There’s a great batch of reading and writing happening mostly online right now about the labor, inequality and the machines that are coming for our jobs.
Much of the public debate is coming from a series of recent books and research articles on how machines will displace a significant portion of human labor in the next market epoch.
It makes a good addition to courses across stratification, culture, economics, and critical studies. Here’s a brief twyllabus (twitter + syllabus):
I’d probably place the beginning of the conversation with Brynjofflson and McAfee’s “Race Against The Machine“.
Then there’s Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation” (with all that signals for Polayni fans/critics, I think). If that’s tl;dr go with the Atlantic’s coverage.
The Atlantic piece also links to Frey and Osborne’s paper on the future of employment <pdf>.
I think there was something silly in the NY Times last week about robots displacing low wage care work of old people but I skipped it and won’t bother looking.
However, that story prompted Tufekci’s tightly written argument about machine ages, labor, and care in Medium. Read that. Assign it even.
Totally gonna go self-aggrandizing here and hat-tip my brief engagement with technocratic utopias, social safety nets, and higher education in Dissent.
And, finally, this from Somers and Block on the reissue of Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation”. Read actual Polanyi only if you’ve got free time, a jones for dense prose, and no money for a proper summer vacation with trade paperbacks and tequila.
#twyllabus