In this public lecture, Allison Pugh explains how we have ended up in a moment in which machines have time for people, while human workers rush by, bent to the dictates of the industrial clock, and maps out its implications for the future of our social health.
Critics commonly warn about three primary hazards of AI – job disruption, bias, and surveillance/privacy concerns. Yet the conventional story of AI’s dangers is missing a vital issue and blinding us to its role in a cresting “depersonalization crisis.” If we are concerned about increasing loneliness and social fragmentation, then we need to reckon with how technologies enable or impede human connection. Based on five years of interviews and observations with more than 100 people employed in humane interpersonal jobs, as well as the administrators and engineers overseeing and systematizing this work, Pugh identifies what these jobs have in common as “connective labor.” Pugh argues that the degradation of connective labor serves as a justification for its automation, part of the way socio-emotional AI is sold.
Meet our speaker and chair
Allison Pugh (@allison_pugh) is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on how meaningful emotional connections between people are shaped by rationalization, precariousness and inequalities of gender, race and class. Her fourth book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World is based on a federally funded study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship.
Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She has published 20 books and advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Council of Europe and UNICEF on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. She directs the Digital Futures for Children centre.
More about this event
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