11. Automated Progress? Questioning Techno-optimistic Projections For Automation and the Future of Work.
Patrick Baur, University of Rhode Island; Alastair Iles, UC Berkeley
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Over the past decade, techno-optimistic visions of automation have become ubiquitous, evident in domains ranging from self-driving cars and farm tractors to auto-complete features in word processors and automated customer service bots. Increasingly, society seems to have passively accepted that automation drives progress. Yet these visions have not spontaneously emerged from the aether, and many visions are hardly new: a future filled with self-driving cars, for instance, was first imagined at the 1939 World’s Fair (Norton 2022). In this panel, we invite conversation and inquiry into the extensive (yet often obscured) work required to frame automation as a powerful and inevitable path to utopia, the resistances to such frames, and the hidden consequences of mass buy-in to resulting techno-optimistic visions for automation.
For our open panel, automation includes, but is not limited to, technologies in the areas of mechanization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics that can be applied to agriculture, transportation, education, manufacturing, consumption, health care, energy, and other areas. Commonly, boosters frame automation as a solution to ‘problems’ associated with human work (such as inefficiency, lack of intelligence, fallibility, and rebelliousness). They frequently portray automation as offering novel capabilities that human actors lack (e.g. identifying patterns that human brains cannot see). Sometimes, automation is proposed as a way to solve the problems that earlier generations of machines have created (such as making cars safer or identifying disinformation spread through social media), or to bridge gaps in what those machines were able to do. The subtext is that progress means minimizing, even eliminating, human work.
Crucially, automation is frequently depicted as inevitable, transformative, and (implicitly) equitable. Boosters concoct grand, glittering visions of promise that are always some decades in the future. They point to workers being empowered to do better quality work and to consumers having more freedom to enjoy products and services. Yet the social and environmental costs of automation are seen as irrelevant—or never acknowledged at all—in the face of the projected progress. Historically, visions of automation have seldom been realized fully, if at all, suggesting that powerful resistances can push back against this technology, or that the projected vision does not need to come to fruition for the technology to ‘succeed’.
We welcome papers on topics such as:
How does automation displace (as opposed to replace) labor and work? Is automation ever truly automated?
How does automation pretend to be automatic and inevitable? Techno-optimism frames automation in such a way as to highlight projected benefits while glossing over potential harms. How do techno-optimist accounts produce and maintain such lopsided narratives?
What requirements does automation have in order to work? What (or who) needs to change, what are the resistances (or who resists), and how are these ‘overcome’ or not?
What does automation “working” actually look like in practice for different sectors (as distinct from the glossy visions of what automation is supposed to do)?
Are there cases in which automation improves livelihoods and the conditions of human labor (e.g. is actually labor-enhancing rather than just labor-replacing)?
How does automation intersect with pre-existing political economic structures? Who stands to benefit in power and wealth as a result of automation? Who will bear the risks and burdens? How does automation actually redistribute power and wealth (or not)?
Can automation be “democratized”? If so, how and in what ways? What does this even mean? What can we learn from technological justice and sovereignty?
