Labor and robots at Amazon. How technology is changing the organization of work
In this Colloquium Alessandro Delfanti enters Amazon's warehouses to show how technologies and managerial techniques give rise to an intensification of control over labor. The hundreds of thousands of workers who enable Amazon to deliver its goods are part of an experiment that illustrates how the way we work is changing. Automation does not then mean "the end of work" or even a reduction in the number of people employed in warehouses. Algorithms, robots and other technologies do not replace work, but they do regulate and standardize it. A picture that Delfanti's Colloquium also shows through an analysis of the many patents that Amazon sponsors each year. In the most futuristic robotic projects, there is always an integration of human and machine labor, a "symphony" in which humans and robots work together. As these new forms of automation change the warehouse, however, there is also growing discontent among workers, who are fully aware of the contradictions of a model in which innovation rests on flexibility and low cost.
Speaker: Alessandro Delfanti, professor of Digital and Media Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the role of technologies on the reorganization of the work process, digital media politics and digital countercultures. He is the author of Biohackers. The politics of open science (Pluto Press, 2013), Introduction to Digital Media (with A. Arvidsson, Wiley Blackwell, 2019), and The Warehouse: workers and robots at Amazon (Pluto Press, 2021).
Introduction: Isabella Consolati (professor of Politics and Technology, Politecnico di Torino)