Playing Ourselves into Feudalism: The Politics and Ethics of Playful Automation

Automation is everywhere. We fear the robots, but it is in fact a more insidious kind of automation, driven by algorithms and presented in a playful way, that is slowly corroding the social fabric. This “soft automation”, the use of algorithms to eliminate semi-skilled white-collar jobs, is transforming services into self-services, and killing the middle class as a result of it. There is a lot of concern over automation (Vallor, 2014). From the future of work in the face of disappearing jobs (Srnicek and Williams, 2015) to the fear of an AI planet (Bostrom, 2016), we are witnessing a revolution across labor: in the way it is organized, rewarded, and eliminated. We should be afraid of automation. Not only of the robots that will deprive factories from human jobs that require skill and expertise but not an academic education, but also of the quotidian, mundane forms of automation we are silently letting take hold of our daily life.


Introduction
Automation is everywhere. We fear the robots, but it is in fact a more insidious kind of automation, driven by algorithms and presented in a playful way, that is slowly corroding the social fabric. This "soft automation", the use of algorithms to eliminate semi-skilled white-collar jobs, is transforming services into self-services, and killing the middle class as a result of it.
There is a lot of concern over automation (Vallor, 2014). From the future of work in the face of disappearing jobs (Srnicek and Williams, 2015) to the fear of an AI planet (Bostrom, 2016), we are witnessing a revolution across labor: in the way it is organized, rewarded, and eliminated. We should be afraid of automation. Not only of the robots that will deprive factories from human jobs that require skill and expertise but not an academic education, but also of the quotidian, mundane forms of automation we are silently letting take hold of our daily life.
The explosion of AI techniques for natural language processing and image recognition, coupled with the ubiquitous presence of powerful smartphones has changed the way we interact with services. Through concepts like Big Data, states and corporations alike are finding solutions to make their services more accessible to users by developing software that can be installed on a smartphone, which is available 24/7/365, and that allows users to benefit from engaging with these services when they please. And additionally, they make these engagements pleasurable and fulfilling through playful User Experience designs.
In this paper, we analyze how play has been used as a design framework for the creation of selfservices. Play encourages more appealing and intriguing interfaces and experiences that engage users. However, we will argue that this playful turn is Building on media theory (Galloway, 2006;Dieter, 2014), aesthetic and critical theory (Baudrillard, 1996) and play theory (Sicart, 2014), we argue that playful soft automation is a corruption of the aesthetic and experiential powers of play as a form of appropriation of the world. At the same time, we will argue that play can be used to subvert soft automation, drawing on the long history of critical play and the arts (Flanagan, 2009;Getsy, 2011).

SOFT AUTOMATION AND PLAYFUL DESIGN
The use of apps to mediate services marks a transition from services to self-services. This transition involves a displacement of labor from specialized workers with privileged access to the inner workings of services, to users being deputized to perform service operations with the aid of software. Professions that used to be the stalwarts of the middle class and that did not require a long, academic education, like bank teller or clerk, are disappearing as we users accept to do that work ourselves, without any intermediaries. The promise of the vanishing intermediaries hides the threat of eliminating those service specialists, like travel agents, who understood how complex systems operated and could navigate them for us. Now we are at the mercy of algorithms such as search engines, which we have to interact with in order to book our next holidays or find that receipt that we need for our taxes (Manovich, 2014, Mittelstadt et al., 2016.
We address the transformation of services into self-services via software applications with the proposal of the concept of "soft automation". Soft both because it is based on software, and because it does not bring forth the fears of the terminator that will kill us, or the car-assembling robot that will steal our jobs. And automation, because these software-based services depend on algorithms to translate the complex systems into an interface that is user-friendly. Soft automation has the effect of displacing labor from specialized workers to users.
Additionally, softly automated services entice their users via playfulness. Research in games as engagement tools has showed that games can be used to increase the satisfaction and engagement and learning in users (Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino, Schrape, 2014;Walz & Deterding, 2015). There are successful indications that some forms of gamification and game-based learning actually increase engagement and improve educational results. Play is a powerful instrument to engage users of digital systems, to make them more attached and engaged to their activities, and to translate repetitive, boring, and mildly complex tasks into something more pleasurable. The promise of play is that by making things feel like games, and by structuring the activity using game design techniques, users can play the world, and therefore feel more engaged with the activity at hand (Deterding, 2012).