(p.2) The fear of technological unemployment has been accompanying the great innovative waves. However, in the history of humanity, periods of intensive automation have often coincided with the emergence of new jobs, tasks, activities and industries. Indeed, the challenging question is related to the overall sign of the relationship between technological change and labor: is technology labor-friendly or is it labor-threatening?

(p.118) Technology optimists do not deny that automation will prove disruptive in the short run. They point out, however, that historically periods of rapid technological change have created more jobs than they have destroyed and have raised wages and per capita income in rough proportion. The AI revolution may be different, but there are good reasons to believe that a resilient, adaptable economy will again vanquish the specter of technological unemployment: income growth raises the demand for labor in sectors that produce non-automatable goods and for workers that perform manual-intensive tasks; higher productivity stimulates investment throughout the economy in cooperating capital...

(p.118) Technology optimists do not deny that automation will prove disruptive in the short run. They point out, however, that historically periods of rapid technological change have created more jobs than they have destroyed and have raised wages and per capita income in rough proportion. The AI revolution may be different, but there are good reasons to believe that a resilient, adaptable economy will again vanquish the specter of technological unemployment: income growth raises the demand for labor in sectors that produce non-automatable goods and for workers that perform manual-intensive tasks; higher productivity stimulates investment throughout the economy in cooperating capital...

(p.109) For Arendt the desire to escape labor through technology has, in a kind of diabolical inversion, led to the creation of a society devoted exclusively to laboring. Where humans previously enjoyed a variety of forms of the active life, we now devote our striving to caring for our bodies. Modern technology in this way dislodges the traditional world-building role of techne in human life; this is perhaps why Arendt so rigorously distinguishes work from labor in The Human Condition, a distinction some critics of her work consider fraught. In her analysis of the tools used by homo faber, for instance,...

(p.24) Anxiety about technological unemployment is not new. It dates back to the Luddite movement in the early days of industrialism (Hobsbawm, 1952) and has periodically resurfaced ever since. For example, John Maynard Keynes (1930) predicted machines would abolish work within two generations. The same was said in the 1980s (Leontief & Duchin, 1986) and 1990s (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994; Rifkin, 1995) in light of computerization, even as others more cheerfully spoke of a tremendous ‘upskilling revolution’ with the arrival of post-industrialism (Drucker, 1993). But the situation is very different today according to recent commentators who predict the death of work...

(p.25) The so-called ‘second machine age’ (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014) refers to the rapid maturation of digital, robotic and computational technology, and most recently AI or ‘machine learning’.3 Thousands of routine jobs disappeared with the first appearance of computer technology in the 1980s, combined with the offshoring of work to the Global South (Gordon, 1996). So what distinguishes applications of AI from past uses of automation? Unlike factory machines, robotics can perform non-routine labour of the physical, cognitive and even emotional kind (Ford, 2015). What some technologists term ‘the singularity’ takes the argument one step further (Chace, 2016). Highly advanced computer...

(p.31) I do not want to imply that machines will have no influence on work in the future. Indeed, the impact may be significant, including unemployment. However, the now prevalent forecast of mass joblessness is unlikely to be realized given how AI and digitalization are constrained by socioeconomic and organizational forces that shape its implementation (namely, labour pricing, extant power relations and the job task in question). Furthermore, the concept of bounded automation allows us to understand why increasingly low-skilled (be they unautomated or semi-automated) jobs are likely to flourish while so-called good ones become ever more difficult to acquire.

(p.22) Fears that new technology will lead to massive unemployment are not new, though many researchers contend that this time the outcome will differ because of the potentially powerful effects of computers, robots, and other digital technologies. While we have not tried to address the question of what will happen to employment in the economy as a whole, we have examined an important occupation, and one in which employment levels many predict will be hit hard in the not-too-distant future by technologies that were difficult to foresee as recently as a decade or two ago. Our case study of truck drivers...

(p.153) In the end, the trajectory of the digital economy may mean that an unprecedented number of citizens could lose their jobs to robots and software that can work for cheaper and for longer hours than any human. If such a transformation occurs, it will most likely be gradual (Susskind & Susskind, 2016), but even so, anticipating the individual and social outcomes is a matter worth pursuing. Hopefully, by recognizing the potential dangers of unemployment and by assessing both the trajectories and discourses associated with newer technologies, social scientists will be more equipped to discuss the implications of robotics, AI, and...

(p.584) Developmental disability is a significant, chronic disability that is attributed to physical, mental or a combination of mental and physical impairments. According to [2] these functional limitations in life activities include learning, mobility, self-direction, language reception and expression, and capacity for independent living. Instead of collaborative robots, or co-robots, completely displacing workers with IDD, social co-robots may have promise for not just augmenting the physical and intellectual capabilities for these workers but improving the attitudes and enjoyment for them in their employment environment.

(p.9) The general trend in the formation of agricultural labor resources under digital transformation at the present stage is to increase the professional qualification level of workers. This is due to the gradual dwindling of the functions of manual labor and the development of labor skills of interaction and casing of artificial intelligence technologies and the Internet of Things, robotics, and data processing tools. The role of mental labor is significantly increasing in comparison with physical labor, there is an increase in the creative content of labor, a decrease in working time expenditures, a significant simplification of labor and an increase...

(p.206) Apart from the effect on jobs, debate has focused on the disruptive and potentially transformative effect of robotics and AI not only on the world of work but society more generally. We have seen the introduction of new concepts fed by knowledge- based digital work such as ‘immaterial’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) or ‘free’ labour (Terranova, 2003), as well as a description of a new form of ‘technological singularity’. Singularity refers to an end- point which, in the words of Good (1965) envisages a world where everything is done and made by an ultra- intelligent machine able to ‘surpass all...

(p.207) A runaway process is predicated on the notion of ‘accelerating change’, whereby information technology has a special effect in inducing an unstoppable and unquestionable transformation of work. It depends on a sup-posed autonomy (Ellul, 1964: 14) in the application and effect of technology which then produces its ‘runaway’ quality (Heidegger, 1977: 17). In such fashion, technological singularity would be inevitable and simply a matter of time. Runaway and accelerating change have also been pertinent to longer term debates on the allegedly ‘special’ nature of information and communication technologies. Anthony Giddens (1999) has been most prominent in promoting such a perspective....

(p.215) Predictions of the end of the human job because of replacement by robots and AI are lacking in sufficient analysis and evidence that cover the technical, social and economic effects. References to the 1920s/1930s, 1950s, 1970s and 1990s suggest that predictions of emerging technological singularity proved to be false dawns. Many of the ‘end of work’ scenarios, from J. M. Keynes, through Toffler, Gorz and Mason rest their case on ever expanding productivity resulting from computerisation, information technology, digitalisation or robotics/AI. Yet, aside from the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s and 1960s, we see declining rather than increasing productivity as...