Work Matters: Autonomy and Automation as Data in Social Context

This course examines the history of work as a tension between the automation of labor and the autonomy of identity. By focusing on the history of labor as data in social context, students will explore the priority of efficiency, the privilege of professionals, the counting of outcomes, and the politics of identities. Particular attention will be devoted to mechanization in industry, creativity in crafts, expertise in professions, and care in service professions as sites of struggle, forms of expression, and sources of measurable date. Students will conduct original research, engage with external partners, and prepare reports working individually and collaboratively.

Assignments:
Group projects, 3 @ 20%, total 60%
Problem sets, 2 @ 10%, total 20%
Final essay, 2 drafts @ 5%, final version @ 10%, total 20%

Group Projects:

Child Labor: an investigation of an industrial automation in the textile industry in the US south in the early twentieth century, using historical photographs, investigative reports, and labor statistics, resulting in a presentation observed by staff from the Prints and Photographs division of the US Library of Congress.

Essential Workers and Automation: research projects examining the potential advantages and disadvantages of increased automation in fields of work deemed "essential" during the Covid-19 pandemic, including health care, education, law enforcement, janitorial, and food production, resulted in a collaboratively researched, written, and revised paper.

Robots on Film: an exploration of key characters from 2001: A Space Odyssey; I, Robot; Wall-E; Transformers; Star Wars; and Big Hero 6 who embodied the possibilities of automation, with analysis of how this vision compares to automation now and in the likely future, resulting in short film with illustrations and analysis.

Readings include selections from books and articles listed below:

Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology
Meredith Broussard: Artificial Unintelligence
Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru: Gender Shades (2018)
Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI
Virginia Eubanks: Automating Inequality; Guardian (2018)
Lauren Klein and Catherine D'Ignazio, Data Feminism
Safiya Noble: Noema Magazine (7/2020); Algorithms of Oppression
Cathy O'Neil: , Weapons of Math Destruction
Frank Pasquale: New Laws of Robotics
Zeynep Tufekci: Atlantic (9/4/2020); Atlantic (9/30/2020); Atlantic (2/26/2021)
Jillian York: Silicon Values
Shoshana Zuboff: Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Guardian (2019)

Film: Coded Bias

Photograph: Macon, Ga, 1908, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2018674998/