Robots, robotic technologies, and labour geographies

Vincent J. Del Casino and Casey R. Lynch

Chapter 21 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 363-375 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The chapter explores three intersecting themes related to the integration of robotic technologies in everyday labour processes. First, in contrast to narratives of direct replacement of human labour by ‘intelligent’ robots, this chapter argues that automation involves the parsing and reassembling of human and robotic cognitive functions in work processes, leading to new divisions of labour. Second, evolving configurations of human and robotic labour create new forms of worker alienation, where work products are separated from workers and the cognitive and physical capacities of workers are captured by new forms of sensing and digital monitoring. Third, robotic labour involves shifts in social reproduction, including gendered and racialised regimes of labour, new links between production and consumption, and shifting human-robotic affective relations. This concludes that Labour Geography must take up the question of human-robotic relations in and beyond the workplace to examine what work will mean in an advanced robotic age.

Keywords: Automation; Intelligence; Division of labour; Alienation; Social reproduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
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