I, Robot: Work, Life, Design and Art in the Age of Automated Industrialism, Additive Manufacturing and the Self-Driving Automobile 2015 (original) (raw)
The post-industrial world is beginning to disappear. The shift to a markedly different social model, auto-industrialism, is underway. The signs of the transition from the post-industrial to the automated industrial era are everywhere. Go into any big supermarket retailer today, and what do you see: the self-service check-out. The auto-industrial era is an age of self-service. It is marked by a rising tide of do-it-your-self, automated, and robotic processes. There are continuities with the post-industrial age. The ubiquitous computer remains ubiquitous. But some things already look different. The paper explores the challenges for organizations and the prospects for work in the auto-industrial age, including the decline in demand for routine blue-collar, white-collar and professional work, and the rise in demand for 'creative work'. The talk asks what exactly is 'creative work' and who does it?
Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2017
This article compares two examples of industrial patronage in the late 1950s. The first is the 1958 filming of Le Chant du styrène by filmmaker Alain Resnais, with a voiceover of a poem by Raymond Queneau, with funding from the Péchiney firm. The second is the 1959 exhibition Forces et rythmes de l'industrie ("Forces and Rhythmes of Industry") by painter Reynold Arnould, organized with funding from 12 major French companies. We show how similar these two operations were, from two perspectives: first, the logic behind arts patronage for major firms of the time, and second, the esthetic and social issues at stake for the representation of industry in the context of the debate on automation. An historic and esthetic analysis of Resnais' film and Arnould's canvases provides an opportunity to discuss the societal concerns of this period of accelerated industrial development in Europe in the 1950s. We then look at the perspective of these artists in light of the work of sociologists from this period, who were conducting fieldwork in the same factories that Resnais filmed and Arnould painted.
The 'Social Paradigm' of Automation
Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten, 2024
The lineage of industrialisation that began in the eighteenth century continues with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). It reveals a heuristic apparent in/as the social paradigm that defines labour as interchangeable with the machinery it operates. Placing AI into a socio-cultural context with the industrial revolution reveals the on-going impacts of the social disparities created by capitalist production in the nineteenth century that were justified by reifying Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy concerning judgement (human agency) continue to shape contemporary developments. Examining this philosophical justification and its influence illuminates a social paradigm focused on the replacement of labour with automation. This interdisciplinary approach links moral and aesthetic claims to the questions of labour to reveal a heuristic in which workers were cast as the “intellectual organs” of the machine, anticipating “machine learning” and other forms of digital automation that replace intelligent labour. This cultural foundation developes from the continuity of technological changes that defined each stage of industrialisation through disparate social, cultural and aesthetic claims about machinery and the social significance of the industrial factory. The regimentation of labour by industrialization concerned nineteenth century artists and critics whose ideas established an archetype whose structural effects shape and constrain the contemporary implementation of automation and AI.
"Shitty Automation": Art, Artificial Intelligence, Humans in the Loop
Media-N, 2020
This essay adapts the concept of "shitty automation," developed by Brian Merchant to name frustrating experiences with automated systems, to describe how human input-our labor, bodies, biases, prejudices, and desires-remains invisibly present in automated systems. Tracing a lineage of automation from Jacques de Vaucanson's Canard Digérateur (1739) and Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical Turk (1770) to contemporary artist Trevor Paglen, who uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create artworks, this essay considers how humans "stay in the loop" in automation and what "shitty automation" reveals about human culture, our desires, and the evolution of AI.
xCoAx, 2023
The question if machines can make art has existed since before the industrial revolution. This research aims to clarify if this goal is attainable by comparing two case studies: Méta-Matic No. 10, a machine built by Jean Tinguely in 1959, and Ai-Da Robot, an ultra-realistic robot using Artificial Intelligence, invented in 2019. Both machines were built with similar intentions. This research demonstrates how the low-tech aspect of the former case study facilitates its status as an art-creating entity compared to its latter code-reliant counterpart. Furthermore, this research addresses questions surrounding authorship, creativity and embodiment and examines to which degree each of these aspects is relevant to a claim of machine-made art.
Automated Labor: The 'New Aesthetic' and Immaterial Physicality
Ctheory, 2013
This essay considers Karl Marx short essay ‘The Fragment on Machines’ and its relationship to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ described by James Bridle is a typical example of this new, automated labor beginning to impact the physical world and provides a reference point for the examination of ‘The Fragment on Machines’: Marx divided labor into three categories (means, material and living labor) that is in the process of being reorganized by digital automated systems (in both immaterial labor and physical production forms). This reorganization forces an underlying paradox in capitalism into focus, foregrounding the mismatch between a capitalist productive system and the consumer society required to maintain that system, a paradox that emerges precisely because exchange value emerges from the relationship between one commodity and another—from the exchange of a commodity for the acquisition of another: human labor is the underlying commodity required by this entire system, a commodity rendered obsolete by digital automation; the ‘new aesthetic’ provides physical examples of this transition-in-progress.
ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
This article is an ethnographic exploration of robot anthropomorphism at a robotics company. It draws on a 10-month participatory ethnography among a robotics company, an anthropologist, and a social robotics research lab. In contrast to psychological methods, this anthropological participatory ethnography integrates all stakeholders’ insights, offering holistic understandings of robots’ in situ operations throughout the fieldwork, data-sharing, interviews, and analysis. In particular, this article unravels employee social constructions of the company’s self-driving factory transport vehicles, “the robots.” These robots are deployed across a variety of warehouses and factories in North America. Our results involve an assessment of six teams at the robotics company’s headquarters: those testing robots, those developing their hardware and software, and those working with customers. We unpack trends of anthropomorphism for each of these teams and across the company.
Robótica cultural: sobre las imbricaciones entre la identidad y la autonomía en personas y máquinas
Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 2013
In this paper, we introduce the phrase "cultural robotics" to refer to the interdisciplinary analysis of autonomous machines and their mutual construction with society: as culture constructs robots, they are (re)constructing us. The objects we study range from industrial manufacturing devices to socially-intelligent robots (SIRs), and our disciplinary frameworks include humanities-oriented approaches-cultural anthropology and graphic design in particular-as well as cybernetics and computational sciences. We will examine the cultural significance of two SIRs portrayed in pop culture, analyze the socio-technical history of autonomous devices such as the master-slave circuit, and explore the ways in which such observations might contribute to efforts such as participatory design (discussed here in terms of Bennett's "interactive aesthetics"). We conclude with a recent case study in which racial identity and robot design had direct intersections. Like Haraway and Latour, we aim
nformation, Communication, and Automation Technology Ethics in the Knowledge Society Age, 2018
The thoughts presented and discussed in this essay all point to the critical conception that technology is never in any general sense ‘neutral’, although, as I will try to show, modern technology and its (techno)scientific base is quite largely, although sometimes implicitly and unconsciously, understood to be so. The reason for this non-neutrality is, as I will argue, that technology and its science is always and inescapably rooted in and informed by human interpersonal relationships. Moreover, technology is thus also always embedded in a cultural context. Or differently put, an irreducible part of social organization and its imagination, worldview and ideology. Throughout the essay I will place in dialogue contemporary issues and phenomena revolving around (especially) automation technology with the visions, claims and notions of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, two of the most influential programmatic pioneers of modern technoscience. In sections two and three this dialogical exchange centers on social, political and economic issues with a special focus on the themes of labor and equality. The fourth and final section transitions over to a critical discussion on how the modern technoscientific imagination, with its technological understanding of truth/nature/being, is conceived as answering and overcoming existential concerns about human life and its mindedness.
On the Pending Robot Revolution and the Utopia of Human Agency
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
A hallmark of modernist thought is the belief in science and technology as a socially revolutionary force. Consequently, new technologies have often been sequenced by pictures of another world to be. The birth of electronic data processing (EDP) was no exception. Provoking both hopes and anxieties, EDP and its subsequent process of automation has, ever since the launch of the first electronic data processing machines in the early 1950’s, been a cornerstone for countless extravagant visions of the future, such as the thought of an ever so impending “Robot Revolution”. This article builds from the basic assumption that visions of the future draw on notions of what at a given time is considered socially and politically desirable, unwanted or at all possible. It thus argues that the robot revolution could be studied as a form of reified anticipation through which possible social trajectories are made symbolically comprehensible. Focusing on the automation debate of the Swedish 1950’s, I...
Creativity, Co-evolution and Co-production: The Machine as Art and as Artist
Computational Creativity , 2024
With the understanding that art and technology continue to experience a (rapidly escalating) historical rapprochement, but also with the understanding that our comprehension of art and technology has tended to be constrained by scientific rigour and calculative thinking by one side, or have tended to change to the extreme from the lyrical: the objective of this article is to provide a reflective look for artists, humanists, scientists and engineers to consider these developments from the broader perspective it deserves, while maintaining a focus on what should be the emerging core of this topic which is the relationship between art, technology and science: the state of the art in mechatronics and computing today is such that we can now begin to speak comfortably of the machine as artist, and we can begin to hope, too, that an aesthetic sensibility on the part of the machine might help generate an intelligent more friendly and responsive machine agency overall. The principle of the inhuman emphasises that the questions of ontology are not questions of being as subject, of being as consciousness, of being as Dasein, of being as body, of being as language, of being as human or of being as power, but of being as being. Finally, the ontological principle hypotheses that all beings are ontologically on an equal footing or that all are to the extent that they make a difference. However, until now not much has been said about “algorithmic entities”. From the above, it is clear that there are still many unanswered questions, for example: How to raise the question of techno-diversity when intellectuals yearn for a general artificial intelligence? We must go back to history to orient ourselves in our current situation with a sense of distance. Will it be possible to find strategies to free ourselves from this apocalyptic end of technological singularity and reopen the question of the creative future in machines in relation to humans?
Waiting for robots: the ever-elusive myth of automation and the global exploitation of digital labor
Sociologias, 2021
Discourses of robotic replacement and of the end of work have survived to the present day. But more and more voices now challenge the very idea that technological innovation is necessarily conducive to job loss. According to several studies, new high-tech jobs is accompanied by an even bigger low-tech job creation, and AI can be expected to be no exception. Based on new evidence about the role of human-annotated data in machine learning and algorithmic solutions, a new generation of scholars are now studying the germane phenomena of “heteromation”, “automation last mile” or, more simply, platform-based digital labor needed to generate, train, verify, and sometimes modify in real-time huge quantities of examples that machines are supposed to learn from. Digital labor designates datified and taskified human activities. The first type of platform occupation ison-demand labor. The second type of platform-based digital labor ismicrowork. Finally, the third type of digital labor issocial ...
Design Capitalism: Design, Economics and Innovation in the Auto-Industrial Age 2015
Automation is replacing white-collar office work and non-dexterous manual work, causing major structural change in the job market. As advanced economies shift from a post-industrial to an auto-industrial model, all kinds of routine work is being replaced by machines. Mid-range job opportunities are shrinking, and labor markets are polarizing. Demand for dexterous service work nevertheless remains strong, as does demand for abstract labor working with patterns rather than with rules or procedures. Design is a mid-tier occupation that is growing rather than declining. " Design " is also a metaphor for abstract labor of all kinds; it exemplifies work that is creative, innovative, problem-solving, and reliant on judgment rather than rules. Heightened demand for abstract labor reflects the evolving nature of capitalist economies. The contribution of invention, ingenuity and imagination to the creation of economic value continues to expand. The auto-industrial era is coeval with design capitalism ; together they represent a key dimension of future economics.
This machine could bite: On the role of non-benign art robots
2017
The social robot's current and anticipated roles as butler, teacher, receptionist or carer for the elderly share a fundamental anthropocentric bias: they are designed to be benign, to facilitate a transaction that aims to be both useful to and simple for the human. At a time when intelligent machines are becoming a tangible prospect, such a bias does not leave much room for exploring and understanding the ongoing changes affecting the relation between humans and our technological environment. Can art robotsrobots invented by artists-offer a non-benign-by-default perspective that opens the field for a machine to express its machinic potential beyond the limits imposed by an anthropocentric and market-driven approach? The paper addresses these questions by considering and contextualising early cybernetic machines, current developments in social robotics, and art robots by the author and other artists.
Tecnoscienza, 2024
This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multiple intersections between Artificial Intelligence (AI), work, and organization, mobilizing different research strands such as STS and Organization Theory, as well as the History of Science and Technology and Cultural Sociology. Matteo Pasquinelli proposes an exploration of theories of automation drawn from political economy and the history of science and technology, investigating their explanatory accounts of technological innovation. As argued by the author, these theories provide important foundations for unveiling the socio-technical genealogy of current forms of AI as well as the specific logic of automation that they follow.