The other timeline: Rehumanizing the normative ideal of workplace augmentation

Join the Centre of Business and Society online or in-person on our Cambridge Campus for a research seminar from Prof Nicky Dries on alternative, more human-centric formulations of the future of work.

Augmentation – machines and humans working together to enhance one another, by design, such that the intelligence of the resulting system improves – is currently considered the normative ideal for the future of work. However, augmentation is currently narrowly understood, from a managerialist, almost neo-Taylorist perspective.

Raisch and Krakowski (2021), discussing the ‘automation-augmentation paradox’, identified an urgency for social scientists to get more involved in debates around the future of work, dominated by computer scientists and engineers who “often regard humans as a mere disturbance in the system that can and should be designed out” (p. 203). The focus mostly lies on technology, adopting a techno-determinist stance assuming that technological capabilities and innovations shape social, economic, and political reality, rather than the other way around, while topics like future labour conditions and relations are rarely addressed. Some argue that Big Tech is on a mission to monopolise the collective imagination around the future, using discursive closure tactics like naturalisation – i.e., presenting trends as inevitable, while obfuscating the sociohistorical processes that created them.

Using multimodal discourse analysis, we explore the artistic processes and practices of 35 professional artists who are working, full-time, with augmentative AI technologies (embodied and non-embodied, robotic, virtual, and embedded). These artists, many of whom are world-renowned (e.g., Refik Anadol; AndyRobot; Leonel Moura; Alexander Whitley), span various artistic neo-disciplines such as data painter, choreoboticist, movement analyst, and computational photographer.

The central idea of our paper is that in the 1960s and '70s, there were two traditions in robotics: the engineering tradition, focused on efficiency and automation, and the artistic tradition, focused on relationality and human-centricity. Over time, the engineering timeline seems to have won out, and this is the timeline we find ourselves in today. Hence, this study asks the question: what if we would have gone down the other timeline?

About the speaker

Nicky is a former Fulbright Scholar (Boston, 2012). To date, she has published over 60 international peer-reviewed articles, two books, and 20 book chapters. She is very active in science communication outside academia as well, and regularly publishes trade press articles (e.g., HBR.org, Forbes.com), op-eds/editorials, and podcasts, and has appeared in a documentary TV series on the labour market implications of disruptive technologies (The Digital Dilemma on VRT). In 2021, Nicky was selected from more than 1,000 applicants to be part of Belgium’s ‘40 under 40’ inaugural cohort representing the nation’s promising future societal leaders.

Currently, Nicky is an Associate Editor at Journal of Management (JOM), as well as being on several other editorial boards (e.g., HRMJ, EJWOP). She has also been an evaluator of several national and European scientific funding agencies, e.g., FWO in Belgium, NWO in the Netherlands, the Research Council of Finland, and the European Commission.