“Who Cooked the Feast for the Victors?” Recentering Human Labor in the Automation Debate by Colin Patrick (Lewis & Clark College)

null, Colin Patrick (University of Portland)

March 11th, 3:30pm PST via Zoom
In the last few years, as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have begun to replace human workers in fields as diverse as customer service, management, transportation, and combat, it has become common to expect human work (and human beings) to be rendered obsolete altogether in short order—a result that some fear, while others welcome. While acknowledging the undeniable recent advancements in AI in these and other fields, I will argue that hopes and/or fears of full automation must be tempered by something that is emphasized in Marxist and feminist philosophy but downplayed within, and more often entirely missing from, mainstream discussions of this topic, namely the vast amount of collective human labor expended upon, embodied in, and necessary for nearly everything in human life, including in our age of AI, ML, and robots.