What is it about?
Leaving behind the much too simplistic notion of automation as an (im)perfect sequence of technological mechanisms, this chapter aims to discuss the broad variety of manual labour involved in automation but left out of its attendance discourse. This silence about manual labour serves to maintain the fantasy of the automatic while the the gaps of inefficiency are closed with the labour time of others than those who enjoy the profits of automation.
Featured Image
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The chapter highlights how automation, rather than saving labour time, results in a total of time and labour-shifting effects upheld by a scaffolding of money, capital, and social relations. Thus, automation reinforces not only class relations but also gender relations and racialized hierarchies from which it originates.
Perspectives
Writing this article was an opportunity to bring the oft-missing perspective of time and labour-shifting effects of technology into the automation debate.
Christina Gratorp
Lunds Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Time to Automate: The Hidden Labour of Automation, September 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004703940_005.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
