HSS 336 Humans & Machines: Work & Technology in the 21st Century

This course will examine the historical relation of humans and machines from the Enlightenment to the present. The exponential transformations in machine intelligence and power that have occurred in the last decade force us to ask: do humans no longer wield prosthetic tools to increase their power over nature, but are instead becoming the mere prostheses of machines? In a contemporary context in which by current estimates some 47% of all human labor - material and immaterial, low- and high-wage, 'First-' and 'Third-world,' - may be automated in the next two decades, how must we reconceive the human itself?

We will proceed on the hypothesis that the problem of humans and machines is specific to the conjuncture of Western and now global modernity: Capitalism. The human species is today subject, as the foundation of social existence, to the imperative to valorize value (to 'make a profit'): what will happen, however, when human labor and the wages that accompany it disappear? Can man live on credit alone?