The Future of Work in the Age of Automation: Proceedings of a Workshop on Norbert Wiener’s 21st Century Legacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article synthesizes the insights gained through presentations and discussions at the 2023 IEEE Workshop on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century (21CW2023), which focused on “The Future of Work in the Age of Automation.” Hosted at Purdue University, this interdisciplinary convening of technologists, social scientists, and humanists explored the impacts of automation on labor, drawing on Wiener’s legacy of insights as a backdrop to examine the technologically mediated future we face in coming decades. The workshop presented a rare opportunity to reflect critically on these issues at a pivotal moment in human and technological history, and to elicit underappreciated dimensions. Areas of focus include: the qualitative and quantitative losses associated with automation and AI, the impacts automation has for questions about the meaningfulness of work, the challenges we face related to uncertainty and lack of predictability in technological advancement, and the opportunities that exist for centering human values and agency in these conversations. While acknowledging many items for concern in the context of automation in the future of work, such as the domination of economic narratives, a potential loss of qualitative texture, and the neglect of certain issues key to human identity, the authors conclude by offering optimistic visions—or calls—for redefining value and labor, preserving human agency, and embracing creative problem-solving.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".