Race, Gender, and Labor in the Robotic Imaginary

Fortunati describes the hegemony of immaterial labor through its connection to forms of reproductive labor that were once located primarily within the domestic sphere. In digital capital, labor is increasingly immaterial and precarious as it makes its way outside of both the domestic sphere and the industrial factory.

The term “anthropomorphic attachments” also refers to a method for thinking about, examining, and critiquing AI technologies. According to this method, anthropomorphization, a central organizing concept of AI, cannot be disentangled from dehumanization, because the concept of the human cannot be disentangled from dehumanization.

To this end, we approach science and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.