Everyday Automation

This Open Access book brings the experiences of automation as part of quotidian life into focus. It asks how, where and when automated technologies and systems are emerging in everyday life across different global regions? What are their likely impacts in the present and future? How do engineers, policy makers, industry stakeholders and designers envisage artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) as solutions to individual and societal problems? How do these future visions compare with the everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities in which AI and ADM are experienced? What do people know about automation and what are their experiences of engaging with 'actually existing' AI and ADM technologies? An international team of leading scholars bring together research developed across anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies and ethnology, which shows how by rehumanising automation, we can gain deeper understandings of its societal impacts.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Sarah Pink is Professor at Monash University Australia, where she is Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Associate Director of the Monash Energy Institute, and an investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Martin Berg is Professor of Media Technology at Malmö University, Sweden. He coordinates the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's research network Re-humanising Automated Decision-Making and co-directs Malmö University's strategic research programme Data Society. Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Centre of Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney. She leads the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Minna Ruckenstein is Associate Professor in the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki. She leads an interdisciplinary research group that studies algorithmic culture and organisational and societal processes in relation to automated decision-making.

Introduction: Everyday Automation: setting a research agenda PART I: Challenging dominant narratives of automation 1. Imagining Mundane Automation: Historical Trajectories of Meaning Making around Technological Change 2. Trust, Ethics and Automation: Anticipatory Imaginaries in Everyday Life 3. The Quantified Pandemic: Digitised Surveillance, Containment and Care in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis 4. Less Work for Teacher? The Ironies of Automated Decision-making in Schools PART II Embedding automated systems in the everyday 5. Alexa's Got a Hunch: The Human Decisions behind Programming Emotion-sensing and Caregiving into Digital Assistants 6. Framing Fashion: Human-Machine Learning and the Amazon Echo Look 7. Coffee with the Algorithm: Imaginaries, Maintenance and Care in the Everyday Life of a News-ranking Algorithm 8. Everyday AI at Work: Self-tracking and Automated Communication for Smart Work 9. Exploring ADM in Clinical Decision-Making: Healthcare Experts Encountering Digital Automation PART III Experimenting with Automation in Society 10. Hate it? Automate it!: Thinking and Doing Robotic Process Automation and Beyond 11. Smart Thermostats and the Algorithmic Control of Thermal Comfort 12. Prisoners Training AI: Ghosts, Humans and Values in Data Labour 13. Investigating ADM in Shared Mobility: A Design Ethnographic Approach 14. Ad Accountability Online: A Methodological Approach.