Conference May 27, 2021

Antonio Casilli is professor of sociology at Télécom Paris, author of Les liaisons numériques.  Towards a new sociability (2010), Waiting for robots. Survey on the click work (2019).

What if, like the enigmatic Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play, robots never arrive? What would happen if our almost messianic expectation of complete automation turned out to be a constantly renewed but never kept promise? It is in the field of work that this prophecy weighs more heavily. From the first appearance in the 17th century of the concept of “factory without workers” to large digital platforms, it is less of a “major technological replacement” which takes place only in a large framework of work within material and ideological structures that push for forms of subordination and flexibilisation that are increasingly extreme. However, this situation is not without contradictions, tensions and alternatives.

Video is in french

Antonio Casili: Waiting for the robots. Utopia of the end of work or new exploitation?