Inhuman Power

Dyer‐Witheford, Nick; Kjøsen, Atle Mikkola; Steinhoff, James

doi:10.2307/j.ctvj4sxc6

Cited by 98 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…This resulted in not-sodesirable outcomes, such as massive manipulation in the US and the Social Credit Systems in China. In contrast, these societal concerns raised a debate in Europe about digital rights and AI-driven algorithmic disruption by spurring a call to action (Dyer-Witheford, Kjosen, & Steinhoff, 2019). Ultimately, the book ends up with Resetting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Review: Smart City Citizenship

Calzada

2021

JCUA

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Against the backdrop of the current hyperconnected and highly virialised post-COVID-19 societies, we, ‘pandemic citizens’, wherever we are located now, have already become tiny chips inside an algorithmic giant system that nobody really understands. Furthermore, over the last decade, the increasing propagation of sensors and data collections machines and data collections machines in the so-called Smart Cities by both the public and the private sector has created democratic challenges around AI, surveillance capitalism, and protecting citizens’ digital rights to privacy and ownership. Consequently, the demise of democracy is clearly already one of the biggest policy challenges of our time, and the undermining of citizens’ digital rights is part of this issue, particularly when many ‘pandemic citizens’ will likely be unemployed during the COVID-19 crisis. Amidst the AI-driven algorithmic disruption and surveillance capitalism, this book review sheds light on the way citizens take control of the Smart City, and not viceversa, by revolving around the new book entitled Smart City Citizenship recently published by Elsevier. The book review introduces nine key ideas including how to (1) deconstruct, (2) unplug, (3) decipher, (4) democratise, (5) replicate, (6) devolve, (7) commonise, (8) protect, and (9) reset Smart City Citizenship.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Review: Smart City Citizenship

Calzada

2021

JCUA

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“…Digital machinery feeds on workers’ mental and sensory operations as much as their muscle. Rather than representing the liberated cognitive power of the multitude, here Marx’s general intellect should be seen as “capital’s accumulated machinic capacities, excised from social human labour” (Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen, and Steinhoff 2019, 31; see also Briken 2020). The question then becomes, which capacities, how, and to what extent are they excised or snatched?…”

Section: Humans and Machines In The Digital Workplacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Amazon is still far from building its first lights-out FC, that is, achieving full automation. The automated warehouse is rather imagined as a workplace in which the relationship between workers and machines keeps shifting in favor of the latter (Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen, and Steinhoff 2019). Worker displacement is an incremental project, and the changing technical composition imagined in patents tends to assume the coexistence of humans and robots on the shop floor.…”

Section: The Project Of Worker Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanly Extended Automation or the Future of Work Seen through Amazon Patents

Delfanti

Frey

2020

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Amazon’s projects for future automation contribute to anxieties about the marginalization of living labor in warehousing. Yet, a systematic analysis of patents owned by Amazon suggests that workers are not about to disappear from the warehouse floor. Many patents portray machines that increase worker surveillance and work rhythms. Others aim at incorporating workers’ activities into machinery to rationalize the labor process in an ever more pervasive form of digital Taylorism. Patents materialize the company’s desire for a technological future in which workers act and sense on behalf of machinery, becoming its living and sensing appendages. In this new relationship, humans extend machinery and its reach. Through the work-in-progress process of reaching increasing levels of automation, Amazon develops new technical foundations that consolidate its power in the digital workplace.

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“…In this part of the article I briefly touch upon the “ideal types” of the two major circulating visions of the future of work that dominate this debate by experts in the West. Other ideal types could be constructed as well, but the positions I base the latter two on cover a large proportion of the expert debate according to numerous authors (Boyd and Holton, 2018; Dyer-Witherford et al , 2019). Similarly to the approach described in Pulkka (2019, p. 24), ideal types are used in this article to help understand the “foremost divisions” in the debate, building on Weber's concept of ideal types.…”

Section: The Future-of-work Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…have published studies engaging with the topic. A key question in these mainstream discussions in the West is what the effect of AI and robotics on employment is going to be (Dyer-Witherford et al , 2019). A number of governments and think tanks have engaged with how to deal with the potential impact of employment issues linked to automation, AI and robotics (Bailey and Barley, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial intelligence and the future of work – lessons from the sociology of expectations

Vicsek

2020

IJSSP

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PurposeWhat is the future of work going to look like? The aim of this paper is to show how the sociology of expectations (SE) – which deals with the power of visions – can make important contributions in terms of thinking about this issue by critically evaluating the dominant expert positions related to the future-of-employment- and artificial intelligence (AI) debate.Design/methodology/approachAfter providing a literature review regarding SE, an approach based on the latter is applied to interpret the dominant ideal-type expert positions in the future of work debate to illustrate the value of this perspective.FindingsDominant future scripts can be characterized by a focus on the effects of AI technology that give agency to technology and to the future, involve the hype of expectations with polarized frames, and obscure uncertainty. It is argued that these expectations can have significant consequences. They contribute to the closing off of alternative pathways to the future by making some conversations possible, while hindering others. In order to advance understanding, more sophisticated theorizing is needed which goes beyond these positions and which takes uncertainty and the mutual shaping of technology and society into account – including the role expectations play.Research limitations/implicationsThe study asserts that the dominant positions contain problematic assumptions. It makes suggestions for helping move beyond these current framings of the debate theoretically. It also argues that scenario building and backcasting are two tools that could help move forward thinking about the future of work – especially if this is done in a way so as to build strongly on SE.Practical implicationsThe arguments presented herein enhance sense-making in relation to the future-of-work debate, and can contribute to policy development.Originality/valueThere is a lack of adequate exploration of the role of visions related to AI and their consequences. This paper attempts to address this gap by applying an SE approach and emphasizing the performative force of visions.

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Inhuman Power

Cited by 98 publications

References 0 publications

Book Review: Smart City Citizenship

Book Review: Smart City Citizenship

Humanly Extended Automation or the Future of Work Seen through Amazon Patents

Artificial intelligence and the future of work – lessons from the sociology of expectations

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