Disenchanting Technoliberalism

In a recent issue of PMLA, Wai Chee Dimock's Editor's Column, entitled "AI and the Humanities," refers to two distinct paths for the artificial intelligence of the future: "How can we create algorithms that would complement rather than replace human beings, help rather than destroy us?" she asks.¹ Dimock prefaces these alternatives with PMLA's readership in mind, citing studies that warn "those 'with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree'" and that the advent of new AI will "[hit] educated workers the hardest."² What "exposure" to AI might mean for literary scholars practically is never specified but the implication is that impending automation poses yet another threat to knowledge workers in literature programs who already find their material livelihoods jeopardized by the crises of defunding and adjunctification. To adapt, Dimock intimates that scholars of literature might enter into interdisciplinary arrangements with the computer scientists and engineers who have a hand in AI design. She observes that Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, for example, now counts English professors among its faculty. In such arrangements, the disciplinary practices and objects of literary study take a back seat to the collective pursuit of ethical AI. Here, literary expertise is narrowly defined as the dispensation of "humanistic perspectives" that will facilitate the creation of cooperative AI and hopefully stave off apocalyptic outcomes.³

In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, coauthors Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora lay bare the complex imaginaries that feed these contrasting visions of an automated future. If Dimock's questions betray concerns about the state of the discipline, they also rehearse a false opposition. What seems to be the utopic alternative, in which robots help rather than hurt us, recasts the value of literary study as moral instruction and reproduces exploitative labor relations. As Atanasoski and Vora write in their book's introduction, the "engineering projects that create the robots, program the AI, and enhance the digital infrastructure associated with a revolutionary new era are in fact predetermined by techniques of differential exploitation and dispossession within capitalism" (4). Although these technologies seem to advance a new era of freedom from the hardships of work, Surrogate Humanity contends that, more often than not, these advances ultimately shore up and further entrench existing racial hierarchies.

To elaborate these claims, Atanasoski and Vora open their book by explaining the ideology that underpins our current technological revolution. This structural transformation, sometimes referred to as the second machine age or fourth industrial revolution, promises to alter work as we know it by automating those tasks associated with "wage labor, domestic and reproductive labor, the work of care, and even the work of waging war" (4). While the socioeconomic impacts these changes will have on workers prompt fears of obsolescence for some, for others the displacement of humans by smart robots heralds a new epoch in human history. Unburdened by repetitive tasks, the thinking goes, smart technology will release post-industrial workers from their daily toil, liberating them to explore their full human potential. This vision of a postlabor future made possible by technology is precisely the gambit of technoliberalism, Atanasoski and Vora's term for "the ideology that technology advances human freedom and postracial futurity by asserting a postlabor world in which racial difference, along with all human social difference, is transcended" (28).

As Atanasoski and Vora make clear, technoliberalism is a ruse. Its fantasy of a world that transcends existing social inequities obscures the politics of difference that continue to fuel racial capitalism. They argue that "racial logics of categorization, differentiation, incorporation, and elimination are constitutive of the very concept of technology and technological innovation" (5). Building on Saidiya Hartman's conception of the surrogate self, they contend that "the freedom of the fully human liberal subject cannot come to be without the unfreedom of the less than human or...