When
Work, Life, Autonomy, and Intelligence in a Robotic Age
Vincent del Casino
Provost and Senior Vice President, Academic Affairs
San Jose State University
Vincent Del Casino is currently provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at SJSU. He is also a human geographer with interests in the intersections of social, health, medical, and critical geography. His early research explored issues related to the HIV crisis in Southeast Asia along with issues of representation and representational politics. He has also explored issues of disciplinary history and has an ongoing interest in the history of ideas in geography as a discipline. His most recent work explores questions of human-nonhuman relations particularly as it relates to robots and robotic technologies as well as food systems and bugs. He has held positions at California State University, Long Beach and the University of Arizona prior to taking up the position of provost at SJSU. His most recent work has been co-authored with a number of scholars, while this most recent project (and talk) relies on his collaboration with Casey Lynch (University of Twente and University of Arizona PhD graduate).
Abstract: The subdiscipline of labor geography has historically focused on the human condition of work, the gendered and racialized dynamics of labor and social relations, as well as global socioeconomic networks and shifts in capital production infrastructures. Labor geography has been less immediately interested in, or more realistically engaged with, robotic futures. This talk traces this gap and offers a way to think about the future of human labor as a more-than-human experience. I argue that labor geography, and geography more broadly, must examine both how robots and robotic technologies are changing human relations to work and how labor futures are deeply integrated (and perhaps dependent on) our robotic futures. It does so while tracing some key concepts/questions in the geography of robotics related to questions of intelligence, precarity, and everyday life. The talk operates between a techno-pessimistic approach to these changes and a techno-optimistic one by offering ways in which human-robot relations are creating new spaces of work while displacing others. It does so while acknowledging the continuing uneven development in which robots are being deployed and roboticized technologies organized in relation to human labor today.