Behind Every Good Robot There's A Human
Or 2 or 3 or 500. It can take effort to see them.
Robot magic has something in common with the old-fashioned kind that plays in Vegas and at kids’ birthday parties. In both cases, a ta-da! spectacle grabs people’s attention, so they don’t register the human labor that made ta-da happen. The magician draws your eyes where she wants them, away from the well-practiced move that switches the handkerchief for the dove. Similarly, the robot company talks up sensors and mobility and AI, nudging your thoughts away from the human driver who takes over when the machine gets overwhelmed.
Fauxtomation — Astra Taylor’s term for supposed achievements credited to machines that are actually performed by people — is the most egregious form of unseen work in tech, but it’s not the only kind. Also unrecognized are the myriad tiny fixes humans do when they work with robots, and the guidance they provide when machines need to learn a task. We also hear very little about the engineers who rush in to fix systems t…