Capitalism's mirror stage: artificial intelligence and the quantified worker – Phoebe Moore

As AI enters the workplace, we need to reflect upon the criteria by which human work is evaluated and human subjectivity depicted. Control panels are the obvious place to run operations centrally. The control rooms of Star Trek's fantastical Enterprise (and the hub of the actual Project Cybersyn under Chile's radical president Salvador Allende) in the 1960s and 70s were however operated by humans with relatively primitive technologies. Today, much of the work of the people we imagined in these rooms--the bouffanted women in silver A-line dresses and men in blue boiler suits pushing buttons to operate the manoeuvres of galactical imperialism--is done by computers. But what will happen when the proverbial windows looking out to the galaxies only display a cadre of robots and the control panels' blinking lights are the only reflective glimmer?