Academics Rhiannon Firth of the University College London and John Preston of the University of Essex have published a new book Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics that critiques the theories and visions of techno-optimistic socialists that are based on cybernetics, automation, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 for being unable to include human forms of creativity and working practices both theoretically and practically. They then use interviews with workers and activists in Industry 4.0 workplaces to argue that tacit knowledge as well as autonomous and spontaneous human projects are crucial for the theoretical and practical feasibility of creating postcapitalist societies in the 21st century.
A summary of the book can be found below:
The idea that automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics might lead to a utopian future for humanity is a powerful one both in mainstream and radical discourse. The paradigm of ‘Industry 4.0’ where digital manufacturing enables the seamless production of goods (and services) and ‘lights out’ factories where machines and robots effortlessly produce for our future needs and wants are powerful drivers of a capitalist, free market cybertopia. For some radicals, technology and automation produce the conditions for a Fully Automated Luxury Communism, drawing on an interpretation of Marx, where human work would be replaced by a life of leisure and abundance for all. For others, an earlier discourse – cybernetics – and the use of AI and social media in communication and co-ordination enable forms of radical organization through ‘anarchist cybernetics’.
This book questions that technological optimism – particularly cybernetics, automation and AI – through a critique of these technologies and organizational forms. Cybernetics and corresponding technologies and forms (particularly Industry 4.0) can never capture human forms of creativity and working practices. Furthermore, there are similar problems with the ‘cybernetic paradigm’ as a radical form of organization or social movement in terms of human autonomy, creativity, desire and social prefiguration. As counterpoint the book shows, through empirical evidence and drawing on interviews with workers or activists in a variety of organizational forms, that tacit knowledge and autonomous and spontaneous human projects (what the authors define as ‘hobbying’) are critical in the physical act of making and co-operating.
The book is open-access and can be read in full here.