Military Technologies and Human Labor

In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019) observe that under capitalism transnational media and corporate promotional accounts of artificial intelligence (AI)—alongside algorithms, robotics, and digital technologies—subscribe to a logic of technoliberalism whereby technological advancements promise to unburden humanity from the daily toils of unfulfilling work in order to reach its full potential. To romanticize human flourishing by way of technological efflorescence requires that engineering imaginaries craft a narrow definition of what the human is and what such flourishing entails; as the authors put it, these cultural imaginaries “tend to be limited by prior racial and gendered imaginaries of what kinds of tasks separate the human from the less-than or not-quite human other” (4). It is no surprise, then, that those menial tasks performed by the “not-quite human other” have historically been rendered invisible or deemed insignificant in order to...