Critics commonly warn about three primary hazards of AI: job disruption, bias, and surveillance/privacy concerns. Yet Allison Pugh argues in The Last Human Job that this conventional story is missing a vital issue, and blinding us to its role in a cresting “depersonalization crisis.” If we are concerned about increasing loneliness and social fragmentation, then we need to reckon with how technologies enable or impede human connection. Based on five years of interviews and observations, Pugh explains how we ended up in a moment in which machines have time for people, while human workers rush by, bent to the dictates of the industrial clock.

About the Speaker

Allison Pugh is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and teaching focus on how economic trends—from commodification to job insecurity to automation—shape the way people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work. Her public writing on work, relationships and inequality has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic and other outlets