Deliveroo drivers are striking this week (The Guardian) over their pay, rights and safety practices. (Deliveroo is the UK equivalent of Doordash.)
After a 4.5 year legal fight, ending in the UK Supreme Court, Uber Says Its UK Drivers Are ‘Workers,’ but Not Employees (Wired). This means drivers get minimum wage guarantees after expenses, paid holidays, and pension contributions but not sick pay or protection against unfair dismissal.
Deliveroo drivers and Uber drivers are performing “Below the API” jobs. Uber’s software layer (the API) dispatches a human to do a job, and…
What does that make the drivers? Cogs in a giant automated dispatching machine, controlled through clever programming optimizations like surge pricing?
And: it’s not a secret that Uber intends to eventually replace all their drivers with self-driving cars.
Here’s Norbert Wiener in 1948, in his seminal book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (the first public use of the term). He’s talking about computers, or as he says the modern ultra-rapid computing machine.
It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.
I’m actually not comfortable with the use of “slavery” as a metaphor here. The lived reality of slavery is abhorrent in its own way, and I feel like it’s minimised somehow to deploy the word like this. Life under capitalism, below the API, can be criticised on its own terms.
HOWEVER: it strikes me as significant, somehow, that right at the dawn of computing, it was possible to predict the situation that Uber drivers find themselves in today, 73 years into the future.
As it happens, Wiener didn’t believe that knowledge work was immune.
There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions.
So we have that to look forward to.
Further back!
101 years ago, the word robot (in its current sense) was coined:
The modern meaning of the word ‘robot’ has its origins in a 1920 play by the remarkable and fascinating Czech writer Karel ?apek. The play, titled R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), begins in a factory which manufactures artificial people, the ‘universal robots’ of the play’s title. The robots are designed to serve humans and work for them, but the robots eventually turn on their masters, wiping out the human race.
But robot wasn’t a new word. It first appears in English in 1839 referring to central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labour or service.
It comes from the Czech robota meaning “forced labour” or “slavery.”
Here’s a segment from Rossum’s Universal Robots:
DR. GALL: Yes, the Robots feel practically no bodily pain. You see, young Rossum provided them with too limited a nervous system. We must introduce suffering.
HELENA: Why do you want to cause them pain?
DR. GALL: For industrial reasons, Miss Glory. Sometimes a Robot does damage to himself because it doesn’t hurt him. He puts his hand into the machine, breaks his finger, smashes his head, it’s all the same to him. We must provide them with pain. That’s an automatic protection against damage.
HELENA: Will they be happier when they feel pain?
DR. GALL: On the contrary; but they will be more perfect from a technical point of view.
HELENA: Why don’t you create a soul for them?
DR. GALL: That’s not in our power.
FABRY: That’s not in our interest.
BUSMAN: That would increase the cost of production.
It don’t know what it means for our current pitfalls to be anticipated so long ago.
But I do feel that we need a word in the public discourse to critique what the Ubers and Deliveroos are doing with their “Below the API” workers. Something that can be said by newsreaders and unpacked by columnists. Because it’s not really well understood right now. It’s one thing to say that Uber hasn’t, historically, paid minimum wage, but the easy counter to that is that the drivers get a kind of flexibility and freedom that regular employees at other companies do not. It’s another thing entirely to say that reason that the drivers are paid below minimum wage is that they are being put into artificially amplified competition with one another and with future automation. It was inevitable. So it’s that system that needs to be unpicked, not the outcome.
Perhaps “robot” will do, as a word to use in the debate, given its history. Robots are people who are denied souls, for business reasons.
So here’s my proposal. Let’s make robot a dirty word.
i.e.: “What is Uber doing? They’re treating their drivers like robots.” Etc.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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Deliveroo drivers are striking this week (The Guardian) over (Deliveroo is the UK equivalent of Doordash.)
After a 4.5 year legal fight, ending in the UK Supreme Court, Uber Says Its UK Drivers Are ‘Workers,’ but Not Employees (Wired). This means drivers get but not sick pay or protection against unfair dismissal.
Deliveroo drivers and Uber drivers are performing “Below the API” jobs. Uber’s software layer (the API) dispatches a human to do a job, and…
And:
Here’s Norbert Wiener in 1948, in his seminal book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (the first public use of the term). He’s talking about computers, or as he says the .
I’m actually not comfortable with the use of “slavery” as a metaphor here. The lived reality of slavery is abhorrent in its own way, and I feel like it’s minimised somehow to deploy the word like this. Life under capitalism, below the API, can be criticised on its own terms.
HOWEVER: it strikes me as significant, somehow, that right at the dawn of computing, it was possible to predict the situation that Uber drivers find themselves in today, 73 years into the future.
As it happens, Wiener didn’t believe that knowledge work was immune.
So we have that to look forward to.
Further back!
101 years ago, the word robot (in its current sense) was coined:
But robot wasn’t a new word. It first appears in English in 1839 referring to
It comes from the Czech robota meaning “forced labour” or “slavery.”
Here’s a segment from Rossum’s Universal Robots:
It don’t know what it means for our current pitfalls to be anticipated so long ago.
But I do feel that we need a word in the public discourse to critique what the Ubers and Deliveroos are doing with their “Below the API” workers. Something that can be said by newsreaders and unpacked by columnists. Because it’s not really well understood right now. It’s one thing to say that Uber hasn’t, historically, paid minimum wage, but the easy counter to that is that the drivers get a kind of flexibility and freedom that regular employees at other companies do not. It’s another thing entirely to say that reason that the drivers are paid below minimum wage is that they are being put into artificially amplified competition with one another and with future automation. It was inevitable. So it’s that system that needs to be unpicked, not the outcome.
Perhaps “robot” will do, as a word to use in the debate, given its history. Robots are people who are denied souls, for business reasons.
So here’s my proposal. Let’s make robot a dirty word.
i.e.: “What is Uber doing? They’re treating their drivers like robots.” Etc.