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Soc (2014) 51:595–601
DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9831-9
COMMENTARY
Technology and Mechanization Today
Peter Augustine Lawler
Published online: 19 September 2014
#
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract
The progress of technology, a wonderful display of
human freedom, is largely about mechanization. My purpose
is to describe, both critically and appreciatively, that progress
in our time.
Keywords
Technology . Mechanization . Proletarianization .
Liberty . Transhumanism . Singularity . Tyler Cowen
Today, more than ever, we have the evidence that distin-
guishes between and deeply connects technology and mech-
anization. Technology is quite the revelation of who we are as
free beings when understood as ingeniously inventing and
deploying machines to constantly expand the realm of human
creativity. But technology undermines human freedom—un-
derstood as creativity and spontaneity—insofar as it reduces
any human being to a machine and nothing more. The prob-
lem, of course, is that the creativity of technology depends on
both inventing machines and controlling mechanical behavior,
including that of other human beings. To some extent, the
creativity of the few depends on the conscious mechanization
of the many as part of the conscious control of all of nature.
The progress of technology is largely about mechanization,
and my purpose is to describe—both critically and apprecia-
tively—that progress in our time.
The creativity of technology depends on understanding
nature as made up of machines. Mechanization depends on
being given machines with which to work. That is why we,
these days, think of the other animals as tasty nutrition ma-
chines that exist for our convenience. We do not think of them
as
“organic”
beings that have their own natural purposes and
forms of spontaneity. Before we get too moralistic about
getting less technological and more totally organic when it
comes to our relationship with domestic animals, though, we
have to remember that the species chicken, pig, and cow are
human inventions for the convenient satisfaction of our bloat-
ed human needs. We improved upon the noncompliant and
scrawny machines we were given by nature. That is was
necessary, of course, because there is no evidence nature
actually intended those machines to be for our personal use
at all.
Conscious and Volitional (or Rational and Industrious)
Evolution
The creativity of technology depends on understanding even
human nature as mechanical. The human being is some mix-
ture of natural machine and creative freedom (as Descartes
and Rousseau explain); each of us, more precisely, thinks of
himself as a free being who depends on machines to fend off
personal extinction and to know and enjoy as only free beings
can do. It is the deep intention of technology to free us
completely from unconscious or unwilling dependence on
impersonal natural mechanisms through our conscious and
volitional control of all machines—that means, of course,
inventing machines we have not been given by nature and
transforming (for our personal convenience) all the machines
we have been given. If all there is free human creativity and
mechanism, then we can, eventually, subject all that exists to
our conscious and willful control.
Our free and creative objection to what we have been given
by nature is that it is impersonally mechanical; it is indifferent
to and so randomly destructive of persons. It is an objection
none of the other animals can or would want to make. And so
our technological intention is to creatively subject of all nature
to the cause of personal freedom. We are the animals that use
machines to serve the personal freedom.
We can see better than ever in our time that human labor
becomes infinitely more productive as it becomes the manip-
ulation of the better and better machines—the smart and even
genius machines—that we have invented. Think, for a mo-
ment, of all the unprecedented power you are carrying around
P. A. Lawler (*)
Berry College, Mount Berry, GA 30149-0118, USA
e-mail: plawler@berry.edu
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Soc (2014) 51:595–601
with you today—your iPhone, iPad, and iPod and various
other iThings. But a problem that has always been there in
principle remains increasingly there in practice: most human
labor can be done more efficiently by more reliable ma-
chines—by, for example, robots and operating systems (the
results of which we see displayed on screens). And so we will
actually need fewer and fewer members of our species to
display their creative freedom. That problem is preceded by
another. Our technological freedom continues to progress
through a complex division of labor that is actually based on
a simple principle: the division of our species into those who
use their brains—or what we now call their
“human
capital”—
to invent and control machines and those whose behavior is
reduced to that of a more reliable machine by the technolog-
ical ingenuity of others.
We continue to see constant progress in reducing human
labor to a mechanical routine, like the script followed by
workers in chain restaurants or the swiping motion that is
pretty much the only skill left in staffing the Walmart check-
out line. If you think about it, the compliant behavior required
by the scripted service worker is, if anything, more about
degrading mechanism than working on the old-fashioned
assembly line. Once those who do the creative labor have
reduced a task to a mechanical routine, then it does not require
that much more ingenuity to replace the worker by a reason-
ably
“smart”
and much more reliable machine, as you see in
the self-service check-out line or in the innovative robotics
that are mostly responsible for the astounding efficiency of the
recently depopulated Amazon warehouses. Just recently, the
formerly proudly personal Panera Bread has announced it is
replacing cashiers with kiosks, and other fast-food chains are
following their lead.
So the libertarian futurists like Tyler Cowen, Brink
Lindsey, and Charles Murray candidly see that our future
might well be about a
“cognitive
elite” of about 15% of our
population becoming smarter, hugely more productive, and
more astutely creative. That class is composed of people free
from personal prejudice and readily capable of flexible and
abstract thought. They have what it takes either to comfortably
work with
“genius
machines,” or to manage those who do that
nerdily creative work on, say, the Google campus, or to crea-
tively market the results of all that creativity. Cowen also
imagines a small but lucrative place for enlightened econo-
mists such as himself who will be cheerleaders for that meri-
tocracy based on productivity. He also thinks that, increasingly,
it is the economists that will be the ones who know everything
about what is going on, because they rigorously refuse to think
of persons as more than free and productive beings. And they
know that it is the genuinely oligarchic few—those John Locke
called the industrious and rational—who really are responsible
for change we should all believe in.
That techno-creative class deserves what it is getting—
unprecedented wealth. Money is what is given in exchange
for productive labor. Members of that class are given lots of
creative freedom and flexible hours in determining how to
accomplish their tasks, and they are proving it is possible to be
wonderfully productive and have stable family lives and be
consumers of all the creative, artistic, literary, and culinary
accomplishments the great cultures of the world have given us
to enjoy. It is true enough that they are too free of the repres-
sive illusions that are the downside of being immersed in a
particular religious/moral/political culture to actually be in-
centivized to build Gothic cathedrals, pyramids, or whatever,
but they can still reproduce, manipulate, and combine the
cultures of the world into creative technological artifacts that
make dazzling—if not exactly profound—contributions to
what they have been given.
Technology has given the world to the industrious and
rational, and their labor or productivity is their title to it. Not
only does the challenge of working for technological produc-
tivity make that cognitive elite smarter, it becomes smarter still
insofar as it successfully isolates itself from the rest of society
in real or virtual gated communities, inter-marries, and all that.
Members of this elite, we are told, understand marriage as a
kind of contract for investing in the development of children.
Their children, of course, are educated to be both productive
and creative beings—and so they read classic books, take
music and ballet, play soccer, and travel widely, as well as
learn all about calculus and operating systems.
The Proletarianization of the Middle Class
So Cowen imagines that our techno-future will soon give us a
world in which a brilliantly creative minority of our popula-
tion is extremely healthy, wealthy, comfortable, and stimulat-
ed by all the good things the world has to offer. The middle
class as we have understood it will wither away;
“average,”
as
Cowen writes,
“is
over.” People without the intelligence or
who are unable to acquire the complex skills required to work
readily with genius
“human
capital” and genius machines will,
if anything, be worse off economically. Their scripted work,
depending, as it does, on the intellectual labor of others, will
fall in value.
More and more of those who used to be in the middle will
languish as marginally productive beings, if they work at all.
We can all already see the consequences on family life when
the relatively unskilled work of ordinary men is either more
contingent and lower paying or disappearing altogether. Even
conservatives, such as Joel Kotkin, are writing books about
the proletarianization of the middle class, and some are even
in agreement with the Marxists on the emerging facts, if not
the values.
So at first we seem to see our population dividing into a
creative technological elite and mechanized many. But it is not
that simple. For one thing, many increasingly lack the
Soc (2014) 51:595–601
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habituation to function as cogs in a machine. We see that at
one time in our country mechanized labor—in factories and
on assembly lines—was quite compatible, due to unioniza-
tion, with family and religious life and dignified living in
general. It used to be common to take pride in being a reliable
cog at work for the sake of a relatively creative and fulfilling
life with family, church, and friends—enjoying various goods
that technology has made available to us all. Unions, of
course, depended on the relatively noncompetitive supremacy
of American industry, and unionization is incompatible with
the competitive rigor of the 21st-century global competitive
marketplace. Unionization, of course, was also responsible for
the disappearance of lots of relatively unskilled or mechanized
jobs from our country, jobs that will not, of course, be coming
back as unions fade away. Maybe the most troubling econom-
ic fact today is the lack of relatively unskilled or not-all-that-
cognitive work available, and so, for one thing, the declining
compensation and status for the scarce jobs still available.
Liberty, Inequality, and Democracy
Economic inequality in the country is increasing. But our
libertarians are right that inequality, by itself, hardly under-
mines the case for liberty. When Alexis de Tocqueville ob-
served that America is a middle-class country, with everybody
thinking of himself or herself as a free being who works, he
presented the American view of equality as equality under the
law and equality of opportunity. Americans understood that
equality so understood would produce great inequality in
wealth. They opposed any scheme that would lead to some
government redistribution of wealth in the name of economic
equality, for two reasons. They were very moralistic about
everyone having every incentive to work hard, and they all
hoped that through effort—and luck—to have more than most.
A free country, from this hopeful view, is a place where
everyone is getting better off, although some, because of their
hard work and natural gifts, more than others. Libertarians
always point to the progress of technology as benefitting us
all. Everyone is living longer, or at least everyone responsible
enough to attend to what we can all know about avoiding the
risk factors that imperil our health. In our march toward
indefinite longevity and even the Singularity—the moment
when we conscious beings are finally at home in immortally
reliable machines— it might be reasonable to hope that few
will be left behind. And almost everyone benefits from the
constant improvement and plummeting cost of the
“screen”—
from the smart phone to the tablet and laptop to the huge flat-
screened TV.
Generally speaking, it is quite amazing how democratic
techno-breakthroughs are: expensive and for the privileged
few at first, but widely available and very affordable soon
enough. If, as the film
Her
predicts, Americans will soon
prefer the virtual love and encouragement of an operating
system to a real girlfriend, it is reassuring that most of us will
have the wherewithal to have one. A trend we already see with
videogames and even Internet porn we can count on acceler-
ating indefinitely.
Although wages for most people might continue to stag-
nate or even decrease, Cowen reminds us of the many ways
technology has made
“cheap
fun” and
“cheap
education”
available to us all. For those with the brains and personal
discipline to enjoy the benefit, an education worthy of the
greatest minds is available for nearly free on line. It is more
true than ever that philosophers do not need much to live quite
well; Aristotle is more right than ever that the most worthy
human activity is least dependent on material resources.
Something similar can be said about home schooling and
other such alternative methods of self-improvement.
For those who cannot or will not take advantage of that
educational benefit and may find all the satisfaction they need
by being endlessly diverted by the sports, videogames, and
porn freely available on screens, we have to be unpuritanical
enough not to deny them their freedom to choose. The
idiocracy of irresponsible young men that we can already
see emerging in certain parts of our country will be amused
enough—especially if you add legalized marijuana—not to
think of themselves as having been reduced to nothing by
forces beyond their control. So it is the screen that keeps the
Marxist prediction from becoming true that the techno-
progress of the division of labor will lead to revolution as
freedom becomes, for most people, another word for
nothing left to lose.
It still might be getting less clear most Americans, howev-
er, that the progress of economic liberty has democratic ef-
fects. Productivity, thanks to techno-development and the
global competitive marketplace, has increased, but wages
have stagnated. One reason is that, since the 1960s, women
have flooded the marketplace, making competition for the
scarce resource of lucrative jobs newly tough. It takes two
incomes, typically, to sustain a middle-class family these days,
and that is, on balance, not an improvement in the quality of
family life. Middle-class Americans are dismayed at plans by
corporate leaders to flood our country today with immigrant
guest workers to perpetuate the trend of adding to productivity
without raising wages. They can distinguish between such
schemes, of course, and those designed to make the immi-
grants now here citizens, because they can distinguish be-
tween schemes that treat all Americans as equally dignified
citizens and those that reduce us all to mere workers.
Libertarian economists join our oligarchs in not being able
to make that distinction. They say, for example, that anyone
genuinely concerned about disparities of wealth throughout
the world would eliminate national barriers to markets, and
that appeals to citizenship is nothing but a form of rent-
seeking. The citizen as such is a collectivist, understanding
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Soc (2014) 51:595–601
himself as part of a whole greater than himself, and, in truth,
we free and conscious beings stuck in machines are properly
called individuals, producers, and consumers.
The Withering Away of Safety Nets
So libertarians celebrate the new birth of freedom that is the
power of the 21st century competitive marketplace to over-
whelm all forms of reactionary moral and political resistance.
But middle-class Americans can also see that the
“safety
nets”
on which we have come to rely to cushion the effects of
economic competition on our lives seem to be withering away.
They include, of course, employer and employee loyalty,
pensions, unions, and government entitlements.
Who would not be, to some extent, nostalgic for a time
when American businesses, lacking much effective competi-
tion from the rest of the world, could partner with labor to
create such a decently middle-class way of life in our country?
That nostalgia is not
“progressive”
but
“reactionary,”
but we
conservatives always wish that libertarians could take a mo-
ment to learn something from it. The real reason that
“right-to-
work” laws, funded lavishly by extremely rich Americans,
make headway in the states is that workers sadly perceive that
unions can no longer deliver what they once could. That
perception was behind the recent vote against unionization
at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. It is simply true that
the global competitive marketplace has made unionization
unsustainable, but that is not good news for the conditions
of and compensation for work.
All honest futurists acknowledge that robotization will
result in the loss of more and more jobs, meaning that fewer
people will really be productive at all. People, according to
Freud, find human life—with all its miseries—bearable
through personal love and worthwhile work. It is virtually
impossible for most people to see that worthwhile work need
not be productive, and even personal love rarely endures
unsupported by work lucrative enough to sustain families. It
is easy to doubt that there is going to be a new birth of
aristocratic leisure or even of the flourishing of whimsical
bohemianism that Marx unrealistically described as the end
of history. The new leisure is obviously about lives far less
noble than, say, the gentleman scholar—but also far less noble
than those found in the American middle class of the 20th
century.
Libertarians these days are spending more time than usual
lecturing ordinary Americans about being too envious. In a
free society, anyone who is industrious and rational—no
matter what or where he or she came from—can rise to wealth
and power based on real merit. That means that both justice
and self-interest demand that I stop being envious and start
working hard, and if I come up short, I have no one to blame
but myself. The democratic remedies for envy are shared
citizenship and shared opportunity, and there are reasons
why the experiences of citizenship and opportunity are getting
less common.
The libertarians are surely right that envy is one of most
obsessive, least enjoyable and least productive vices. The
noblest remedy for envy, of course, is being satisfied with
what you have, which is hard if you do not have or are losing
what it takes to live a dignified relational life. Another remedy
for envy is your conviction the rich and the privileged deserve
what they have. And it is easy to observe that in our free
society—despite all that government regulation—there is a
closer connection between real productivity—adding real val-
ue to the world—and wealth than ever. Still, it is natural to
believe that with privileges come responsibilities to those less
well off, and we can still admire the relatively selfless (and, of
course, somewhat self-deceptive) paternalism of Lord
Grantham on
Downton Abbey.
Members of today’s
“cognitive
elite” are too conscious that they have really earned their
money, and so they do not owe anyone anything else. They
really do form a new class—separated by money, power, and
habits from the rest of America—but they are very short on
“class”
in the positive sense. Even when they take an interest
and spend their money on behalf of ordinary Americans, it is
in the spirit of technocratic manipulation by experts, as in Bill
Gates and his Common Core. Or in the
“nudge
economics”
that works to affect the behavior while being untouched by the
souls of ordinary people, as in Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on the
giant sodas.
So there any many reasons why the equality of hope and
belief in work that have curbed American envy on behalf of a
universally middle-class society have broken down. It is just
no longer true that conservatives can say credibly that cutting
taxes on
“job
creators” and taking out as many regulations as
possible will spur growth that will benefit us all. We are in the
midst of the first of many jobless recoveries, the consequence
of the expert techno-perfection of the division of labor. Still, as
I have said, libertarian futurists have reason to believe that
envy will remain fairly ineffectual as a force curbing liberty on
behalf of democracy, precisely because more and more Amer-
icans no longer think as free beings who work.
Today, due to pathological family life, poor schools, and so
forth, an increasingly sizable percentage of the relatively non-
cognitive many no longer pick up the discipline even to be
reliable workers, and it is, after all, not that unreasonable for
them to conclude that the jobs still available to them are not
worth their time and effort. So the lower part of the middle-
class is not mainly failing in the direction of being cogs in
machines, as Marx predicted, working long, miserable hours
for subsistence wages. They are falling more in the direction
of self-indulgent chaos, diverted by what they see on screens
and propped up just enough by minimalist government enti-
tlements. It is because they lack the wherewithal to be middle
class in the traditional American sense; they, especially men,
Soc (2014) 51:595–601
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are becoming superfluous as political, familial, and economic
beings. They inspire neither hope nor fear in their betters. That
is why our new kind of meritocratic oligarch (or oligarch in
the precise sense) is eager to import immigrant guest workers
who have those requisite personal qualities, grounded, often,
in devout religious faith and strong, resilient families, to be
reliable workers.
Guest workers are more efficient for many reasons than
permanent new residents on the way to being citizens, given
that the need for them will decrease over time, as their reliably
mechanical behavior is displaced by robots. Care for the
elderly—a burgeoning burden on our aging society, for ex-
ample, might well be gradually transferred from our immi-
grants to robots that look like us and have been programmed
to be cleverly sensitive and responsive to human material and
emotional needs. They are already using such friendly robots
big-time in that nursing home we call Japan. And
Her
reminds
us why most people might prefer genius operating systems to
real girlfriends to open up to and with
“whom”
to have
genuinely intimate sexual lives. When I made fun of the
relationships displayed in that film on the hyper-techno
Big
Think
blog, more than one techno-nerd responded that I was
dissing real love. That might be one piece of evidence that
members of our cognitive elite are less free and creative—less
deeply personal—than they think they are. Or maybe we all
are: Studies from Japan really are showing that old people
often prefer their robots to their real relatives.
The Transhumanist Temptation
Libertarian futurists such as Cowen and Lindsey sometimes
write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—
the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of
“human
capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory
hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of
individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. Cowen says
“the
light at end of the tunnel” is the coming of a world in which we
will have plenty of everything, and all the time in the world to
play enjoyable games. Lindsey writes that Karl Marx’s view
of communism was wrong in only one respect: In order to live
in a world of bohemian enjoyment, we will need to remain
productive.
Wishing us nothing but good, the libertarians would have
us free ourselves from the puritanical repression that would
discourage enjoyment for any reason other than deferring
gratification to enhance productivity. Those who do defer
gratification intelligently—who can repress themselves, but
in the right way—deserve to have more money for toys than
those who insist on being gratified right now.
There are all kinds of problems with the Marxist/libertarian
light at the end of the tunnel, the promised realm of freedom
that Marx misleadingly calls communism. The utopia of
unobsessive or random enjoyment of one activity after
another must be a life unmoved by love and death. That is
why, apparently, there is no marriage and no familial raising of
children under communism. Somehow, I guess, the produc-
tion of adults is socialized—dependent on no one in particu-
lar—as is the production connected with the running of
machines.
The overcoming of natural scarcity seems to mean, for
Marx, that no sweaty or nasty work is going on in either
factories (with machines) or nurseries (with diapers). The
person is somehow freed from all the imperatives that come
with bodily necessity. Marx’s promise is not just, as we say
today, that women will be free to choose not to be moms; their
liberated lives will not be distorted by being determined by the
natural bonds of motherhood. Without that latter liberation,
women are not really free to choose.
We know, of course, that being a mom, and being a child,
and personal love in general will never really be lifestyle
options on some menu of choice. It is a self-indulgent fantasy
to put them outside the realm of what Elvis sang about; our
“can’t
helps” will always be there. They are the limits on our
freedom that in fact make life worth living. On that point, our
Darwinians will be never be completely wrong. We will
remain, among other things, guided by the natural instincts
of social animals. Our libertarians are relieved, of course, that
members of our cognitive elite today have decided to defer
gratification or
“romance”
not only by working hard but by
“investing”
in their children. Until the Singularity kicks in or
robots get smart enough, we will continue to need children to
insure our productive future. But our libertarians (or our
Marxists) are so good in explaining why some people prefer
spending quality times with their kids to playing games or
being creatively productive at work.
For now, the existentialists—from their unerotic view-
point—remain right that no self-conscious mortal can live a
life full of unobsessive enjoyments. They, being both too
“authentic”
and too
“hip”
to admit to being defined by love,
turn our attention to death—to our consciousness of our
contingency and mortality. If we were born only to be happy,
we would not have been born to die. So our lives in front of
screens can look like pathetic diversions from what we really
know. That is why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn heard just beneath
the surface of the happy-talk of American pragmatists the
howl of existentialism. And that is why many free persons
these days seem to experience their very being as more con-
tingent than ever. So they spend their lives obsessively trying
to avoid the risk factors that imperil their health and safety,
that could so easily be the cause of personal extinction. The
transhumanists, acknowledging the truth of this existentialist
criticism for now, agree with the Marxists that the utopia to
come would have to be one in which death itself literally has
no place in the thoughts and imagination of conscious beings.
Technology will not have really overcome scarcity until that

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