implementing it.

Automation of dangerous or unpleasant work:
There will always be dangerous or unpleasant work that needs to be done. It will be possible to automate work that produces essential goods and services. The technology to do this has existed for several years. Robots can now assemble cars, manufacture computers. make furniture and so on. More recently, computers can mimic workers that make decisions according to rules, such as quality control inspectors, lawyers and doctors. The reason some work is not automated yet is because it is still unprofitable to do so. But the technology is there, waiting to be used should society decide to use it. For example, if our aftershave producer decides to grow bananas for a change and no replacement was immediately available, he/she could see an expert systems programmer. This programmer would write a programme that would instruct the computer to operate the aftershave brewery. Should the ex-aftershave brewer get nostalgic, he/she could always return and pull the plug on the computer.

The building blocks for constructing the computer systems described above have been available for decades. What you have read is not science fiction. It is fact. computer networks are used by companies, especially multi-nationals, in order to co-ordinate their activities and to communicate with each other. The hardware is already in place. All that is necessary is to reprogramme the computers to perform the tasks described in this article, should that be the wish of the majority of the people at the time.

Defenders of the capitalist status quo tell people that socialism is not workable. They think that workers are not intelligent enough to run a system of production for use, one where there are no followers and leaders but a system where everyone co-operates in decision making. They forget that workers are intelligent enough to perform the tasks necessary to run a capitalist society. It is workers who design, build and operate computer systems. When the wage and salary earners of the world, the working class, want socialism they will have it.