The panel addressed the state-of-the-art in the current theories of automation as a way to problematise the role of AI. The panel had a specific focus on the role of metrics and metrology in the measurement of labour, knowledge, and nature and in the processes of labour automation. In short, it proposed to see AI not as a problem of interpretability but measurability of human skills.

Panelists:

  • Matteo Pasquinelli grounded the rise of automation and AI in the development of metrics of labour and social behaviours in the late 19th century (especially psychometrics) and further provided a general framework by analysing the main differences among predominant tendencies in Historical Materialism and History of Science and Technology.
  • Senthil Babu analysed the calculation of commodity value in the case of 16th century pearl fishing in the Gulf of Mannar in southern India, showing how the metrics of labour and natural resources extends also in contemporary India in the entanglement of gig economy, financialisation of personal debt and working conditions in coastal environments.
  • Leonardo Impett demonstrated how current AI visual systems for the recognition and generation of images are grounded on specific and arbitrary measurement of beauty and how old AI visual systems keep on reproducing these standards and conventions of ‘beauty’ through their implementation in many applications.
  • Paolo Caffoni focused on the indexing of language’s value in Machine Translation. He analysed the definition of low and high resource languages in NLP and highlighted how language models are constructed to discriminate hierarchies of productivity in society, grounding the rise of NLP both in division of labour and bordering techniques.

The panel investigates the spectrum of automation theories and technological transformation with a focus on AI as the last stage of the automation of manual, mental, and care labour. Authors like Benanav (2020) relativize the impact of AI on employment and emphasise deindustrialization and stagnation tendencies, while Pasquinelli (2023) centres the valorisation process of platform capitalism and AI monopolies around a new discipline and metrics of labour. As Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019) have pointed out, the project of AI and automation in general remains grounded on the ‘surrogate humanity’ and invisible labour of enslaved, workers, and women that have made possible the universalistic ideal of the free and autonomous (white) subject.

The panel invites to explore and question a deep historical perspective spanning the theories of automation of the industrial age (Adam Smith, Babbage, Marx, William Thompson, Thomas Hodgskin), the Time and Motion Studies from United States and Soviet Union’s Taylorism (Gilbreths, Gastev, Biomechanics movement), the labour process theory debate (Braverman, Noble), the positions of Autonomist Marxism (Tronti, Negri, Mezzadra), and more recently communisation theory (Endnotes). The panel engages also with the historical epistemology of science and technology (Hessen, Grossmann, Kula, Damerow, Renn, Rheinberger, Schaffer, Daston, Galison, Omodeo, Schmidgen) and feminist and decolonial epistemologies (Rose, Harding, Fox Keller, Haraway, Federici).