Abstract
Abstract On “Amazon Prime Day” in 2019, Amazon workers across the globe went on strike to protest working conditions; protesters held up banners demanding “Human Workloads,” with the message “We Are Not Robots.” The fantasy of automation—its promises and pitfalls—is a mainstay of contemporary public discourse, organizing the ways we work and live. In this review essay, Zara Dinnen reads three recent scholarly, political, and artistic contributions to knowledge of automation: Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation by Jason E. Smith; Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures by Caroline Basset, Sarah Kember and Kate O’Riordan; and Atlas of Anomalous AI edited by Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell. Each book offers a critical standpoint from which to apprehend and witness the situation of automation as it determines material and imaginary conditions of labor today. In conversation, the three works contest the ethical and political terrain of automation as a signifier of growth and progress under late capitalism.
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