Transforming dispositions towards automation

Abstract

Speaking to debates on how digital automation is changing people's capacities, my commentary affirms the value of surveying the myriad dispositions to automation that are muffled by the force of dominant boosterist or dystopian narratives. However, rather than assuming strong ‘reactions’ to automated objects or interfaces, I speculate that interactions with automation might be better characterised as ‘non-encounters’ for many. I explain how the non-encounters of being lulled, cajoled, and swayed can be evaluated as politically troubling, but that responses to heighten awareness of automation's politics may not necessarily result in people caring more about it. My commentary proposes a more indeterminate understanding of how people immanently evaluate automation which invites a more transitional and low-intensity understanding of the dispositions involved.

Automation has become a charged, hyperbolic object in many domains of public discourse. In popular narratives, digital automation is presented as either the source of our salvation or the source of our destruction. On one side, boosterist narratives claim that automation is what is needed to cast off the yoke of dull, repetitive labour, ultimately making our lives easier and more fulfilling (Mcafee and Brynjolfsson, 2017). On the other side, dystopian narratives claim that automation will lead to mass unemployment and intensified social inequality (Yang, 2018). Though these are clearly contrasting positions, they are similar in terms of their intensity of commitment. Both boosterist and dystopian accounts about automation come from being strongly invested from the outset one way or the other. And the power of these accounts is to try and convince others to become similarly invested by cultivating a strong positive or negative disposition towards automation. This logic extends to how we as academics engage with these debates. We bring our own investments, and we affirm the dispositions that we believe in (Joronen and Häkli, 2017). Some start by affirming forces of plenitude and excess (Pedwell, 2017). Others start from a position of critique and suspicion (Moore et al., 2018). Either way, both popular narratives and much academic work on automation share a commitment to trying to get people to become more invested in a position. Their collective charge is to take notice and to become more affected about something that we are supposedly not yet sufficiently affected by.

But what of other responses to automation that don’t sit so easily with these strong narratives? This is the terrain that Lin et al. (2024) brilliantly draw our attention to through their survey of diverse applications of airport automation. Aeromobilities have often been a site for experimenting with novel technologies that are then introduced more widely (Fuller and Harley, 2005), and so this makes for a fascinating setting through which to evaluate responses to automation. But more than just the setting itself, a conceptual focus on dispositions towards automation provides a much richer sense of the subjectivities at play. Where stronger narratives imply that people have – or should have – firmly held positive or negative attitudes towards or opinions on automation, dispositions are much more performative. Dispositions form more subconsciously over time through repeated encounters that give rise to specific bodily sensations, rather than being deliberately weighed up in conscious thought. The terrain of dispositions is therefore more mixed and ambivalent than the strong positionalities implied by both boosterist and dystopian narratives. From gamification and enchantment to aspiration and experimentation, automation's dispositions are also more multiple than boosterist and dystopian narratives would suggest. Multiple dispositions can be overlayed and felt together. Our dominant disposition at any time might just be the effect of one stronger disposition winning out over the others (Smith, 2011).

Anaesthetised subjects

Fundamental to the formation of automation dispositions is the concept of encounter. Dispositions don’t emerge from nowhere. They develop through everyday encounters with people, objects, and events. Lin et al. use the language of ‘reactions’ to automation to emphasise this point. And yet this highlights to a central paradox with automation: it is not encountered as such. Despite the potential value of encounter as a lens to explore automation (Bissell, 2021), there is no such thing as automation ‘in itself’ to be encountered, only ever context-specific applications. This is probably why robotics has become such a popular way of thinking about automation in that robots typically involve a discrete object that can be encountered (Lynch et al., 2022). However, in spaces of mobility such as airports, people encounter composite objects and interfaces that might be undergirded by digital automation, but automation itself is not the primary object that they are encountering. People touch screens, they place luggage on a belt, and they place their passport on a reader. Even then, the language of encounter or ‘reaction’ potentially feels too intense. Passengers’ dominant dispositions are likely to be conditioned by the warp and weft of travel, much more so than these objects and interfaces (Bissell, 2015). What's more, any ‘reaction’ to these objects is highly likely to be subtle and fleeting at most.

Yet, it is precisely the absence of encounters that many progressive thinkers find politically troubling. Passive coercion is the spectre that looms large in Lin et al.'s survey of automation dispositions. The pejorative language of people being ‘swayed’, ‘cajoled’, and ‘lulled’ into these automation dispositions signals an anaesthetised subject that is insufficiently reflective or critical of these automated developments (see also Bissell 2022; Lin, 2022). For Lin et al., the problem is that it is precisely these acquiescent dispositions that will likely ‘smoothen automation's entrenchment’. This paints a picture of aeromobile spaces where powerful capitalist companies play passenger and workers as passive marionettes. Such a concern echoes longstanding worries about subjects who are unthinkingly corrupted by the strategies of capitalist modernity. From transit environments that offer rapid displacement through the rough and tumble of urban spaces thereby removing the potential for transformative encounters in the city (Sennett, 1996) to the magical seductions of shopping malls that induce spending (Goss, 1993), the concern here is about the capacity of spaces to produce insufficiently affected subjects. Therefore, in some respects, though diverging sharply from the polarities of simplistic boosterist or dystopian narratives, Lin et al.'s charge is the same: we need to collectively take notice and become affected about something that we risk not being sufficiently affected by.

A practical implication that follows from this diagnosis of anaesthetisation might be to imagine ways to make the path to automation less smooth. The remedy here might involve actively creating more intense, harder-edged encounters that bring these subconscious embodied dispositions back into conscious attention so that the politics of what exactly is happening can be reflected on. For passengers, this might involve being prompted to feedback and evaluate their experiences involving automated applications, bringing these dispositions to conscious attention to be worked on. For workers, this political manoeuvre could take place before dispositions become habituated by involving workers more comprehensively in the design and prototyping stage of context-specific automation applications. This co-design remedy would of course rely on pre-existing labour solidarities to push back against aspects of the technology that might have negative impacts on workers. Such remedies would be about attuning more sharply to the politics of automation. Yet the relationship between attunement and investment is not straightforward (Rose, 2021). Becoming attuned to something doesn’t mean that we inevitably invest in and care about that thing. Furthermore, just like responses to boosterist and dystopian narratives, being encouraged to take notice and to become more affected by something that we are supposedly not yet sufficiently affected by does not mean that we inevitably will be.

Transforming dispositions

The politics of how, when, and where people come to evaluate automation is likely much more complex than such neat interventions suggest. Where Lin et al.'s diagnosis of people being swayed, cajoled, and lulled suggests an absence of resistance to being affected, the actual registration of automation's affects by differently situated bodies is likely not as probabilistic as we might imagine. Reflecting on the examples surveyed, there is nothing inevitable about the capacity of an automated robotic aide to produce a disposition of enchantment; and there is nothing inevitable about the capacity of a mobility app to produce a disposition of gamification. Refracting Lin et al.'s commitment to pluralising responses to automation, these dispositions themselves need to be pluralised. For instance, where enchantment and gamification would seem to indicate positive, uplifting dispositions, what of the more subtle evaluations of robotic aides and mobility apps that sidestep these diagnoses? As I learned through fieldwork with people in the mining industry, rather than being positive or negative, such bodily evaluations of automated applications might be much more confused and changeable for people (Bissell, 2021). Furthermore, the spatio-temporality of how automation is evaluated is also likely to be more complex than the in-situ moment of interaction with a robotic aide or an automated app. The joyful or sad dimensions of automation might be felt and evaluated much more obliquely. For instance, someone might be caught off-guard by a sadness for a colleague who lost their job to an automated application, but when or where this might happen is not determined in advance.

This evaluative indeterminacy points to an important distinction between dispositions and encounters in terms of their durations. Where dispositions are the terrain of long-duration continuities, encounters are a much choppier short-duration terrain. Better understanding the relationship between these two durations is important because this relationship holds the key to figuring out how dispositions towards automation themselves might change. Again, the choice of conceptual starting point is crucial. Theorising dispositions via a thinker such as Bourdieu can result in quite a conservative understanding of dispositions that emphasises their consistencies and continuities rather than their potential fluidity (Noble and Watkins, 2003). Regardless of the undulations of experiences someone goes through, dispositions from this perspective are relatively unchanging. And yet if we believe that experience matters, turning to conceptual starting points that affirm the transformational impact of encounters produces a much more changeable understanding of dispositions. Habit literatures that draw from process thinkers like Bergson and Deleuze potentially produce a more dynamic sense of dispositions that change in nature and intensity, open to reaching tipping points and more abrupt change (Grosz, 2013). The precise affectivity of airport automation then becomes contingent on a much wider hinterland of affecting experiences for people that shape their capacities to act and feel – and thus, the nature and intensity of dispositions.

The question of intensity of disposition leads us full circle back to the issue of investment. Even if we accept the presence of these automation dispositions, how strong are they relative to the myriad dispositions towards other things in people's lives? A recognition of bodily limitations is important here. As Hannah (2018: 2) argues, ‘we are constantly open to appeals, desires, impulses, and solicitations from all directions, both internal and external, but largely only able to act in a sustained and deliberate way in a directionally limited fashion’. Recognition of such limitation suggests that many of the aeromobile dispositions identified by Lin et al. might actually be pretty weak or even non-existent – relative to the dispositions that are more front and centre for people. What if our capacities to invest and care are already used up by relationship struggles, personal neuroses, and the daily dramas of social reproduction – in this case, for both passengers and workers alike? As such, automation's streamlined non-encounters might not necessarily produce the disposition of ‘aspiration’ in the sense of folding into productivist discourses of efficiency. Yielding to the convenience and ease of the non-encounter does not necessarily have to be understood pejoratively as being swayed, cajoled, or lulled. Instead, and more affirmatively, automation as support, comfort, and care might provide a kind of relief from the burdens of being affected in spaces of mobility.