Robots at work: Two case studies from the Pissarides Review

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Programme 2024-25

Technologies at Work is a forum that facilitates interdisciplinary dialogues across academic disciplines, policy circles, and activist fora on rising digital technologies and their evolving relationships with work and life. The growing intrusion of digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the world of work has incited vibrant debates across academic disciplines, policy circles, and activist fora.

The rise of digital platforms and AI technologies has reconfigured employment relations, labour governance regimes, global division of labour, workers’ subjectivities, and spatio-temporalities of work and life. Digital platform companies and AI production firms have obscured despotic labour management practices and unfair working conditions by positioning themselves as tech firms and neutral intermediaries who simply connect clients with service providers. However, scholars have also pointed out that digital platforms and AI production firms provide both opportunities and constraints for employment generation and everyday experiences of working raising important contradictions in the developmental impacts of digital and AI technologies.

Some scholars argue that digital workers exert agency over platforms and AI production firms reconfiguring the operations of platforms and organisation of work rather than complying with despotic labour regimes. The fine and fragile balance between agency-enabling and agency-constraining effects of digital and AI technologies on workers and their lives makes it more challenging for researchers to meaningfully contribute to research-led policy mediation and activism in the context of fair labour policies and platform/AI regulations. The risks of thwarting opportunities for workers to ensure fair labour practices and thereby oversimplifying research-led policy recommendations pose serious challenges for researchers who aspire to contribute to research at the intersection of theory, policy, and activism.

Technologies at Work adopts a scholar-policy-activist approach to create a collaborative and constructive space for researchers across disciplines including but not limited to Geography, Sociology, Media Studies, Law, Management, South Asian Studies, Engineering, Music, Dance, and Psychology, among others to share their preliminary and advanced research on the broader theme of technologies at work.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

SG1 (Hybrid), Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, United Kingdom