'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' Is a Fabulation

Six years ago, Reddit's r/socialism released a survey with not-so-surprising results: 48 per cent are unemployed, 61 per cent live with parents, 69 per cent are uneducated, 14 per cent support free speech, and 46 per cent support riots. To paraphrase Hayek, if socialists were serious people, they would not be socialists. But this survey explains the proliferation of one particular meme: fully automated luxury communism.

First introduced in the identically named book, this meme postulates that sometime in the (hopefully near) future, technology will usher in a post-labour and post-scarcity society. Unfortunately, this meme is just plain wrong. It was born out of a misunderstanding of technology, and its proliferation links to one constant: the further physically removed a person is from manufacturing, the more likely they are to believe automation will save them. For a simple reason, they have never set foot in a factory. If they had, they would realise, as I will illustrate in detail, that automation can only shift labour, never replace it. r/socialism still needs to get a job in the future.

To understand why, we first must understand the difference between an open- and a closed-loop system. Open-loop systems start with an input and run until completion with no feedback to adjust the operation. An example is a timer-based toaster. Simple enough.

Closed-loop systems use feedback to adjust for the overall output. Think of thermostats and cruise control systems. They adapt automatically based on feedback, compared to a set point, without user input. Most people think of closed-loop systems when it comes to automation. Problems emerge as the number of inputs and outputs increases with a clear breaking point as the economic costs outweigh the benefits.

For that matter, it should be self-evident as to why a pizza restaurant can fully automate, but trash collection can not. The pizza place turns into a closed loop by shielding customers from it. The same set of inputs creates each pizza within the loop, disregarding customer types. The button pressed is always the same. But when trying to automate trash collection, the loop cannot be closed, given the infinite number of inputs to account for. Quality of streets (and residents), timing, and trash variations are just the tip of the iceberg. People have problems sorting plastic and paper, so consider human-caused errors if they have to adjust their behaviour for machine collection. Therefore, automated garbage collection becomes an open loop with an extending side-loader to pick up the bins.

What about robots and the Internet of Things, then? Can't we use humanoid robots to pick up the trash like humans and RFID to track the trash items? Yes, you can. However, when you run the numbers and consider maintenance hours per operating hours, the more complex a system is, the more maintenance hours it requires. If the system has to be failsafe to prevent human life loss, like combat helicopters, the ratio can rise between 4:1 and 8:1, meaning four or eight hours of maintenance are conducted for an hour of flight. The maintenance costs associated with fully automating the food supply would be off the charts. At that point, it is easier, cheaper, and more efficient to keep the human farmer.

From my time as an automation technician, the senior engineers had one thing to say about automation: “Don’t listen to the software engineers, they’re fools living in the debugger.” In other words, nothing worked the way software engineers imagined in their debugger. Every facility after setup had issues. After the mechanics assembled all conveyor systems and electric motors, the electricians wired everything up, and the software engineers loaded the code. Once we came in to turn on the machinery and run everything through a programmable logic controller—a type of industrial CPU—nothing worked. Everything had to be calibrated, altered, or modified in some way. And all it takes is thousands of man-hours.

When I worked on the production line for the i3 at BMW in Leipzig, Germany, it took us about 18 months until that loop became operational. Even in the second year, the system would still spit out a chassis with upside-down or double doors. All because of one bit of missed code within millions of lines.

This is also why cars come now with downloadable content locked behind a paywall. It is an attempt to increase profits by reducing everything to one loop. When you produce three variations of a make, you must stress test three setups of the same loop. That means three times the number of resources across man-hours and material. Therefore, it is less costly to create one car model with all features and lock them behind a paywall.

And this has all been just software so far. We have not even entered the realm of cosmic entropy that is hardware wear and tear. Each automated warehouse we sold came with a second warehouse filled with spare parts just for that warehouse. By the time we were working on the mezzanine floor six months in, a 24-hour on-site maintenance crew had to replace electric motors, belts, sensors, pneumatic valves, and more on the ground floor. Replaced because of stress tests, bear in mind the facility was not operational for another year.

The superficial understanding of automation omits auxiliary labour. A massive warehouse I worked on had a storage capacity of over two million medium-sized boxes. It had 24 maintenance workers and 12 low-skilled workers at the pick stations. It would seem automation has destroyed 964 jobs because warehouses used to employ more than 1000 people. However, such an assessment is only true when ignoring the auxiliary labour needed to create and maintain the warehouse in the first place. When accounting for those jobs, automation has created millions of jobs in the economy. So much so a manufacturing powerhouse like Germany is experiencing a skilled labour shortage.

Automation and AI will destroy soft-menial jobs like the service industry and likely middle management. But it will also increase the demand for skilled trades in manufacturing, bringing us back to the argument in the beginning: automation shifts labour never replaces it. True human labour will never vanish, leftists have simply abandoned labour.