Workplace - Kelly Pendergrast - Performing Automation

Performing Automation

Kelly Pendergrast

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Wilbur the Coyote at Gigglebees, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Early 2007. Photo: Alex Knapik.

Workplace
January 2022










Notes
1

Researcher and roboticist Kate Darling quoted in “​​What Is a Robot?” Wired, August 24, 2017, .

2

See the definition of service robots provided by the International Federation of Robotics for more information, .

3

For more on the signaling value of robots and other high-tech devices see studies including: Pedro Pita Barros, Carlos Gouveia Pinto, and Ana Machado’s “A signalling theory of excessive technological adoption” in Health Care Management Science 2 (1999): 117–123; and Matthew I. Beane’s “In Storage, Yet on Display: An Empirical Investigation of Robots’ Value as Social Signals” in 2020 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (2020): 83–91.

4

Astra Taylor, “The Automation Charade,” Logic 5, 2018, . Jathan Sadowski, “Potemkin AI,” Real Life, August 6, 2018, .

5

Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue (1920),

6

Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, Stephen B. Johnson ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

7

P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1854), 157.

8

Louis Chude-Sokei, “The Uncanny History of Minstrels and Machines, 1835–1923,” in Johnson, 117.

9

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 25.

10

Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work—1,” New Left Review 119 (Sept/Oct 2019): 11–12.

11

Bradley Berman, “On Berkeley’s Sidewalks, Bots With Burritos,” New York Times, November 8, 2019, Section B, Page 6.

12

Ed Pilkington, “Life as a drone operator: ‘Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?’,” The Guardian, November 19, 2015, .

13

Christopher Mims, “The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2019.

14

Josh Dzieza, “How hard will the robots make us work?,” The Verge, February 27, 2020, .

15

Rebecca Greenfield, “Your Raise Is Now Based on Next Year’s Performance,” Bloomberg, July 9, 2018, .

16

Dzieza, .

17

Studs Terkel, Working; People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

18

Simone Weil, “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labor.” In: Simone Weil, An Anthology, Sian Miles ed. (London: Virago, 1986).

19

Simone Weil, “Factory Journal.” In Formative Writings 1929-1941, Dorothy McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness eds. (Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).