Re: <nettime> alternative visions/projects of automation

Interesting old stuff from the 1970s/80s might be to look at how the labour movement thought about building their own technology and addressed the issue of Artificial Intelligence/automation.

Mike Cooley passed away last year but he was one of the leading thinkers in the Lucas Aerospace worker-written business plan to address lay-offs in their arms manufacturing company due to post-fordism induced industry restructuring (UK). They advocated for socially useful production/preserve jobs/people to run machines rather than the other way around. This stuff is recirculating in recent years with the idea of re-applying this thinking to the need for bottom-up solutions to climate change http://lucasplan.org.uk/lucas-aerospace-combine/ Also a recent film The Plan. Mike Cooley has several books all published in the last decade which note the negative experience of automation when implemented from above- top-down by management. But as an engineer he and others in the labour movement were interested in automation/AI/design issues. Here is Cooley’s 1980s article on human-centered AI philosophies https://philpapers.org/rec/COOHCS He started the journal Artificial Intelligence and Society now edited by Karamjit S. Gill who has done some recent work to uncover more of this historical background https://www.wit.ie/news/business/influential-irish-engineer-and-cybernetician-prof-mike-cooley-archive-donat Generally that journal might be a place to find some interesting links to the people who first confronted the 1970s wave of automation and thought about how it could be done differently or wrote/researched on its effects (such as Swasti Miller on the global impact of automation upon women https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00146-018-0864-2 )

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> On Behalf Of Luke Munn
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2021 1:13 AM
To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> alternative visions/projects of automation

Hey Net-timers,

I'm writing a short book on automation and am looking for examples of alternative visions of the "future of work" broadly speaking, i.e. projects or movements that run counter to the near-future scenarios envisioned by Siemens, IBM, Google, and so on.

"Alternative" in this context might mean technologies or projects with different sets of values - e.g. more egalitarian, more ecologically attuned - than the usual axioms: accumulation of capital, increased efficiency, etc.

Or "alternative" might mean more localized interventions that take into account specific community needs, as opposed to the globalized, homogenized future typically on offer.

I'm sure there are a lot of inspiring and ingenuous projects out there I'm unaware of - please post away! :-)

best,

Luke

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