The last human job: AI, depersonalization and the industrial clock | LSE Event

In this public lecture, Allison Pugh explains how we have ended up in a moment in which machines have time for people, while human workers rush by, bent to the dictates of the industrial clock, and maps out its implications for the future of our social health.

Critics commonly warn about three primary hazards of AI – job disruption, bias, and surveillance/privacy concerns. Yet the conventional story of AI’s dangers is missing a vital issue and blinding us to its role in a cresting “depersonalization crisis.” If we are concerned about increasing loneliness and social fragmentation, then we need to reckon with how technologies enable or impede human connection. Based on five years of interviews and observations with more than 100 people employed in humane interpersonal jobs, as well as the administrators and engineers overseeing and systematizing this work, Pugh identifies what these jobs have in common as “connective labor.” Pugh argues that the degradation of connective labor serves as a justification for its automation, part of the way socio-emotional AI is sold.

Speakers:
Professor Allison Pugh

Chair:
Professor Sonia Livingstone

#AI #Events #London

Full details/attend: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2025/02/...

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