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

Reading through the dozens of science AMAs that have been conducted on Reddit, it seems evident that r/science is fulfilling a need that may have been previously unforeseen by the scientific community of researchers who spend years toiling in obscurity, testing and retesting their hypotheses so that one day their hard work may see the light of day in the form of a journal article. In a world where scholarly journals are often frustratingly difficult to access by the general public, there remains a demand in the market for a way to remove the friction between scientists and non scientists. With the rise of MOOCs and other discussion tools like Reddit, science communication is transcending its heretofore gatekeepers. “My personal belief, in the end, is that scientists really work for the people,” said Mason. “We’re allowed to follow our intellectual curiosity insomuch as we share it with other human beings.” With six months of AMAs and thousands of questions uploaded, Reddit’s Science AMA series seems to have brought us significantly closer to that goal.

Déjà présents en magasin afin de contextualiser l’expérience client indoor et redonner de la valeur à l’espace physique, les Beacons, ces mini-capteurs bluetooth basse consommation, veulent s’installer en entreprise et bâtir les prémisses de la "smart company". Apple, l’un des groupes ayant testé le premier cette technologie a ainsi décidé d’équiper les entreprises de ses ibeacons. Non pas pour surveiller de près les aller-venues des employés mais plutôt pour améliorer la collaboration en entreprise.

Dans le cas d’une réunion, toutes les personnes y assistant recevront une notification sur leur smartphone avec les informations de l’intervenant qu’il aura souhaité partagé avec eux. Les employés peuvent cependant contrôler ce qu’ils partagent en fonction des salles de réunion dans laquelle ils se trouvent. De plus, Robin permet aussi de partager du contenu: un document sur un compte Dropbox peut être synchronisé sur tous les appareils présents dans la salle à l’entrée même de la personne possédant le compte, facilitant ainsi le travail d’équipe.

“Many of the middle-skill jobs that persist in the future will combine routine technical tasks with the set of non-routine tasks in which workers hold comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, flexibility, adaptability and problem-solving,” Mr. Autor writes. He specifically mentions medical support jobs, building trades and some clerical jobs that require decision-making rather than typing and filing.In the paper, Mr. Autor presents data showing that these middle-skill jobs have indeed been under pressure over the last few decades, with much stronger growth in the number of both very basic low-paying jobs and the most advanced jobs for skilled professionals. It is a hollowing-out of the American work force, in effect, with fewer jobs for technicians and factory workers and the middle-class wages that come with them.

“I expect that a significant stratum of middle-skill, non-college jobs combining specific vocational skills with foundational middle skills — literacy, numeracy, adaptability, problem-solving and common sense — will persist in the coming decades.” He argues that it is hard to blame computerization for jobs that have disappeared over the last decade in that much of the shift happened after capital investment in information technology fell following the collapse of the dot-com bubble.

La consultation directe des salariés lors de négociations collectives est, quant à elle, appréhendée sous plusieurs facettes juridiquement encadrées ou non ; le recours au référendum peut ainsi répondre à de multiples logiques, entre stratégie de « passage en force » et démarche participative. Enfin, si la médiation renvoie d’abord à l’intervention d’un tiers en cas de conflit social, une acception plus large permet d’envisager le rôle facilitateur de différents acteurs externes tout au long du processus de négociation (consultants, experts, avocats, etc).