10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18597
application/pdf
2038-3460
18597
2
en
Pedro dos Santos Maia
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton and Minna Ruckenstein (eds.), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies, Routledge, 2022
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
14
Book Reviews
2024-01-16
2023-12-06
2024-01-16
2024-01-16
139-142
TS
Pedro dos Santos Maia
2023
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18597
139
Geneva Graduate Institute
2038-3460
2
en
142
Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton and Minna Ruckenstein (eds.), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies, Routledge, 2022
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/18597/17033
14
T/S                                                                                  BOOK REVIEWS


Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging
Technologies
by Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton and Minna Ruckenstein (eds.) (2022) Abingdon
and New York, Routledge, pp. 250.




Pedro dos Santos Maia
Geneva Graduate Institute


   Do you know when you are typing, and your phone tries to guess the subject and suggests
the next word? Or when Alexa talks to us and suggests results on a specific topic? These are
examples of automation in our daily lives. Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipat-
ing Emerging Technologies, edited by Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton, and Minna
Ruckenstein, provides a comprehensive examination of the impact of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) on our daily lives. Despite their messy and
shifting nature, as outlined by the contributors in this volume, AI and ADM are character-
ised by algorithms. Therefore, Everyday Automation suggests an exploration of the everyday
and situated relationships with automation, aiming to humanise it while emphasizing the
impact, presence and perceptions related to ADM and AI.
   This is an edited volume that puts forward a research agenda structured around an inter-
disciplinary way of exploring everyday automation. The book dialogues with and expands on
contributions from more-than-human theory, Feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
and scholarships tackling the everyday engagements of humans and non-humans with algo-
rithms and digital infrastructures. If Kate Crawford (2021), reviewed in TS 1/2022 by Federico
Cugurullo, provided readers with a reflection on the places (earth), practices (labour and classifi-
cation), forms of knowledge (data), elements (affect) and organizations (state) implicated in the
many stages of AI development and implementation, this book proposes a focus on the mun-
dane engagements between humans and AI, presented in the form of ADM. This approach
acknowledges the humans involved in every stage of the design, delegation, and implementation
of automated systems. Bringing people and their daily practices to the discussion around auto-
mation allows striking a balance between industry portrayals of automation as a perfect solution
and the view of data-driven decisions as cruel and reductionist. Through this book, the contrib-
utors focus on the human part of automation processes and allow us to consider the practical,
experiential, social, and political implications of automated technologies in everyday life.
   The first part of the book encompasses Chapters 1 to 4 and is named “Challenging dom-
inant narratives of automation”. It provides an overview of moments where imaginaries, vi-

CNOS
   TE CIENZA. tI alian Journal of Science & eT chnology Studies     © The Author(s) 2023
     14(2) p. 14239- ISSN 2038-46                                   Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
          DOI: 10.692/issn./18597203-46                             www.tecnoscienza.net
Maia                                                                                         140

sions and narratives around automation are challenged, echoed, or multiplied by our daily
practices. In Chapter 1, Lina Rahm and Anne Kaun analyse newspaper clippings on auto-
mation in the Swedish press from the 1950s to 1980s. They examine mundane ways of im-
agining technological change and the visual depiction of such processes. They reveal how
public discourse on innovation and automation oscillates between confirmation and demys-
tification of technology, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea of natural and inevitable
technological progress. Sarah Pink, in Chapter 2, discusses the role of trust within industry,
policy and research sectors shaped by a techno-solutionist innovation paradigm, as the mar-
ket of ADM transport mobilities. She shows how the coupling between trust in automation
and human ethics disconnects the everyday worlds where ethics and trust are experienced
from those where automated technology is designed and developed. Looking at future im-
aginaries of ADM transport mobilities, trust is situated as something that needs to be gener-
ated so that people will (correctly) use automated technologies to solve societal problems. In
Chapter 3, Deborah Lupton introduces a sociocultural reading of how digitised surveillance
was deployed or anticipated in the year following WHO’s pandemic declaration, highlighting
the implementation of digitised surveillance in social and political contexts and effects. She
anchors the chapter in three concepts: digitalisation, datafication and dataveillance to explore
Covid as a calculatory process that despite heavily relaying in surveillance practices and in the
implementation of digitised Covid solutions, still had little impact on populations living in
data poverty and potentially leading to the exacerbation of existing disadvantages and dis-
criminations. Chapter 4 discusses the implementation of automated attendance systems in
classrooms. Neil Selwyn discusses how the implementation of facial recognition technology
in Australian schools – part of an automated attendance system – is connected to a broader
dominating educational logic that conditions contemporary school reform to disintermedi-
ate the interaction between teacher and students, reducing the student’s subjectivities to data
points and diminishing teachers’ capacity to deal with emergent classroom dynamics.
   The second part, “Embedding automated systems in the everyday”, is composed of Chap-
ters 5 to 9 and focuses on how automation has crept into our more intimate and personal mo-
ments and the consequences of this movement. In Chapter 5, Jenny Kennedy and Yolande
Strengers propose a gender reading of digital assistants. In their work from 2020, Kennedy
and Strengers tackle how digital assistants revisit outdated gender stereotypes (Strengers and
Kennedy 2020, reviewed in TS 2/2021 by Linda Paxling). In their contribution to “Everyday
Automation”, they expand on their previous work by exploring how gender is programmed
into these assistants and how their decisions are bound by ADMs seeking to automate dis-
tinct manners of care, resembling “women’s intuition” or the feminised work historically
connected to bearing high levels of emotional intelligence. This specific performance of
gender is a way of facilitating the acceptance of caregiving coming from digital assistants or
“smart wives”. Heather Horst and Sheba Mohammid, in Chapter 6, focused on the Echo
Look, an Amazon device that uses AI to collect social media data on clothing and provide
people with suggestions and recommendations on outfit options. What the authors highlight
is how users make sense of Echo Look practices, the context of its use and the limitations
of this machine, that is, what Echo cannot see, like different fashion contents and contexts.
Chapter 7, authored by Jakob Svensson, exposes the ways in which people get entangled
141                                                                   Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

with algorithms on a daily basis. He explores how algorithms and algorithmic automation
are imagined in a newspaper’s newsroom and the socio-institutional practices embedded in
these imaginaries. Svensson argues that the way the newsroom staff imagine the algorithm
also frames the calculations of the algorithm itself. For example, imaginaries of algorithmic
automation as labour-saving and time-efficient afforded the construction of an algorithm re-
sponsible for sorting the newspaper’s frontpage and which news reach readers. Consequent-
ly, the algorithm optimized the journalists’ time and allowed them to focus on the content.
In Chapter 8, the focus of the analysis lies on office-based workplace tracking devices. In this
chapter, Stine Lomborg explores self-tracking at the workplace. Through empirical work in
Denmark, he shows us how everyday AI solutions at work try to advance a homogenisation
of work values while forgetting that users actively contribute to the uses of technology and
continuously shape and reappropriate digital systems to their own ends. The last chapter of
this section, written by Magnus Bergquist and Bertil Rolandsson, presents a discussion on
the delegation of decision-making to ADM devices in healthcare. In their text, it becomes
clear that ADM is an opaque and ambiguous tool which allows workers and professionals to
improvise and be creative in managing healthcare, granting healthcare workers the capacity to
perform even more complex and nuanced practices.
   The third and last part – Chapters 10 to 14 – titled “Experimenting with automation in
society” discusses the many different engagements, practices and relations established with
automated technologies in the everyday. In Chapter 10, Martin Berg looks at robotic process
automation in the workplace and how companies create value propositions in relation to
their products and specific ideas about what work is and what it can become. By looking
at the discursive practices of two companies – UiPath and Blue Prism –, Berg argues that
companies employ a certain vocabulary around change, re-imaginations and transformation
that situates and performs work practices as part of an automated future. Julia Velkova, Dick
Magnusson and Harald Rohracher examine in Chapter 11 how energy companies and tech
start-ups’ use ADM systems in smart thermostats and how it impacts the relationships be-
tween the privacy of our homes, energy infrastructure providers, and data-driven companies.
In this process, ADM becomes a form of mediating algorithmic logic that “binds together,
mediates, and transforms relations between multiple economies and ‘social worlds’ brought
together by a common concern with temperature” (p. 172).
   Chapter 12 unveils the ghostly presence of prisoners training and creating AI. Tuukka Le-
htiniemi and Minna Ruckenstein explore the Finnish company Vainu and how it employs
prisoners to perform data labour. In highlighting how the company tries to conceal the sub-
jects that are part of processes of automation, the authors explore how the ghost work of
incarcerated bodies, and their invisibility is an integral part of obscuring and occluding the
way AI mechanisms are trained. Chapter 13 proposes as a research design an ethnographic
approach to dissecting the future of automated mobility solutions and explore how this type
of research creates new ways of engaging with the social implications of ADM and the con-
text in which this technology is being deployed. The authors in Chapter 14 provide a way
of addressing current ad politics and accountability. If advertisements used to be publicly
available to anyone, now they have gone “dark” and are visible only to whom they are tar-
geted. This moves everyday engagements with advertisement away from overarching public
Maia                                                                                               142

scrutiny, raising a series of concerns about tailored discrimination, predatory advertising, and
the circulation of misleading political advertising. The rise of “dark ads” is followed by a con-
cern with their accountability and the authors try to contribute with a methodological way
of addressing this through back door access and auditing practices.
  Summing up, the book adds value to anyone interested in how our most intimate and mun-
dane routines are structured around automated processes and the possible consequences of
this move. It enlarges the chorus of STS scholars demanding a more serious engagement with
how AI and other automated processes became part of our everyday lives and how different
actors like companies, invisible workers and devices are implicated in our ways of engaging
with technology. A potential way of moving this research agenda forward would involve delv-
ing into issues that were not extensively examined in “Everyday Automation”, such as the
environmental costs implicated in the production, use and discard of ADM devices (e.g.,
Crawford and Joler 2018) and the aesthetic experiences part of everyday engagements with
algorithms and AI (e.g., Phan 2019).


References

Crawford, Kate and Joler, Vladan (2018) Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical
   Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources. AI Now Institute and Share Lab. Available at:
   https://anatomyof.ai (retrieved on October 24, 2023).
Crawford, Kate (2021) Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence,
   New Haven, Yale University Press.
Cugurullo, Federico (2022) Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, Yale University Press, 2021 [Book Review], in
   “Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies”, 13(1), pp. 157-160.
Paxling, Linda (2021) Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy, The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa,
   and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, The MIT Press, 2020 [Book Review], in
   “Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies”, 12(2), pp. 243-247.
Phan, Thao (2019) Amazon Echo and the Aesthetics of Whiteness, in “Catalyst: Feminism, Theory,
   Technoscience”, 5(1), pp. 1-38.
Strengers, Yolande and Kennedy, Jenny (2020) The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart
   Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press.
