Suchergebnisse

Tremendous research, policy, and investment is directed towards a new wave of automation in modern societies. Most notable within discourse for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but also in radical ideas for Fully Automated Luxury Communism, automation appears essential to the future. Advocates claim it will renew capital accumulation, boost labour productivity, and extend managerial control in sustainable systems of production and consumption. Noting criticism about future essentialism in this automation advocacy, this essay will turn to innovations in marginal industrious spaces within industrial societies. Here people are hacking, subverting and appropriating ostensibly automating technologies for purposes of creativity, collaboration, and care. Social capabilities in post-automation are being cultivated. Perhaps greater attention to the politics implied in post-automation can help open our futures to more democratic deliberation?

Automation as a word was first used to describe the linking together of machine tools into a continuous produc tion line by mechanical devices to load, unload, and transfer between machines or between stations in a single machine. As the meaning of automation has broadened, this original appli cation has increasingly been described as "Detroit automa tion." Many examples are found in the automotive industry, but the technique has been successful in manufacturing appli ances, motors, radio and television sets, and many other items produced in large volume. Some major problems have arisen that limit the economic size of a single automatic sequence of operations. Growth rate is limited by the balance between the degree of flexibility possible and the production volume that will probably be required. The rate at which automation is added in the metalworking industries has tapered off in the last few years but seems to be rising again, and continued increase, though at a less hectic pace, seems likely. The recent develop ment of numerically controlled machines will do for small-lot producers what the transfer machine is doing for mass pro ducers.