On Autopilot

Heightening both Promethean excitation and the anxiety surrounding that which it displaces, automation is difficult to reasonably navigate. Ask someone what they think about automation and you’ll probably be surprised by their answer – even if you think you know them quite well. Conventional left-right divides seemingly melt away and new political fault lines are drawn when faced with work’s erasure through technology.

This issue is concerned with the future of automation as a form of political and economic re-organisation, as well as the concept’s corollaries – the abdication of agency in making things automatic, the existential issues raised by treating machines as automatons, and the alienation experienced through the interplay of these forces when they’re dealt with inadequately. A recurring theme is the importance of negotiating with automation’s future, rather than treating it as a blindly acting force. This makes it ripe for harnessing methodologies from disciplines such as foresight and futures studies, several examples of which feature in this issue.