Abstract
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures is a much-needed intervention into critical race and feminist studies of technology, robotics and posthumanism. Atanasoski and Vora argue that new and emerging technologies function as surrogates, or ‘racialised and gendered form[s] defining the limits of human consciousness and autonomy’ (p. 9). Atanasoski and Vora situate the robotic surrogate within the broader context of ‘technoliberalism’. They argue that technoliberalism valorises technological progress as a means to emancipate the human from ‘dull, dirty, repetitive and even reproductive labor’ (p. 4). However, the post-labour, post-gender and post-racial ideology of technoliberalism obscures how robots increasingly perform tasks that were historically undertaken by racialised, gendered, classed and otherwise marginalised subjects (p. 5). Like racialised and gendered human surrogates, technological surrogates allow certain subjects to lay claim to being fully human at the expense of those designated to the realms of inhumanity and unfreedom.
The book asks: who is emancipated through automation, and whose humanity is realised through the labours of technological surrogates? The first chapter explores the automation of labour, arguing that the contemporary post-labour imaginary illuminates the co-dependence of both liberal and fascist concepts of automation. The second chapter examines how socialist ideas of shared resources and the digital commons are appropriated by technoliberalism. The third chapter interrogates how technoliberalist fantasies render both labour and the worker invisible, while the fourth chapter investigates social robots and the role of emotion and affective capacity in the racialised construction of humanity. The fifth and sixth chapters focus on the production of, and liberal resistance to, autonomous military technologies, such as drones and killer robots. The conclusion provocatively argues that there is no such thing as feminist AI, calling for the decolonisation of the category of ‘intelligence’ itself.
By situating post-labour imaginaries within longer histories of the exploitation of racialised labourers, Atanasoski and Vora provide a necessary counterpoint to feminist scholarship that calls for the strategic deployment of technology for ‘progressive gender political ends’ without seriously taking race into account (Laboria Cuboniks, 2018, p. 17; for a critical response, see Goh, 2019). Surrogate Humanity highlights how the liberation of white women from reproductive labour usually relies on the outsourcing of feminised work to racialised surrogates. Here, Atanasoski and Vora’s discussion of the ‘Alfred Club’ service in Chapter 3 is especially illuminating. The Alfred Club (now Hello Alfred) offers subscribers an ‘Alfred’, or an invisible worker who coordinates the subscriber’s domestic labour across a number of service apps and platforms (Crook, 2014). Atanasoski and Vora argue that the Alfred Club’s primary innovation is its near-total erasure of contact between the service worker and the employer. In this sense, the Alfred Club builds upon a longer history of surrogate subjects’ performance of devalued labour in the name of (pseudo-)feminism.
As the example of the Alfred Club shows, Atanasoski and Vora’s work is especially compelling during its discussion of empirical examples, such as its analysis of the social robot Kismet and the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace. Atanasoski and Vora’s interrogation of specific technologies demonstrates exactly how certain technologies function as surrogates and why the surrogate effect takes place. That being said, it would have been positive to see more pushback against the commonly used phrase ‘mechanical Turk’ and its techno-Orientalist connotations. On the note of techno-Orientalism, Surrogate Humanity is also at its strongest when considering the implications of distinct trajectories of racialisation, as in its discussion of techno-Orientalism in Chapter 1. Conversely, Atanasoski and Vora’s work is slightly less convincing when it relies on broad, sweeping arguments about racial capitalism unanchored by different histories of racialisation and/or specific examples of technological surrogates.
Atanasoski and Vora’s comparison of enslaved and indentured people to new technologies is ethically complicated and often discomforting. On the one hand, the history of forced labour undeniably shapes the field of robotics. The word ‘robot’, coined by Karel Cˇapek in his play R.U.R. in 1920, derives from the Czech for ‘forced labourer’ or ‘serf’ (Love, 2020). Meanwhile, the use of ‘master/slave’ terminology in computing and other technical fields has recently attracted intense scrutiny (Landau, 2020). On the other hand, we must ask: what are the costs of drawing comparisons between the brutal exploitation of human workers and the labours of new technologies? Does the concept of surrogate humanity risk conflating histories of racialised oppression with technological imaginaries? I hope to see continued investigation into why and how comparisons are drawn between different forms and experiences of subjugation, as well as how theories of race and technology can further grapple with the complexities of racialisation in its lived and theoretical forms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Christina Gaw for funding support through the Christina Gaw Research Associates in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge.