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The Automation Charade

logicmag.io · 3,567 words · saved by 1 readers

An image from a Hoover catalog in the 1920s. A woman wears a mask that measures her carbon-dioxide exhalation while she vacuums, in order to assess how much energy she is expending. The catalog promises that “Hoover offers the least fatiguing way of cleaning carpets and rugs.” From the Smithsonian Libraries’ Trade Literature Collection. The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve? Somewhere, right now, a manager is intoning to a broke, exhausted underling that someone is willing to do the same job for less—or, that some thing is willing to do it for free. Since the dawn of market society, owners and bosses have revelled in telling workers they were replaceable. Robots lend this centuries-old dynamic a troubling new twist: employers threaten employees with the specter of machine competition, shirking responsibility for their avaricious disposition through opportunistic appeals to tech determinism. A “jobless future” is inevitable, we are told, an

The Automation Charade Astra Taylor The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve? Somewhere, right now, a manager is intoning to a broke, exhausted underling that someone is willing to do the same job for less—or, that some thing is willing to do it for free. Since the dawn of market society, owners and bosses have revelled in telling workers they were replaceable. Robots lend this centuries-old dynamic a troubling new twist: employers threaten employees with the specter of machine competition, shirking responsibility for their avaricious disposition thr

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