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On October 25th, the Seminar was led through a discussion on automation, AI, and the future of work by a fellow participant: recent Virginia Tech graduate and Information Ecosystems Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral fellow Mario Khreiche. Mario discussed his recent publication in Fast Capitalism, “The Twilight of Automation,” in which he theorizes about “the scope and rate whereby human labor will be replaced by machines” (117). Throughout both this conversation on the 25th, and during his public talk the day before, Khreiche clarified that his approach is not a luddite one; he was quick to point out that AI and automation is, first of all, far from a recent concern—historical perspectives can do much to quiet our contemporary moments of panic—and secondly, that reducing AI and automation to its flaws would be, well, reductionist. Anyone who has spent time, for example, formatting citations on a laptop could imagine how much slower and more painful the whole ordeal would be on a manual typewriter. Khreiche has done an excellent job, then, of illuminating necessary critiques about automation without ignoring its multitude of perks. Khreiche spent much of his time examining the “gig economy” or “gigconomy,” in which temporary, part-time jobs are increasingly replacing the availability of lifelong careers. Khreiche specifically mentioned a part-time earner’s potential amalgamation of Uber, TaskRabbit, Amazon delivery, and Airbnb—a combination of gigs which I have actually met several millennials currently dabbling in at the same time. For those of you asking: what’s the big deal with that? As Khreiche himself points out, “automation unfolds Read More

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The University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Information Ecosystems, turned its attention to automation and artificial intelligence on Friday, Oct. 25, when the seminar’s postdoctoral fellow Mario Khreiche presented his research related to the future of work in an age of increasing automation. Khreiche can be described as neither a positivist nor a dystopian. His work lies somewhere in the middle. While he states in his 2019 paper “The Twilight of Automation,” published in Fast Capitalism this fall, “an unchecked project of automation is both ill-conceived and ill-fated” (117) he also takes to task postcapitalist interventions, which he argues “suffers from a certain naïveté, in that its authors undertheorize how emerging technologies unfold as sociotechnical systems, rather than isolated machines” (121).  Khreiche is interested in what he calls a “more nuanced question” – something along the lines of trying to figure out how a company like Uber can adapt or change systems to make them less susceptible to technological redlining, for example. In particular, Khreiche keeps asking what is new about this technological revolution. Work has changed many times in the past: think the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the first computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The Luddites of the nineteenth century smashed weaving machines – but not, as is commonly thought and as the term “Luddite” as it is used today indicates, because they were against technology of any kind. Rather, they were concerned about mechanization being used as a way to exploit workers and produce lower-quality goods. This technological Read More