In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), H.G. Wells’s dystopian tale of a bleak industrial future, the protagonist Graham takes a tour of a London nursery owned by “the International Crèche Syndicate.” Conditions are regulated by an “elaborate apparatus” that rings a bell “at the slightest departure from the optimum of temperature and moisture.” A doctor points to the “wet nurses, a vista of mechanical figures, with arms, shoulders, and breasts of astonishingly realistic modelling, articulation, and texture, but mere brass tripods below.” (Each “nurse” also sports a “disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers.”) Save for the robots, the “little pink creatures” are “left alone, without embrace or endearment.” Horrified by this depersonalized care, Graham protests, but the doctor calmly and expertly reassures him. The “statistical evidence,” he imperiously insists, demonstrates that “the hazardous adventures of the old-world nursing” had resulted in numerous unnecessary deaths and diseases. With its rationalized, automated approach, the Syndicate, on the other hand, “lost not one-half percent of the million babies or so that formed its peculiar care.” Graham finds the adjacent playroom is similarly impersonal: While toys abound, “much was done by machines that sang and danced and dandled.”
Where Graham (like, presumably, Wells) was alarmed, today’s tech bros might see yet another salutary case of “disruption” in action. As Allison Pugh makes clear in her incisive and unsettling study of “connective labor” and its increasing subjection to bureaucratic and technological control, engineers are eagerly designing technologies—today’s “elaborate apparatuses”—to replicate and standardize what were once unassailably human virtues: empathy, compassion, patience, and emotional nuance. Having embarked on a “relentless drive to colonize the human life-world,” Silicon Valley is invading realms once considered the preserves of nurses, doctors, therapists, counselors, teachers, and clergy. Like the doctor’s “statistical evidence,” an AI-powered array of metrics and technical systems is replacing the “hazardous adventures” of only-too-human listening, understanding, and mentoring, and the swift disposal of clients and patients (“not one-half percent of the million babies”) is displacing the time-consuming labor of attention, insight, and care. If Big Tech has its way, the connective labor of relationships—with its vulnerable joys and sorrows, so fraught with confusion and misunderstanding—will yield to the “peculiar care” of today’s technological syndicate. Graham’s abhorrence must become our own.