The role
of technology

Whenever great cultural upheavals occur, we know it, the work and its perception change accordingly. In the months and years that follow the pandemic, the theme of work and employment will be the protagonists of the public debate, generating a consequent mutation, it would have been said to be “anthropological” and cultural, in people who will experience the new rules and new customs.

In recent years, as long as the robotization of production processes affected sectors where human labor was repetitive or tiring (with work in dangerous areas or in unhealthy environments, high-speed processes, handling of heavy articles, sorting among numerous similar products, etc.), the introduction of machines into companies has been most often hailed as a systemic and natural evolution of the production sector.

In reality, the ultimate goal of widespread automation processes has always been the same: to reduce costs and shorten the time required to build goods.

However, today the industrial world is ready to make an epochal leap by building entire automated supply chains. Supply chains where the human presence involved in the production phases will be absent or completely marginal.

This event – as already mentioned – will entail a redistribution of roles, a rethinking of human functions in the occupational sphere and a consequent “reprogramming” of the operational architectures of individuals. Not only that: it will perform a powerful sorting between the types of work, making many professional figures obsolete or even canceling entire sectors.

The new mandatory distance protocols will atomise human figures within companies, replacing or modulating the relationship apparatus thanks to the help of proprietary technological platforms or borrowed from communication systems. The dissemination of work information will take place increasingly through tools: no longer having the constraint of physical presence, internal assistance and advice to companies will be optimized and centralized, so as to reduce the arbitrariness of the choices and increase the synergy of the parties.

In this scenario, where the number and extent of human presence will decrease drastically – be it related to the purely industrial / productive world or related to services – the corporate concept of work and worker will also be diluted. Many strategic figures in social bargaining will no longer have a sense of existence, lacking a real reference base that can be the subject of representation.

Automation and dignity

A sort of occupational paradox will be established on this interwoven network of complex dynamics. If on the one hand the workers will benefit from the automation of the processes (and delegate to the machines a whole series of useless, repetitive, dangerous, wearisome jobs, etc.), on the other they will experience a real systemic deprivation of human dignity.

As we have known for some time, work – which superficially could be identified with a simple network of tasks to perform – in reality represents a vehicle of collective recognition, of identification of one’s place in the world and a vector of social inclusion.

Eliminating or weakening the role of work in the life of individuals, especially in those sections of the population less prepared for a radical change and less involved in the training and relocation process, the conditions will be created for a systemic emptying of individual lives, with a consequent difficulty of recognition of oneself as individuals and as part of a community.

More generally, with the advent of this civil participation deficit, immersed in a value system that rewards automation (together with its corollaries: speed, formal perfection, uniformity, sterility etc.), it will be produced a sort of completely artificial, hyper-specialized and servo-assisted human civilization.

So in fact extremely weak, potentially submissive and unable to claim its own substantial autonomy by drawing on a wealth of systemic knowledge and skills that are useful for one’s physical and moral subsistence.

Among all the professions affected, the most volatile, decontractualized, autonomous and / or illegal professions will be the epicenter of this unease. Here they will dominate borderline attitudes and widespread vexatious strategies that will feed episodes of blackmail, alienation and social marginalization.

Organized underworld will also use this condition of illegality to strengthen its criminal ranks.

In the professions affected by this process of “capillary technologization” or which will undergo dramatic changes within habits, self-employed workers in general, people destined to smart working protocols and those who perform care services, to the person or related to the sphere of well-being.

These workers, forced to mediate between opposing and lacerating forces, will face new stringent regulations, performative pressures and an implacable reduction of their acquired rights. If measures are not taken to better protect these occupations, perhaps even to the detriment of public employees and their acquired positions, we will experience a strong social backlash that will fuel widespread dramatic tensions.