Abstract
Toni Morrison once said that slaves were “surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom” (quoted on p. 9). In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora provide analyses of robots as surrogate slaves to meditate on the problems of human freedom under the long shadow of colonialism. The authors develop the concept of “technoliberalism” and show its powerful legacy in how we think about humans and robots. Under technoliberalism’s ways of thinking, the universal human depends on robots as surrogates to take over bad or dirty work (which, before robots, had been done by colonized and gendered workers). Yet technoliberalism hides labor by portraying automation as enchanted work: in the same way Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” casts a spell on brooms to do the dirty work, we now have Roomba to vacuum floors magically. The authors are arguing that human labor has to be erased for technology to seem autonomous in technoliberalism, but it is a fundamental myth that serves the racialized and gendered status quo.
First, human labor does not go away with automated technologies. In the strongest chapters of the book, the authors make direct connections between supposedly automated systems and hidden labor where exploitation and harm are done to people on the margins. In Chapter Three, we learn how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing model exploits workers, many of whom live in poverty, especially women of color in poor countries. The scholarly depth of the book works well here in providing the historical context (and a photo) of the original mechanical Turk, a supposed chess-playing automaton in the Austrian imperial court that was actually hiding a real human chess player. Now we have “automated” online systems hiding human labor patterns that reproduce gendered and racialized inequalities. In Chapter Five, the myths of drone warfare are exposed. The idea that drones could make war “human-free” is based on the assumption that saving the lives of conquering (usually white men) soldiers is the goal. This assumption hides the fact that at the same time, it renders the lives of (usually brown and black) people on the ground as disposable targets for killer robots.
The second myth the authors analyze in technoliberalism is how robots supply the basis for discourse that reinforces autonomy as a philosophical concept defining humanity, which they argue supports racialized and gendered regimes. This argument is more abstract, with only an indirect connection to people’s lived experiences in the present. For this reader it made for less convincing chapters in the book, such as discussions of autonomy and emotion in robot collaboration with humans (aka “cobots”). Still, these are interesting and provocative arguments, especially the last chapter in the book, which is about sex robots. The misogyny of men designers is clear in the chapter’s description of designers’ efforts to program and defend their work on sex robots, but the authors’ conclusion that feminism can never be squared with autonomous intelligence does not follow as clearly.
I appreciated that the authors included some discussion of hacking, raising questions about ways that robot technology might be hacked to disrupt technoliberalism. How can robot designers work with technology in ways that are anti-racist and feminist? While the book does not provide definitive answers, the platform for questions on feminist hacking of technology in various chapters provides welcome space for new imaginaries of race, gender, and technology. For example, an automated wind-powered minesweeper that removes land mines from war-ravaged places with a very low cost is described as a feminist, caring technology. Feminist and decolonial hacking is a very interesting theme in this book, and further development of it would have been welcome.
For some Contemporary Sociology readers, it may be useful to know that the authors approach the subject of race and technology from more of a cultural studies perspective, bringing expertise from their locations in Critical Race and Ethic Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. They employ methods from the humanities in analyzing material and cultural artifacts with a critical lens. Sociologists who identify as social scientists may thus wish to approach (and appreciate) this book as a theory-building contribution rather than as an empirical research monograph. There is no discussion of how cases were selected or other research methods information that sociologists might expect to find in an empirical piece of writing. Instead, the authors carefully build a conceptual argument throughout the book.
Atanasoski and Vora write with thoughtful scholarship and careful word selection. The book’s introduction is dense with concepts that are developed over the course of the seven chapters. I would not describe the book as jargon-filled because of its careful exposition and illustration with a variety of fascinating examples of how robots have been connected to racial imaginaries in manufacturing, crowdsourcing, service work, warfare, and sex work. Enough depth about the cases is given in each chapter, which means the book as a whole provides a useful survey of potential research sites for sociologists interested in studying robots. The book also provides a generative grounding in relevant science and technology studies (STS) and race theory literatures. This would be a useful book to include in graduate seminars on the sociology of technology and the sociology of race, and in my opinion it should be required reading in any sociology course on colonization and empire.