Technology, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence
Analyze technology as a social relation shaped by ownership, management, skill, labor control, public investment, and political choice.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Estimated effort
- 6 weeks · 4–5 hours per week
- Prerequisite
- Labor-process basics recommended
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What this pathway is for
Technology is neither an autonomous force nor a neutral tool whose effects are determined only after invention. This pathway studies how machinery and digital systems reorganize work, skill, management, ownership, and social capacity—and how different institutions can direct the same technical possibilities toward different ends.
What you should be able to explain
By the end, you should be able to separate technical capability from the labor process in which it is deployed, evaluate automation claims against evidence about tasks and institutions, and frame artificial intelligence as a problem of ownership, control, infrastructure, and distribution rather than destiny.
- Explain how technology can raise productivity while reorganizing skill and workplace control.
- Distinguish automation of tasks from elimination of occupations.
- Identify the roles of management, intellectual property, data, infrastructure, and public research.
- Evaluate technological change through alternative ownership and governance arrangements.
Thinkers in this pathway
6 assigned readings
Check off each assignment as you complete it. The scope note tells you whether to read the full work or a defined selection.
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Read the selected Grundrisse fragment on machinery, general intellect, and the social character of production.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How does Marx explain the transformation of the tool from an instrument wielded by a living worker into an automated system that subsumes the worker?
- What does Marx mean when he argues that capital, by reducing necessary labor time to a minimum while positing labor time as the sole measure of wealth, creates a contradiction pointing toward its own dissolution?
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Read Parts I and II on the separation of conception from execution and the transformation of skill.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How does Braverman define the Taylorist principle of the "separation of conception from execution" in modern capitalist production?
- What is the process of deskilling, and why does Braverman argue it extends beyond industrial factory floors into clerical, service, and technical work?
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Focus on the social choices embedded in industrial automation and numerical control.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How does Noble demonstrate that numerical control (N/C) automation in machine shops was chosen over record-playback systems to consolidate managerial control rather than for purely technical efficiency?
- What decisive role did military funding (U.S. Air Force) play in subsidizing and enforcing specific technological designs in American industry?
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Read selected chapters on planning, the technostructure, and the requirements of large-scale production.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- What is the "technostructure," and why does Galbraith argue it replaced the individual entrepreneur in modern corporate planning systems?
- How do giant corporations manage consumer demand and insulate themselves from market price competition through long-range planning?
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Compare automation that deskills with informatization that can expand knowledge and discretion.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- What is the fundamental difference between technology that merely automates (replaces human labor) and technology that informatizes (generates real-time reflective data about work)?
- How does workplace informatization disrupt traditional supervisory authority and create new imperatives for electronic surveillance?
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Read the core argument on digital technologies, productivity, skills, and distribution alongside the pathway's critical texts.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- What do the authors mean by the "exponential, digital, and recombinant" trajectory of modern computing and artificial intelligence?
- Why has rapid digital productivity growth coincided with increasing income inequality and wage stagnation for non-supervisory workers?
3 lecture guides
These outlines can be used for self-study, a reading group presentation, or the structure of a future recorded lecture.
The machine question from Marx to digital systems
A history of the recurring claim that machinery will abolish labor, paired with a method for separating technical possibility from social deployment.
Lecture outline
- Machinery, productivity, and relative surplus value
- The general intellect and socialized knowledge
- Why technical capacity does not determine distribution
Skill, management, and labor-process control
How technologies encode managerial choices about knowledge, discretion, measurement, and control.
Lecture outline
- Conception and execution in the labor process
- Deskilling, reskilling, and contested implementation
- Worker knowledge as a productive asset and source of power
AI, productive capacity, and ownership
A political-economy framework for artificial intelligence centered on models, data, compute, energy, firms, public research, and institutional governance.
Lecture outline
- Tasks, occupations, and complementary labor
- Concentration in compute, data, infrastructure, and intellectual property
- Public options, worker voice, shared gains, and democratic control
Questions to test the argument
- When does technology deskill work, and when can it expand worker knowledge or discretion?
- Which claims about AI describe technical capability, and which silently assume a particular labor market or ownership structure?
- Who bears the costs and captures the gains when a firm automates a task?
- Choose one technology and describe how its design might differ under worker, public, cooperative, or shareholder control.
6 terms to carry forward
- Productive forces
- The tools, knowledge, infrastructure, labor capacities, and organizational means available for producing social wealth.
- Labor process
- The concrete organization of tasks, knowledge, tools, authority, and cooperation through which work is performed.
- Deskilling
- Reorganization of work that transfers knowledge or control away from workers and reduces the discretion required for a task.
- Automation
- The transfer of particular tasks or control functions from human labor to technical systems; it does not automatically imply the disappearance of an occupation.
- General intellect
- Marx's term for socially accumulated scientific and technical knowledge embodied in production.
- Technostructure
- Galbraith's term for the network of managers and specialists who collectively direct large organizations.