Surrogate humanity : race, robots, and the politics of technological futures

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Technoliberalism and automation : racial imaginaries of a post-labor world

2. Sharing, collaboration, and the commons in the fourth industrial revolution : the appropriative techniques of technoliberal capitalism

3. Automation and the invisible service function : toward an "artificial artificial intelligence"

4. The surrogate human affect : the racial programming of robot emotion

5. Machine autonomy and the unmanned spacetime of technoliberal warfare

6. Killer robots : feeling human in the field of war

"In Surrogate Humanity Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human--machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human-more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions-the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality."--Back cover. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system that is entrenched in and reinforces racial capitalism and patriarchy.