Key Points
During the Industrial Revolution, capitalists organised workers in mills and factories to ensure the division of labour could increase output and profitability..
The great hope then was that mechanisation would accelerate the pace of trade, while enriching lives of workers, many of whom were skilled craftsmen, through guaranteed employment and regular wages...
Realising that simply organising labour was insufficient to sustain growth and profits, capitalists organised markets around efficient processes and supply chains, giving rise to new service industries in the process...
And now, the doyens of the Digital Revolution assure us that intelligent automation, LLM platforms like ChatGPT, and other AI-powered algorithms can utterly transform the workplace, freeing up human time for more intellectual work and creative pursuits..
But it is also capable of supporting the third consideration even more dramatically, by making certain functions of labour - the most unpredictable, unreliable, and uneconomical factor in many service-focused and specialised manufacturing firms - redundant altogether..
