Mechanical Turk

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