Dispositions towards automation: Capital, technology, and labour relations in aeromobilities

Abstract

With the rapid rise of supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and advanced forms of robotics, recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in automation in the academy. In geography, scholars have yielded some important insights on the mottled relations between humans and machines as capital moves towards a more high-tech form of production. In this paper, we seek to extend these debates by delving into how labour's relations with automation do not always reactively vacillate between capitulation and adaptation. Instead, they are more ambiguously swayed by broader ‘dispositions towards automation’, which are generated either through practice, or by machines themselves that are designed to appeal to human desires and wants. Drawing on examples from aeromobilities and, particularly, airports, this paper shows how various in-process tendencies, or ‘points of meeting’, of human-technology assemblages enable and creatively rework automation in ways that are culturally specific and ideologically supportive of capital. We consider five different dispositions – namely, enchantment, aspiration, experimentation, gamification, and acquiescence – as starting points for further dialogues on technological relations and resistances in geography.