That's a great line - the world isn't Kubernetes. Yes, in the real world, things break and problems arise. Things that worked in one context break down in another. In one of the chapters, I talk about the huge amount of maintenance work needed to keep these systems running, 'unsexy' work that never gets mentioned in the founder's keynote. There's often an immense amount of labor, knowledge, and expertise behind the scenes, some of it well paid, much of it precarious and under-paid.
Full/Total/Complete automation is one of the fictions, but it's not the only one.
Automation is also framed as a universal phenomenon that will sweep across the globe, remaking 'the economy' and society. But there are economies plural and technology is cultural and contextual. So I push against this concept and point to automated technologies and how they differ from place to place, in the book zooming into Xinjiang in China, for example, to examine how technologies intersect with historical prejudice.
Automation is also linked 'the human', but historically some people are more 'human' than others and the history of labor is one of inequality. So some (PoC, women, immigrants, etc) bear the brunt of automated technologies while others less.
In other words, automation is not just a myth because its not full automation, but because its a story that obscures the messier and more devastating details that happen on the ground.
Yes, the promises of full automation have been around for at least a century, where we can go back to texts in the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc and see these claims of technical systems taking over work. In a lot of that rhetoric, the only problem is what happens to the superfluous human when that core block of identity - work - is removed. Of course, those promises have not materialized. There are many issues here in attempting to automate that huge constellation of tasks, gestures, roles, etc under the umbrella of 'work'. One growing area of work, as a quick example, is personal services - child care, elderly care, etc. This work is highly context sensitive, and often requires relational and affective labor, rather than repetitive, standardized, physical gestures. Many kinds of labor are non-trivial from a technical perspective.
Of course, as the author, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. :-) The first chapter establishes what is and isn't being claimed and the rest of the book fleshes those arguments out. The idea here is not some massive 'debunking' exercise, but rather pushing against automation rhetoric to explore actually existing work conditions and technological fallout. Certainly that's harder to see from a summary on a webpage though, without having the full book in front of you.
Yes the title is provocative, and can only be so long. The introduction chapter articulates more precisely what I'm arguing. Chapter summaries are available here: https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=34899&i=Contents.htm - I've pasted a section below that might help sharpen the claim.
Automation is a myth, a long-running fable about the future of work that needs to be reconsidered. Whether embraced as dream or cautioned as nightmare, automation is ultimately a fiction, a fantasy. "Myth" does not imply that automated technologies do not exist or that there have not been technically driven transformations in the nature of work over the past century. But these transformations have been piecemeal rather than total. They have taken place differently within different cultures and locations. And they have impacted particular races and genders rather than a generic humanity.
In the tech case, there's a definite trend of overpromising, which wins funding, contracts, and so on, and then underdelivering. There's a few different examples in the book where half-baked 'automated' systems are rolled out, and then humans are placed under increased pressure to fill in the gaps and make things work.
In the politicians case, I think there's probably a mix of motives - being seen to be aware of technological change, forward-thinking, etc. But this gives too much credence to industry promises. The threat creates initative to study the effects of automation, but often at a 10,000 foot view, overlooking the specifics of labor conditions, technological adoption, and the workers themselves (race, gender, etc).
Some HNers might be interested in the book below, which is coming out in a couple weeks with Stanford, and which can be pre-ordered now. It uses a provocative claim to push against the myths of automation but also develop a messier and more interesting portrait of the 'future of work'. Happy to field any questions.
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For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."