This two-day workshop is part of the AHRC funded Automation Anxiety network.

The workshop will explore anxiety about the atrophy of human skills through the automation of complex cognitive skills such as navigation, control of aircraft or vehicles. It will also examine cases where the delegation of human tasks to machines directly become a source of anxiety, instability or concern. Examples include high-frequency trading and the so-called ‘creepy line’ (Google) where algorithms or machine learning may display an uncanny or disturbing level of personal surveillance or insight. The workshop will also look at the extension of this problem into academic analysis itself, that is, the automation of research methods through digital humanities.

Contributions include:

Louise Amoore, The Attentiveness of Machines

James Ash, Automation, In-attention and the Accident: phases and the ethics of autonomous vehicles

David M. Berry, Towards a Critique of Machine Learning: critical digital humanities and Artificial Intelligence

Yves Citton, Exo-attention: Threats and Benefits

Rod Dickinson, Zero Sum

Beatrice Fazi, Distraction Machines? Machine Learning and the Conditions for Attention

Federica Frabetti, The (in)attentive anxiety of automated co-creation: Reflections on programming and/as composing

Andrew Prescott, The Roots of Our Anxiety?

Evelyn Ruppert, The Anxious Practitioner: inhabiting automation

Rebecca Wright, Tracking Automation Anxiety in the Mass Observation Archive

Automation and (In)Attention