Description:

Speaker

Corrina Schlombs, History, Rochester Institute of Technology

Title

"Data Entry, Labor, and Gender: Office Automation in Capitalist and Socialist Economies"

Abstract

In 1949, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener warned US labor leader Walther Reuther that, in the US capitalist economy, automation technologies would cause massive unemployment. But a closer look at labor changes from computing technologies reveals a more complex picture: electronic computing also required new manual routine labor for data entry. Data occurred on paper, such as checks, insurance contracts or phone notes, and before it could be processed by a computer, it needed to be transferred into a computer-legible format—often punch cards or tape. In my talk, I examine mid-twentieth century office automation in capitalist and socialist economies, with a focus on the East German financial sector. In an economy promising full employment and lacking sufficient numbers of workers, officials promoted automation technologies with the goal of releasing workers. However, computing technologies were implemented in ways that heavily drew on women’s labor for data entry. Investigating how questions of technological change, employment, labor, and identity played out in different economic contexts, the talk calls technological promises into question at a time when artificial intelligence technologies are (again) expected to uproot the balance between human and machine labor.

Biography

Dr. Schlombs’s research focuses on technology and capitalism in transatlantic relations. In her current book project, she investigates transatlantic transfers of productivity culture and technology in the two decades before and after World War II. Productivity, a statistical measure of output per worker, came to encapsulate the American economic system, and transatlantic debates about productivity called into question the notion of the capitalist West during the Cold War conflict.