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The Rationality of Irrationality

One of the most well-known sociological theories is George Ritzer’s idea of McDonaldization. Ritzer based his idea on Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy and rationality. Weber was concerned that capitalism and industrialization were fueling a world where our individual freedoms were being eroded. He warned that we were increasingly living in an iron cage, as we become trapped in an impersonal world that values efficiency, rationality, and control over individuality and autonomy. Ritzer picked up on Weber’s concerns and adapted them to contemporary life

Ritzer’s theory of McDonaldization has four dimensions:

According to Marx, automation that displaces workers in favour of machines that can produce more goods in less time is part and parcel of how capitalism operates. By developing fixed capital (machines), bosses can do away with much of the variable capital (workers) that saps their bottom line with pesky things like wages and short work days.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.

In Marxist theory, capitalists create profit by extracting what’s called surplus value from workers—paying them less than what their time is worth and gaining the difference as profit after the commodity has been sold at market price, arrived at by metrics abstracted from the act of labour itself. So what happens when humans aren’t the ones working anymore? Curiously, Marx finds himself among the contemporary robotic utopianists in this regard. Once robots take over society’s productive forces, people will have more free time than ever before, which will “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation,” Marx wrote. Humans, once freed from the bonds of soul-crushing capitalist labour, will develop new means of social thought and cooperation outside of the wage relation that frames most of our interactions under capitalism. In short, Marx claimed that automation would bring about the end of capitalism

Tu devrais jeter cet œil inquiet (et attentif) au Rapport AI Now (2016). Tu devrais te soucier des thèmes qu’ils mettent en lumière, notamment en ce qui concerne les impacts sur le travail, la santé, l’égalité et l’éthique à l’heure où l’intelligence artificielle s’insinue dans nos vies quotidiennes.

Tu devrais réfléchir à la façon dont l’apprentissage machine change nos façons de travailler et le travail tout court. Tu devrais te préoccuper de l’impact de l’intelligence artificielle sur la création et la destruction de nos emplois, te soucier des questions éducatives, de formation à de nouveaux métiers et des allocations et modes de redistribution qui devraient résulter d’une reconfiguration du travail par l’IA. Tu devrais considérer la question de l’automatisation non pas seulement du point de vue de la robotique mais sous l’angle des infrastructures : comment les industries du transport, de la logistique, seront affectées par l’apprentissage machine ? Scoop : elles le sont déjà au prix de nombreux emplois.

Tu devrais te préoccuper des articles publiés par ProPublica sur les biais algorithmiques, notamment celui-ci qui explique comment les logiciels de police prédictive accusent de façon inconsidérée les noirs et beaucoup moins les blancs. Tu devrais te soucier de cet autre article de ProPublica qui indique que certains assureurs augmentent les prix pour les personnes de couleur. Les raisons sous-jacentes ne sont pas si claires mais selon ProPublica, des algorithmes prédateurs favorisent les quartiers blancs plus que les autres. La négligence derrière cette masse de données devrait t’inquiéter