Over the past decade, techno-optimistic visions of automation have become ubiquitous, evident in domains ranging from self-driving cars to AI-generated artwork and automated customer service bots. Increasingly, society seems to have passively accepted that automation drives progress, including in agriculture. One only need look to examples such as robots picking strawberries, milking cows, or driving tractors to witness the power of these visions to shape the future of food systems.

Automation is frequently depicted as inevitable, transformative, and (implicitly) equitable. Boosters concoct grand, glittering visions of promise that are always some decades in the future. They point to workers being empowered to do better quality work and to consumers having more freedom to enjoy products and services. Yet the social and environmental costs of automation are seen as irrelevant—or never acknowledged at all—in the face of the projected progress. Historically, visions of automation have seldom been realized fully, if at all, suggesting that powerful resistances can push back against this technology, or that the projected vision does not need to come to fruition for the technology to ‘succeed’.

Commonly, boosters frame automation as a solution to ‘problems’ associated with human work, such as inefficiency, lack of intelligence, fallibility, and rebelliousness. They frequently portray automation as offering novel capabilities that human actors lack. For example, identifying patterns that human brains cannot see. Sometimes, automation is proposed as a way to solve the problems that earlier generations of technological ‘progress’ have created, such as reducing the extensive reliance on toxic pesticides, or to bridge gaps in what those technologies were able to do—machines that are more safe, precise, or flexible, for example. A common subtext is that progress means minimizing, even eliminating, human work.

This project analyzes the extensive, yet often obscured, work required to frame automation as a powerful and inevitable path to food system utopia, the resistances to such frames, and the hidden consequences of mass buy-in to resulting techno-optimistic visions for agricultural automation automation.

We are asking:

• What does automation “working” actually look like in practice (as distinct from the glossy visions of what automation is supposed to do)?
• What requirements does automation have in order to work? What (or who) needs to change, what are the resistances (or who resists), and how are these ‘overcome’ or not?
• Who stands to benefit in power and wealth as a result of automation? Who will bear the risks and burdens?
• How does automation displace (as opposed to replace) labor and work? Are there cases in which automation improves livelihoods and the conditions of human labor?

Publications

• Baur, Patrick, and Alastair Iles. 2023. Inserting machines, displacing people: how automation imaginaries for agriculture promise ‘liberation’ from the industrialized farm. Agriculture and Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10435-5.
• Baur, Patrick, and Alastair Iles. 2022. Replacing humans with machines: a historical look at technology politics in California agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10341-2.