Automation and its Consequences

Catalog description

We are inundated on a daily basis with accounts detailing how an avalanche of AI technologies is poised to upend a wide assortment of occupations. While some research celebrates the productivity gains that come from automation, other scholarship warns of the potential for widespread job loss and breakdown of social norms. In this course, we will think about automation as a cultural and economic process that has had important consequences for human societies. How does automation today differ from earlier periods in history? What is driving automation: corporations, scientific innovation, consumer behavior, or something else? Likewise, who is automation for, and how does it affect people differently according to demographics, geography, education, and identity? We will especially consider how AI is changing our relationship to work as a bedrock institution of modern society, both in terms of how labor is compensated as well as how this might rearrange social life. What are the tradeoffs of automating work in domains such as healthcare, food and beverage services, delivery driving, university teaching, journalism, talk therapy, and more? Readings will include classic texts from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and Harry Braverman, as well as contemporary work in fields such as economic sociology, science and technologies studies, labor history, and organizational theory.