Labour, Work, and Automation: Reconsidering the Future of Work in Light of Automation

The future of work is one of increasing precarity and uncertainty. The continued implementation of automation has been further problematised by the difficulties brought about by Covid-19 and its resultant lockdowns, the growing popular desire for better work/life balance, and continued economic upheaval. Accounts of the future of work vary across the academic literature and mainstream media: for some, increasing automation is an emancipatory political moment that promises more free time and social justice; for others it is an insidious social force that will bring more harm than good to society.

However, although these opposing accounts of automation might appear to employ the same unproblematic terms and concepts, I argue that they are reified through a focus on specific limited examples which scholars attach to those terms without explicit acknowledgement. As a result, accounts of automation make generic claims regarding the nature of automation by narrowly focusing on one of its given contingent functions, and rely on common sense and incomplete conceptions of work. There is a need to reduce the tension between opposing accounts, and to avoid overtly dystopian and utopian narratives about futures of work, in order to develop an accurate picture of automation and work that reflects the reality of automation today. This thesis performs a phenomenological reduction of automation, and redefines intuitive notions of 'work' as two distinct modes of activity, labour and work. I will develop three ideal type definitions of automation, labour, and work, which can then be applied to make better sense of real-life case studies. While discussions of automation and the future of work can naturally tend towards emotional or polemic predictions of thoroughly technologised societies, both positive and negative, offering such predictions in advance of a rigorous analysis of each term results in incomplete accounts of the phenomena at stake. I will strip back these reified notions, and offer a novel evaluative framework for considering the automation of work, using novel definitions of automation as the enclosure of tasks from further human intervention, and labour and work as distinct modes of activity, comparing these ideal definitions to real and proposed case studies to ensure their practical applicability.

In the first chapter I offer a definition of automation as a means of enclosing a task from further mediation, and in the second I compare this definition to those found across the literature, paying particular attention to the reified accounts of automation offered by scholars, including Aaron Bastani, Nick Srnicek, Martin Ford, and Erik Brynjolfsson. In Chapter 3 I define labour as a mode of activity primarily intended towards biological necessity, and discuss potential Marxist critiques to this conception. Chapter 4 sees the introduction of a number of case studies, including self-driving cars and sex work, which will serve to test my definitions of labour and automation in practice. Chapter 5 introduces the correlate definition of work, and considers a comparable notion of work offered by Hannah Arendt, before Chapter 6 concludes by returning to the case studies offered in Chapter 4, comparing them to the mode of work rather than labour. I will conclude that while pressing, questions surrounding automation and the future of work cannot be fully or accurately answered with a narrow and reified understanding of either term, and will instead offer a novel evaluative framework in response.

The future of work may well be an automated one, but at this early stage it is vital to properly define and understand the dominant notions at play, and to not get lost in emotive speculative predictions of the future that are not aligned with the reality of work today.