Via Yglesias, I find to my dismay that some alleged progressives at Lawyers, Guns, and Money are exulting in the failure of supermarkets to replace human checkers with automatic checking machines. Like Yglesias, I don’t think bemoaning automation in this way is helpful. He gives the empirical argument that slow productivity growth hasn’t historically been good for workers, and that too-low wages are probably one of the things impeding the adoption of productivity-enhancing technology. The second is an argument that I made before, specifically using the supermarket checkout machine as an example. But now I want to make a broader ideological point about this.

These two posts, the one from Erik Loomis and especially the follow up by “DJW,” contain two distinct arguments for the anti-machine position. To take the second and less compelling one first, there’s the claim that maybe being a supermarket checker isn’t so alienating and menial after all:

Secondly, this line of thinking makes some assumptions that I’m sympathetic to, but can’t entirely get on board with. First, the assumption that we can theorize about jobs in this concrete and certain way and determine that supermarket checker (and I assume many much worse jobs) are ‘menial’ and we should hope for a world in which humans don’t do that sort of thing. I like my early Marx, too, but I can’t get on board with this. I simply don’t think we have the tools to do this kind of universal theorizing about the essential nature and value of this or that job. People have long found meaning and dignity in all manner of repetitive and uncreative work. Others have approached the world of work with indifference; they work to pay the bills and finding meaning and value in other aspects of their lives. Marx, of course, chalked this sort of thing up to alienation and false consciousness and the like, but I’m more of pluralist about what a dignified and fully human life looks like. At a minimum, I don’t have all the answers, and have a healthy distrust of letting my own tastes and proclivities get in the way of respecting other’s ability to determine what they value about their lives on their own terms.