Artificial Intelligence,Deskilling,and Labor Employment

The continuous breakthroughs in big data,artificial intelligence,robots and other technologies,as well as the subsequent technological revolution and changes in production organizations,will increasingly have a profound impact on economic growth,labor skills,labor employment,income distribution and even the world landscape.The widespread application of new technologies represented by big data and artificial intelligence not only makes it possible to improve labor productivity and capital accumulation,but also makes those "long life" and immovable "dead" labor is getting more and more,and "living" labor encounters "dead" labor in control,exclusion,and exploitation.In contrast,during the "infancy" of capitalism,labor and knowledge are a unified whole,because knowledge originates from the accumulation of labor experience,specifically,from those craftsmen;starting from the squeeze of capital into the family,from the simple collaboration between labor began,and since labor was no longer an individual behavior but a social behavior,knowledge and labor began to decompose and never ceased.For example,as a result of the division of labor in the handicraft industry,the intelligence of the production process is opposite to that of workers;and "Big industry separates science as an independent production capacity from labor",and forces science to transform into technology,forcing technology to capital service;automation technology connects the machine into a production system,and the production line becomes "automatic".In the past,the layout of the machine had to follow the operating process in order to complete the transfer of workpieces between machines.This evolution can be said to be the strengthening of capital from small machine movements to large labor process controls,the destruction of artisan craftsmanship,and the tearing of the bond between working people and technology.In short,the technological revolution has made the labor process more complex than in the past,and workers' skills have not improved with it,but have fallen below the level of the labor process;moreover,each of them needs to know and understand more than in the past,not more workers work alone,but much less.This is also the result of the separation of "concept" and "execution" in Braverman's writing.Braverman(1979)argues that "Every step of the labor process,as far as possible from specialized knowledge and specialized training,becomes simple labor.At the same time,for the few who can still have specialized knowledge and can be specially trained,people,as far as possible,get rid of the burden of simple labor." In the sense of capital dominance,the advantage of the division of capital applied technology is to master and consolidate all aspects of the "concept" in order to achieve hierarchical control over "execution".And capital-driven technological progress has always directed the "separation" of this labor concept and execution-specifically,since the Industrial Revolution,technological change has followed from mechanization to automation,and then to artificial intelligence the development trajectory of intelligence,in this process,labor is increasingly showing the polarization separation trend of "conceptual" high-skilled labor and "executive" low-skilled labor in the sense of Braverman.When the benefits of division of labor disappear,the principle of separation of concept and implementation will come out again.In the long run,the division of labor quality and the proportion of quantity will show a power law distribution,and the head will continue to "shrink" and the tail will continue to "swell".This indicates that the continuous differentiation of employment and the continually widening income gap are an inevitable trend,and the separation of concept and implementation is mainly achieved by technological innovation.Naturally,employment differentiation and income inequality appear to be,it has become an inevitable product of technological innovation.In fact,regarding the impact of technological change on labor skills,employment and income distribution,Marx has already provided theoretical guidance and analysis tools,especially Marx's labor process theory,capital organic composition theory,and relative surplus population theory.For example,Marx's labor process theory itself discusses the management and control of labor,the deskillization of labor,and the affiliation of labor to capital.On this basis;furtherly,Marx deduce the improvement of the organic composition of capital and relative surplus of the population — as a whole in the analysis of technological progress,the theory of organic capital composition has an outstanding applicability and value to the analysis of artificial intelligence phenomena.Starting from the organic composition of capital,the impact of artificial intelligence on labor employment is essentially a change in the composition of technology and its corresponding value composition is aimed at directly changing the composition of living labor and the corresponding changes in the total amount and structure of labor materials,and it is also an overall reflection of global and systematic changes.And the improvement of the organic composition of capital necessarily means that the proportion of live labor relative to dead labor has fallen and the relative surplus of live labor has fallen.However,compared withthe study of labor economics and growth theory,the application value of artificial intelligence,a major theoretical and practical issue of these theories,has not been effectively reflected.Based on Marx's economic theory,this article attempts to conduct a targeted research on this phenomenon from the perspective of labor process theory,organic composition of capital theory,and relative surplus population theory.The study found that: in the era of artificial intelligence,the routine operations corresponding to low skills and the unconventional cognitive posts corresponding to high skills are increasing,while the regular posts corresponding to medium skills are constantly losing.Skills required by employment polarization rather than denying the de-skilling of labor.On the contrary,the increase in skill requirements heralds the continuous deepening of the de-skilling of labor.Although technological progress and iterative evolution will continue to stimulate the demand for high-skilled work,not only because the change in skill content in an objective sense also stems from the needs of "over-education" and "social control" described by Braverman.But fundamentally,it still stems from the profit-seeking nature of capital,which will drive capital to continue pursue control of the labor process,so that the working class continues to go through the cycle of improving skills,de-skilling and re-skilling.The study also found that artificial intelligence does not bring about mass unemployment.Even if the speculated technological progress can bring a big impact on labor or even a complete replacement,it cannot guarantee that the enterprise will eventually choose a new technology.Because it depends not only on the factors we analyze,such as the cost of replacing labor by machines and the corresponding adjustment of the wage rate,not only on the department and position of the individual,but also on class struggle,system construction and government choices.And other factors.However,we must be clear that the problem is not the new technology and the use of intelligent robots instead of labor itself,but the artificial intelligence technology "placed in" the social environment for which the capital is dedicated,but by the capital-accurate said to be capitalist-as a means of producing surplus value,strengthening labor exploitation and replacing labor.It is not known whether technology will cause great unemployment in future.However,the article verified whether automation and intelligence are conducive to the separation of concept and execution,capital,and a small number of highly-skilled labor,and will bring about polarization of wages——Based on the endogenous growth model of technological innovation,the introduction of high-skill automation technology into thegrowth model explains that employment polarization will not bring about wage polarization,because when technology-biased technology is not profitable,capitalists will turn to the development of skill-biased technology to suppress the rise in the skill premium of high-skilled labor,but the income inequality between capital and labor will be further deepened.This stems from the control of technology by capital,from the separation of concept and execution.To strengthen labor exploitation.The innovation of this article lies in:First,this paper studies the enterprise production process and organizational changes brought about by artificial intelligence: In the past few decades,new technologies such as artificial intelligence and its secondary technologies(big data,cloud computing,etc.)have made major breakthroughs.As a typical technical feature of a new technology paradigm,artificial intelligence improves the efficiency and flexibility of information acquisition and information transfer between organizations,and effectively solves the problem of organizational information asymmetry;at the same time,artificial intelligence by mining inter-organizational data heterogeneity and related value,give production and management decisions,promote the organization's management informatization and intelligence,at the same time make the organization's production costs and transaction costs structural changes,and then reshape the relationship between the organization and the organization,triggering changes in organizational form;Second,on the basis of low-skill automation technology,introduce high-skill automation technology and Baumol's cost disease,and study the distribution of income between capital and labor,high-skill labor,and low-skill labor by artificial intelligence.The results show that low-skill automation does widen the income gap between high-skilled labor and low-skilled labor,but with the completion of low-skilled automation technology and the popularization of high-skilled automation technology,it has a significant inhibitory effect on the skill premium;Third,the consistency of the improvement of skill requirements and the de-skilling of labor is verified: The continuous improvement of skill requirements does not deny the de-skilling of labor,on the contrary,the increase of skill requirements indicates the continued deepening of de-skilling of labor,although technological advancement and iterative evolution will continue to stimulate the demand for high-skilled jobs,not only because of the change in skill content in the objective sense,but also because of the needs of "over-education" and "social control" described by Braverman.But fundamentally,itstill stems from the profit-seeking nature of capital,which will drive capital to continue to pursue control of the labor process,so that the working class will continue to go through the cycle of improving skills,de-skilling and re-skilling;Fourth,try to integrate Western economics,especially the model of Western economics,with Marx's economic theory.For example,the combination of the generalized Cobb-Douglas production function and the theory of organic composition of capital to verify whether artificial intelligence will bring about large-scale unemployment-analyzes the conditions for the realization of large unemployment and the countermeasures facing large unemployment;Fifth,this article attempts to integrate labor economics and political economics research: discuss and comment on the impact of new technology development on skills-in the past there was Braverman's statistical dimension(occupational classification),and now it is also needed new statistical methods further clarify this issue;precisely,the research on this issue in political economy lacks statistical verification,and it is particularly necessary to borrow and integrate research methods from other disciplines.Therefore,the article attempts to apply the research method of labor economics on this issue to the study of political economics.Among them,the problems of content convergence and transition are inevitable,but the article's research ideas are clear-first comb the relevant research,discuss the similarities and differences between the two disciplines on skill definition,skill evaluation indicators(skill premium and skill requirements)and skill measurement methods;further from the perspective of labor economics,discuss the logical relationship between the change in employment structure and skill premium and the de-skilling brought about by technology-biased technological progress.