Automation Now and Then: Automation Fevers, Anxieties and Utopias

Abstract

This article discusses the cyclical nature of automation anxiety and examines ways of thinking about the recurrence of automation debates in culture, particularly with reference to the 1950s, 1960s and today. It draws on the concept of topos, developed by Erkki Huhtamo, to explore the return of automation anxieties (and fevers) and the relationship between material formations and technological imaginaries. We focus in particular on recent left thinking where automation is used to invoke a postcapitalist utopia. Examples include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) and Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (2018). This strand of contemporary thinking is re-framed through our return to early automation scares emerging in the late 1960s. We explore engagements between labour, civil rights, left public intellectuals, and emerging industrial figures, over questions of automation and work. We pay particular attention to questions of 'who benefits and when?' These are germane to the question of utopian futures or non-reformist reformism as it recurs today. What interests us here is the concept of revived salience: not only how the tropes evident in these debates are revived and re-embedded today, but how do they find their force, and what do they imply.

AI as a boss? A national US survey of predispositions governing comfort with expanded AI roles in society

“…As mentioned above, anxiety about AI is not a new phenomenon (Bassett and Roberts 2019). What followed the "automation hysteria" of the 1950s and 1960s was neither mass unemployment nor an eternal stasis.…”

“…In this, we see echoes of the "automation hysteria" (Terborgh 1965) that stemmed from the cybernetics movement in the mid-twentieth century. In short, concerns abounded that, in the same way that the human arm was replaced by industrial machines, the next industrial revolution would see the human brain replaced by "technologies of communication and control" (Weiner 1948;in Bassett and Roberts 2019).…”

“…Society is currently facing another big technological change in robotization and Artificial intelligence (AI) integration, which has the same dramatic potential for change in people's lives as has the computer/Internet revolution. Depending on whom you ask, robots and AI harken a third or fourth industrial revolution (Rifkin 2011;Floridi 2014;Schwab 2017), one that has its roots not only in the Internet revolution and the concomitant digital transformation of society via information communication technologies (ICTs), but also further back in the twentieth century's shift to industrial automation (Bassett and Roberts 2019). As automation reaches beyond industry into the social and personal spheres of our lives, integrated robotic and AI technology become the culmination of these transformations.…”

What is robotics made of? The interdisciplinary politics of robotics research

“…Better robotics solutions here, according to the robotics researchers, are those mediated and co-created with a wider range of end-users and societal actors. This is in stark contrast to historic and contemporary anxieties of automation-which fear how technology might closedown personal and collective freedoms (Bassett and Roberts, 2019)-and demonstrates how interdisciplinary capabilities might support a plurality of possible robotics futures.…”

Discontinuous continuity

“…5 Chapter 4 of this book is in oblique dialogue with Huhtamo's serialization of interactivity, undertaken in relation to automation. I return to some of the same grounds but establish vectors that bring cybernation debates back into play in relation to labour-precarity issues rather than following his trail, which links cybernation to interactivity as a medium form (Huhtamo, 1999, see also Bassett and Roberts, 2020). 6 Their limited capacity to 'remember' is, however, something that differentiates them from other more forms of machine learning -for instance, Markov chains.…”