Emplacing the disposition toward automation

Introduction

Disposition, as a less-explored concept in human geography, refers to an intangible affective force that governs our existence in the world (Lin et al., 2024). In their study, Lin et al. evaluated how automation affects the aeromobility labor force. They suggested that rather than focusing on a dichotomous approach - either adapting to or rejecting automation - scholars should instead focus on a range of supportive dispositions, specifically enchantment, aspiration, experimentation, gamification, and acquiescence. These five discussed dispositions, in varying degrees, support the labor force's adaptation to automation. As a continuation of this research direction, this commentary examines the disposition toward automation more closely, particularly its underlying structure and its nuanced relationship to place.

A place perspective

The disposition to automate takes shape and unfolds in different places. By considering the value of place, it is possible to locate where humans and automation are present and to contextualize affective tendencies within any in-process disposition. No less critical, the underlying structure of disposition can be expanded: a piece of disposition originates from a human, travels through an instantiation of automation, and converges on a place. Using the example of labor relations in aeromobilities, an exoskeleton can enable its wearer to carry heavy luggage in the baggage claim area, a flight schedule board can display flight arrivals on the runways, a patrol bot can interact with pedestrians at the boarding gates, and an automation-enabled management system can intelligently manage the interior air and temperature for the airport travelers. It is implied through the examples above that automated experiences occur in specific places, such as baggage claim areas, runways, boarding gates, and the entire airport. These examples show the legitimacy and necessity of situating a disposition in place. By so doing, it becomes possible to explore the different ways in which disposition influences labor relations and to more critically analyze how dispositions form in places.

The place perspective is based on Don Ihde's postphenomenology of technology (1990), which has been gaining increasing attention among human geographers in the past 5 years (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Kinkaid, 2021; Zhao, 2022). Don Ihde underscores the role of technology in mediating the interaction between its users and the world. The positionality of technology, or automation in this commentary, affects how it interacts with humans and places. As the technology moves closer to its user, it unites with the user, while as it moves further away, it merges with the surrounding environment. Further, a particular technology will not permanently adopt a fixed position. Rather, its relation to the human and place components varies constantly. Thus, the momentary disposition toward automation is always a mirror of its user and the place it is situated. As Don Ihde insightfully argued, human experiences emerge as two intertwined affective tendencies that amplify and simultaneously reduce. The amplification converges at the center of human attention, so it is easily identifiable, while the reduction fades away at the periphery of human consciousness and is often ignored. For example, a feeling of disgust can be simultaneously stimulated while a sense of aspiration emerges. With this theoretical framing, our understanding of disposition and its tendency to automation can be further revealed.

Human, automation, and place

As a starting point, I put forward four primary positionalities of automation: embodiment, hermeneutics, alterity, and background, which are determined by the relational proximity of automation to the involved human and place. To begin with, let us take the exoskeleton wearer as an example. An exoskeleton is an automation that is closely embodied within its wearer. The exoskeleton can be utilized by airport ground staff in places like a baggage claim area or a loading zone. One can become attracted to the exoskeleton since it saves a lot of energy when lifting heavy luggage or other loads. In the meantime, the embodied exoskeleton may make the wearer uncomfortable as a foreign object to the body. This inherent discomfort comes from a human's biophysical rejection reaction to foreign objects and can further stimulate a feeling of repulsion toward the exoskeleton or other types of automation. While weightlifting ability has been amplified, the body's ability to react has been reduced due to the lower comfort level with the surrounding environment.

The second positionality of automation is hermeneutics, which establishes when automation represents a place. The representation simplifies a complicated geographical phenomenon to convey an appropriate amount of information for the viewer, but it can also confuse the viewer if the representation contains fakes or errors (Zhao and Sui, 2017). It is because automation, when serving as a representation of a place, blocks the immediate information channel between the viewer and the place. In an airport, the flight schedule board is a popular representation of the airport's logistics. Its operation is supported by the supercomputing of automatic algorithms to report, predict, visualize and manage flight logistics. Rather than displaying every detail of airport logistics, the board shows only arrivals or departures, flight numbers, time, and boarding gates. With this configuration, a traveler can easily find the flight schedule; otherwise, one may feel cognitively overloaded with unnecessarily redundant information, and this cognitive overload may even lead to airport anxiety (Bogicevic et al., 2016). In the process of watching the board, a disposition of enchantment amplifies due to the comprehensiveness of the real-time flight information, but the ability to discern authenticity from falsehood reduces – a traveler may feel suspicious of the accuracy of the displayed flight information, especially when it is inconsistent with that on a paper-based boarding pass. It takes place when the boarding gate is changed, or the flight is delayed.

Automation can also behave as a peer to the person with whom it interacts. The alterity of automation may make people feel astonished by artificial consciousness. This astonishment or admiration takes shape in a particular environment. For example, a patrol or delivery bot may walk in the public areas of an airport. When a pedestrian blocks a bot's way, the bot will automatically process the geographical data from the surrounding environment and figure out how to make way for the pedestrian. Although pedestrians are familiar with geospatial interactions with others on the road, they may be astonished at the level of sophistication of the bot's artificial intelligence in comparison to human intelligence. Meanwhile, the bot's competence may also trigger a backlash since people may feel helpless or confused when job opportunities are taken by bots. Indeed, according to a market survey conducted by McKinsey, approximately 14 percent of the global labor force will be forced to change jobs due to the adoption of automation by 2030 (Manyika et al., 2017).

Furthermore, automation can take effect implicitly while fading into the background of a person's experience of place. For example, with the help of supercomputing or other automation-enabled management systems, the entire airport becomes a giant automation that controls the interior temperature, pressure, and humidity and coordinates flight arrivals and departures based on actual traffic flows in real time. When an airport provides a comfortable interior environment, travelers may not be immediately aware of the automatic operation of the air conditioning system. In other words, travelers do not observe the execution of the automatic system immediately, but its execution constantly influences them. In so doing, people may not initiate any disposition toward automation since no immediate human-automation interaction exists. This unformed disposition consists of indifference, carefree, or untriggered affective force toward automation. In the meantime, people in the place may develop a disposition of insecurity because they are unavoidably influenced by automation, over which they do not have any control.

The above examples of automation's positionalities reveal the disposition's underlying structure, which manifests as a pair of intertwined affective tendencies that amplify certain human experiences while simultaneously reducing others. However, the five dispositions proposed by Lin et al. (2024) are primarily supportive of the labor force's adaptation to automation. Hence, this section reminds us of the constant co-existence of the affective tendencies that may cause a rejection of automation, as discussed in this section, the sense of repulsion, confusion, suspicion, or insecurity. Therefore, a more holistic understanding of the disposition toward automation can be obtained.

Concluding remarks

Building upon Lin et al.'s theoretical discourse of disposition, this commentary underscores the significance of emplacing dispositions toward automation. With new evidence from aeromobilities, I elaborated on four primary positionalities of automation: embodiment, hermeneutics, alterity, and background, to catalyze further discussion. The commentary highlights an often-ignored affective tendency that opposes automation, which simultaneously coexists with the more obvious tendency that supports it. This perspective enriches our holistic understanding of disposition, its underlying structure, and social implications for future geography studies. It also enables us to critically reflect upon the impact of automation on labor relations and the corresponding reproduction of capital, spatially, and temporally.