Asian Roboticism: Connecting Mechanized Labor to the Automation of Work
In: Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologySearch for other papers by Long Bui in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article reconsiders the present-day automation of work and its transformation of who we are as humans. What has been missing from this important conversation are the social meanings surrounding Asian roboticism or how Asians have already been rendered as “robotic” subjects and labor. Through this racial gendered trope, I assess whether industrial automation will lessen, complicate, or exacerbate this modern archetype. By looking at corporate organizational practices and public media discourse, I believe that Asian roboticism will not simply vanish, but potentially continue to affect the ways such subjects are rendered as exploitable alienated robots without human rights or status.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Associated Press. 2012. “Daley: Chinese Diver Qiu is ‘like a Robot.’” Associated Press. July 21.
-
Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. 2015. “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1(1):1-49.
-
Aytes, Ayhan, 2012. “Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception.” Pp. 87-105 in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Edited by Trebor Sholz. London: Routledge.
-
Baldwin, Richard. 2019. The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work. UK: Oxford University Press.
-
BBC. 2013. “Amazon Workers Face ‘Increased Risk of Mental Illness.’” BBC. November 25.
-
Birch, David, Tony Schirato, and Sanjay Srivastava. 2001. Asia: Cultural Politics in the Global Age. NY: Palgrave.
-
Bradley, Laurel. 2014. Health, Well-Being, and Rights: Mapping the Boundaries of Belonging for Filipino Caregivers in Israel. PhD dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
-
Brownell, Susan. 1997. “‘China Bashing’ at the Olympic Games: Why the Cold War continues in Sports Journalism.” Chinese American Forum 7(3):21-22.
-
Chamberlain, Gethin. 2011. “Apple’s Chinese workers treated ‘Inhumanely, like Machines’.” The Guardian. April 30. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treated-inhumanely).
-
Chan, Jenny. 2013. “A Suicide Survivor: The Life of a Chinese Worker.” New Technology, Work and Employment 28(3): 84-99.
-
Chan, Jenny. 2017. “Robots, Not Humans: Official Policy in China.” New Internationalist. November 1. (https://newint.org/features/2017/11/01/industrial-robots-china).
-
Chen, Adrian. 2014. “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” Wired. October 23. (https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/).
-
Chen, Tina. 2017. “Context, Coordinate, Circulation: the Postrepresentational Cartographies of Global Asias.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3(1):vi-xiv.
-
China Labor Watch. 2010. “DailyFinance: Apple, HP, and Sony Open Probes into Latest Foxconn Suicides.” May 28. (http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/newscast/31).
-
China Times. 2012. “Foxconn Chairman Likens His Workforce to Animals.” China Times. January 19. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120215091833/http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id%3D20120119000111%26cid%3D1102%26MainCatID%3D0).
-
Daily Mail. 2008. “Olympic Farce: Former Blue Peter Presenter Konnie Huq Lashes out at ‘Robotic’ Chinese Torchminders.” Daily Mail, April 7. (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-557886/Olympic-farce-Former-Blue-Peter-presenter-Konnie-Huq-lashes-robotic-Chinese-torch-minders.html).
-
Drum, Kevin. 2014. “Social Networking Employs More People Than We Think.” Mother Jones, October 26. (https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/10/social-networking-employs-more-people-we-think/).
-
Frayer, Janis Mackey. 2016. “Rio 2016: China’s Olympian Factories Churn Out Fewer Champions.” NBC News. August 20. (https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-rio-summer-olympics/rio-2016-china-s-olympian-factories-churn-out-fewer-champions-n630786).
-
Golumbia, David. 2015. “The Amazonization of Everything.” Jacobin. August 5. (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/amazon-google-facebook-privacy-bezos/).
-
Guevarra, Anna Romina. 2018. “Mediations of Care: Brokering Labour in the Age of Robotics.” Pacific Affairs 91(4):739-758.
-
Hall, Miranda. 2017. “The Ghost of the Mechanical Turk.” Jacobin. February 16. (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/middle-east-digital-labor-microwork-gaza-refugees-amazon).
-
Happier Abroad Blog. 2013. “Taiwanese people are empty shells with no soul, personality or passion.” HappierAbroad.com. (http://blog.happierabroad.com/2013/01/taiwanese-people-are-empty-shells-with.html).
-
Hellard, Bobby. 2010. “Apple to Investigate Factory Treating Students ‘like Robots’.” IT Pro. October 30. (https://www.itpro.co.uk/business-strategy/careers-training/32246/apple-investigates-student-labour-robot-claim-china).
-
Hindu, The. 2017. “Eerily Life-Life, Chinese Bionic Woman Turns on the Charm.” The Hindu. January 9. (https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Eerily-life-like-Chinese-bionic-woman-turns-on-the-charm/article17013635.ece).
-
Huang, Betsy. 2008. “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions.” Melus 33(4):23-43.
-
Hyman, Louis. 2018. Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. NY: Penguin.
-
Kevorkian, Martin. 2006. Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. NY: Cornell University Press.
-
Lean, Eugenia. 2018. “Making the Chinese Copycat: Trademarks and Recipes in Early Twentieth-Century Global Science and Capitalism.” Osiris 33(1):271-293.
-
Lee, Rachel. 2014. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. NY: NYU Press.
-
Lekach, Sasha. 2008. “‘The Cleaners’ Shows the Terrors Human Content Moderators Face at Work.” Mashable. November 12. (https://mashable.com/article/the-cleaners-content-moderators-facebook-twitter-google/).
-
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “Are Robots Competing for Your Job.” The New Yorker. February 25. (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/are-robots-competing-for-your-job).
-
Lowe, Annie. 2014. Narratives of Technological Globalization and Outsourced Call Centers in India: Droids, Mimic Machines, Automatons, and Bad ‘Borgs. PhD Dissertation. University of Kansas.
-
Lozano-Méndez, Artur. 2010. “Techno-Orientalism in East Asian Contexts: Reiteration, Diversification, Adaptation.” Pp. 185-210 in Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy. Edited by May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara Schwartz. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
-
Lucas, Kristen, Dongjing Kang, and Zhou Li. 2013. “Workplace Dignity in a Total Institution: Examining the Experiences of Foxconn’s Migrant Workforce.” Journal of Business Ethics 114(1):91-106.
-
Ngai, Pun and Jenny Chan. 2012. “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Works: The Foxconn Experience.” Modern China 38(4): 383-410.
-
Park, Jane Chi Hyun. 2010. Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
-
Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross (Eds). 1991. Technoculture. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
-
Picchi, Aimee. 2018. “Inside an Amazon Warehouse: ‘Treating Human Beings as Robots’.” CBS News. April 29. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-treating-human-beings-as-robots/).
-
Rhee, Margaret. 2015. “Racial Recalibration.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 1(3):285-309.
-
Rittenhouse, Lindsay. 2017. “Amazon Warehouse Employees’ Message to Jeff Bezos—We Are Not Robots.” The Street. September 28. (https://www.thestreet.com/story/14312539/1/amazon-warehouse-employees-discuss-grueling-work.html).
-
Roh, David, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (Eds). 2015. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
-
Sachdev, Chhavi. 2018. “Once the go-to place for surrogacy, India tightens control over its baby industry.” PRI. (https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-07-04/once-go-place-surrogacy-india-tightens-control-over-its-baby-industry).
-
Schwab, Klaus. 2017. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Redfern: Currency Press.
-
Simons, Christopher. 2017. “Japan: building the future, living in the past?” New Internationalist. (https://newint.org/features/2017/11/01/robots-japan).
-
Statt, Nick. 2016. “IPhone Manufacturer Foxconn plans to Replace almost Every Human Worker with Robots.” The Verge. December 30. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128870/foxconn-robots-automation-apple-iphone-china-manufacturing).
-
Tao, Li. 2018. “Xinhua News Agency Debuts AI anchors in Partnership with Search Engine Sogou.” South China Morning Post. November 8. (https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/2172235/xinhua-news-agency-debuts-ai-anchors-partnership-search-engine-sogou).
-
Tarantino, Matteo and Stefania Carini. 2013. “The Good, the Fake and the Cyborg: The Broadcast and Coverage of Beijing 2008 Olympics in Italy.” Pp. 291-312 in Encoding the Olympics: the Beijing Olympic Games and the Communication Impact Worldwide. Edited by Luo Qing and Giuseppe Richeri. UK: Routledge.
-
Vasager, Jeevan. 2016. “Why Singapore Kids are so Good at Maths.” Financial Times. July 22. (https://www.ft.com/content/2e4c61f2-4ec8-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc).
-
Vukovich, Daniel. 2013. China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Postcolonial Politics). NY: Routledge.
-
Wee, Sui-Lee. 2012. “Young Workers in China: ‘We’re Human, Not Machines.’” The Fiscal Times. May 4. (https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/05/04/Young-Workers-in-China-Were-Human-Not-Machines).
-
Wilson, Jeremy. 2013. “My Gruelling Day as an Amazon Mechanical Turk.” The Kernel. August 28. (https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/4732/my-gruelling-day-as-an-amazon-mechanical-turk/).
-
Wong, Staphany. 2010. “Decoding the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers.” EU-China Civil Society Forum. September 2. (https://www.eu-china.net/uploads/tx_news/eu-china_2010_hintergrund_01.pdf).
-
Xiaochen, Sun. 2012. “Robots? Nope—Just Really Good Athletes.” China Daily. July 30. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-07/30/content_15629012.htm).
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 3509 | 491 | 72 |
| Full Text Views | 170 | 31 | 5 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 293 | 46 | 8 |
Asian Roboticism: Connecting Mechanized Labor to the Automation of Work
In: Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologySearch for other papers by Long Bui in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article reconsiders the present-day automation of work and its transformation of who we are as humans. What has been missing from this important conversation are the social meanings surrounding Asian roboticism or how Asians have already been rendered as “robotic” subjects and labor. Through this racial gendered trope, I assess whether industrial automation will lessen, complicate, or exacerbate this modern archetype. By looking at corporate organizational practices and public media discourse, I believe that Asian roboticism will not simply vanish, but potentially continue to affect the ways such subjects are rendered as exploitable alienated robots without human rights or status.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 3509 | 491 | 72 |
| Full Text Views | 170 | 31 | 5 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 293 | 46 | 8 |