Repoliticising the Future of Work: Automation and the End of Techno-Optimism

Solange Vivienne Manche and Juan Sebastian Carbonell
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Solange Vivienne Manche: CAM - University of Cambridge [UK]
Juan Sebastian Carbonell: IDHES - Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l'Économie et de la Société - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UP8 - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - UEVE - Université d'Évry-Val-d'Essonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - ENS Paris Saclay - Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay

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Abstract: This review article of Aaron Benanav's Automation and the Future of Work (2020) and Jason Smith's Smart Machines and Service Work (2020) reads both works as an effort to repoliticise the question of unemployment, which has too often been ascribed to technological innovation, especially by proponents of automation theory. It places their works within current debates surrounding the question of automation and its political reverberations across the political spectrum. In the end, we show that the shortcomings of automation discourse reside in their economic analyses of the future of work and employment and that automation theorists encourage a depoliticisation of the question of employment through technocracy, while Benanav and Smith open the way for thinking about the future of work as a collective and social endeavour.

Keywords: Automation; future of work; precarity; sociologie; stagnation; technological unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-hpe
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Published in Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022, 15 (2), pp.270--276. ⟨10.1080/17530350.2022.2028651⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04112195

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2022.2028651

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