(p.10) Artificial intelligence has the power to change the nature of work for many people, but the pace of adoption and the extent of the disruption are still the subject of debate. A rapid adoption of autonomous self-driving vehicles, for instance, could dramatically displace millions of workers, but a more gradual and partial adoption, especially in a growing economy, will have far less impact on drivers.

(p.376) There is thus an issue of realizing the future and what form that future reality will really take. Futurists have adopted more and less positive accounts.10 The fourth industrial revolution too, includes a range of approaches. As we shall argue, however, there are significant commonalities and limits to the range. The important point at this stage is that positions are not irrelevant for how the future becomes the present, since they affect how the future will be shaped from the present. Clearly, this applies also to work and the future of work is a major focus of fourth industrial revolution...

(p.377) Formerly, automation and computerization had their greatest impact on Fordist continuous flow mass production lines and on clerical and secretarial work. That is, work that could be reduced to strictly repetitive actions or multiply reproducible essentially identical forms – some kinds of work whose primary task base could be expressed in simple routines. However, the new technology introduces combinations of mobility, monitoring/surveillance, discrimination, multi-functionality, language and effectively more complex decision making capacity (which is not to suggest this requires an AI be conscious). This greatly extends the range of tasks that could be duplicated by technology and thus the types...

(p.379) At root, Keynes highlights but does not resolve a tension based on two different framings of ‘need’. The need to interact, work and create as self-expression may be intrinsic to what it is to be human, but this is not the same as the need to earn a wage income in order to survive within a division of labour that operates according to disciplining principles or mechanisms. In this latter sense, labour is compelled and profit and accumulation drive the capitalist system. Historically, there is no simple relation where greater use of technology and higher productivity have continuously reduced hours...

(p.380) it is important to note that the world of tomorrow that Keynes is focused on in his essay is not ours. That world is not just one that has achieved technological wonders, it is one that has implicitly transitioned to a radically different socio-economic form of organization.

(p.390) Whilst a sense that technology can liberate the worker from work may now be on the agenda of left accelerationists at such venues as Labour Party fringe conference events (e.g. The World Transformed), the main policy focus remains 390 Economy and Society dominated by a more business oriented and conventional set of capitalist concerns with the growth and profitability of the firm. From this perspective, the concerns of workers, the sociology of work and the broader issues of technology in society, are peripheral or additional.

(p.391) The framing of policy, therefore, is not neutral. It absorbs the fourth industrial revolution concept according to market conforming logics that allow government to limit its responsibility for shaping the future, even as it continues to herald the potential. And this, of course, segues easily into the kinds of concerns and foci that consultancies, such as McKinsey, necessarily find most conducive to explore: investment as a corporate wealth generating and protecting exercise. To be clear, we by no means wish to suggest that a technological future will be dystopian nor that the future of work involves worse-case outcomes of rapid...