We are living through a rapid acceleration in AI capabilities, a development that feels

as scary as it is stunning as we witness our new chatbot overlords confidently passing

exams, writing poems, and even hiring human workers to do their bidding.

Watching all this unfold has prompted speculation that millions of jobs are about to be automated

out of existence, with our skilled labour being replaced by writing assistants like ChatGPT,

image-making robots like Mid-Journey, and our abilities to plan being replaced by automated

agents like AutoGPT.

At the end of 2020, Navarre Media's James Barla was joined by writer and researcher Aaron

Benenev, author of Automation and the Future of Work, for an episode of Navarre FM that anticipated

the current wave of AI disruption, but also placed it in the context of a centuries-old

history of technological advances that have reshaped the workplace over and over again.

In this episode, James and Aaron get to grips with the specter of automation, discussing

the strange gap between labour-saving technology and increased productivity, visions of utopia

beyond work, and why overwork and under-employment can coexist so easily under the current economic

system.

Captain Picard, they're offering a pointed rejoinder to capitalist psychology.

You're listening to Navarre FM on Resonance 104.4 FM London's finest radio station,

I'm James Barla.

The robots are coming, in fact, they've already arrived, doom-laden headlines, and starry-eyed

futurist tracts alike herald the world that those robots are supposed to in all great.

In fact, if there's one thing that unites the silicon capitalists and platform parasites

with luxury communists and left accelerationists, it's this fundamental belief that automation

...