In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable.

At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project.

To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue.

Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP)

Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College

Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable.

At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project.

To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue.

Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP)

Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College

Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable.

At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project.

To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue.

Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP)

Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College

Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable.

At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project.

To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue.

Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP)

Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College

Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues

This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. He has [been] author/editor of five books on various aspects of political communication, journalism, and news media, including the award-winning “Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns”, and has published widely in both academic and general interest publications.

Paul Mason, Economics Editor at Channel 4 News, will speak on his book 'Postcapitalism'.

A lunchtime workshop of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project

In a landmark judgment on October 7 the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbour framework governing the transfer of EU citizens’ personal data to the US does not comply with the requirements of EU Data Protection law in light of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and is therefore invalid under EU law.

The Safe Harbour framework stemmed from a decision of the European Commission in 2000 (2000/520/EC) that the US afforded an adequate level of protection of personal data transferred to the US from the EU. This decision was made long before the EU Charter became part of EU law and more than a decade prior to the Edward Snowden revelations.

The ECJ’s judgment thus invalidates arrangements that for 15 years have allowed Internet companies to transfer the personal data of European users to server farms in the US and elsewhere. It has very wide-ranging implications — not just for data-protection law, but also for the economics of Internet companies and for international relations. This workshop will discuss some of those implications.

Panel: David Runciman (chair), John Naughton, Ross Anderson, Nora Ni Loideain

The political economy has morphed throughout recent decades into a digitally-structured capitalism. The lecture locates some primary features of this historical process in patterns of corporate capital investment in ICTs. It goes on to sketch the development of the politics of digitization, between the 1970s and today. A foremost conclusion is that, in contrast to the unabashed triumphalism that greeted the rise of the Internet as a pole of growth during the 1990s, today we are living amid both persistent economic stagnation and escalating political contention over the structure and control of the world’s information infrastructure.

Dan Schiller, Professor Emeritus of Library & Information Science and of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an historian of information and communications in the context of the five-hundred year development of the capitalist political economy. He has held Chairs at UCSD , UCLA and Temple Universities and is the author of several books including Digital Capitalism: networking the global market system (MIT Press, 1999) and, most recently, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (University of Illinois Press, 2014). He writes about the Internet and other communications systems for Le Monde Diplomatique. Presently, he is conducting archival research for a longstanding project on the history of US telecommunications and is visiting the Technology and Democracy project in CRASSH .

Dan Schiller in conversation with John Naughton and David Runciman

Part of the Technology and Democracy Research Project

http://www.techdem.crassh.cam.ac.uk

Abstract

Two aspects of ‘power’ are important in a networked world. One is the coercive, surveillance and other power exercised by states. The other is that wielded by the handful of large digital corporations that have come to dominate the Internet over the last two decades. Corporate power is the main focus of this talk, which explores a number of interrelated questions: What exactly is the nature of the power wielded by digital corporations? How does it differ from the kinds of power wielded by other, non-digital corporations? In what ways is it—or might it be—problematic? And are the legislative tools possessed by states for the regulation of corporate power fit for purpose in a digital era?

Speaker

John Naughton is a Senior Research Fellow in CRASSH , Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and the technology columnist of The Observer. He is (with Sir Richard Evans and David Runciman) co-director of the Leverhulme ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ research project, and (with David Runciman) co-director of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project in the Centre for Digital Knowledge in CRASSH . His most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet is published by Quercus.