Can AI-Automated Consumption be our Home in the Digital Future?
Welcome to this hybrid seminar with Janice Denegri-Knott, Professor in Consumer Culture & Behaviour at Bournemouth University. As a Guest Professor at Centre for Consumption Research at Gothenburg Research Institute, Janice Denegri-Knott will talk about how AI and automation is affecting our consumption. If the automation of work will generate more time to consume, will there be enough consumption for us left to do?
Professor Janice Denegri-Knott about the seminar: Can AI-Automated Consumption be our Home in the Digital Future?
"Recently, there has been plenty of discussion about how AI-enabled automation will help us live forever, eradicate poverty and disease, save the environment from certain catastrophe, and liberate us from tedious occupations so that we can partake in more edifying and enjoyable pursuits, like consumption. On the other hand, AI-enabled automation could also bring mass technological unemployment, the death of human creativity, and certain death via human-hating autonomous weapons.
"Will there be enough consumption for us left to do?" //Janice Denegri-Knott
In a consumption context, there is some enthusiasm for embracing all sorts of automation to make life easier. To illustrate, we delegate wishlist creation to algorithms; we trust algorithmic recommendations to optimise our decision-making; our platforms curate and safeguard our photographs and music collections. However, if the automation of work will generate more time to consume, will there be enough consumption for us left to do? Will consumption still serve as a site to exercise our autonomy and moral judgement? Will it facilitate the type of self-investment necessary for the development of self and experiencing achievement, as skills are developed to conquer new challenges? Will it be enjoyable? Against these questions, in this talk, I want to make a case for consumption as a means of creating home in the digital future. I will consider four ways in which automation may threaten consumption as homemaking: increasing dependency, reducing serendipity, externalising internal thought processes, and contributing to the atrophy of skills. I will then introduce and advocate for the use of post-phenomenological tools to draw attention to emerging ways in which automated consumption could still be a home in the Digital Future."
