ILPC 2027

 What’s Different About Digitalisation?

A recent report from the OECD (OECD, May 2016) claims that digitalisation is ‘a key influence on the future of work over the next decades’. The onset of ‘ever increasing computer power, Big Data, the penetration of the internet, Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet-of-Things, and on-line platforms are among developments radically changing prospects for the types of jobs that will be needed in the future and how, where and by whom they will be done’. These claims from the OECD are matched by popular commentary, with a variety of associated predictions ranging from visions such as the coming of singularity -the technical point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence (Kurzweil, 2005), to a post-capitalist world where ‘knowledge-driven production tends towards the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended’ (Mason, 2015). For academics, such a new era, whereby the accumulation of knowledge usurps the accumulation of capital as the driver of the system, has been variously labelled the era of ‘communicative capitalism’ a shared economic space dominated by digital artisans (Barbrook, 1998), and ‘free’ and  ‘immaterial labour’ (Terranova, 2000). All of this assumes that digitalisation has a more profound and transformative effect on work than previous forms of technical innovation, essentially because of the claimed huge leaps in productivity that it would enable, fed by the ability of software to rewrite itself, thus releasing humans from the process of work. Utilising a Marxist perspective of technology, capitalism and value formation this paper seeks to address these claims by assessing the evidence of productivity enhancement through digitalisation, and by critiquing the consequent ability of digitalisation to de-materialise production and capital accumulation.