“Unemployment is the vital question […] Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work.” Charlie Chaplin, 1931.

  Charles Chaplin’s “Modern Times” expressed in film the anxieties of the people living through the industrial mechanisation era of the 1930s. The movie examined through humour management practices (it was the heyday of Taylorism), the chase of marginal profit at all cost (in the hilarious feeding machine scene) and the dehumanisation of the factory line workers. Chaplin does not a take a Luddite stance, he is a person that trusts science and believes that technological advancement benefits humankind. However, when he casts his gaze to encompass the society beyond the factory, he sees that the issues of inequality and unemployment aren’t being addressed properly in this new era and that the divide between the ‘has’ and the ‘has-nots’ was accelerating. In the twentieth century, war and death served as the great equaliser.

 Over eighty years have passed since the release of “Modern Times” and the start of industrial automation. We are heading towards a fourth leap in productivity: Industry 4.0. It follows the initial industrial revolution, the electricity and production line era and the computing era to bring about the bright new dawn of the Digital era.

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We have recently witnessed visceral reactions of taxi associations in Europe to the irruption of Über, the car-less transportation company, and its business model; Amazon’s treatment of its warehouse employees, akin to robots; and the dawn of the “gig economy” that negates the employment for life mentality our parents had. Suddenly, the themes explored in “Modern Times” felt fresh once again, a cycle was completed and they could be re-examined in our new “Automated Times”.

  We, the Mr. Roboto team, share Chaplin’s optimism and love of human ingenuity as well as some measure of his social awareness. We want to introduce in the upcoming months the concepts and vocabulary of this strange new paradigm. We will explore a future world of digital platforms, autonomous management systems, A.I.s, machine learning and the Internet of Things. We will study the introduction of these new technologies in the primary, secondary and service sectors, how they will change the nature of work in the twenty-first century and the impact they could have in the broader society.

Choose from the below industries to see how automation has and is changing how people work. Each industry contains a blog that goes through the past, present and future of automation in that industry as well as two opinion pieces relating to automation and its effects. Alternatively, have a listen to our roundup podcast that touches on everything we learned over the past five months!