Automation, Slavery, and Work in Aristotle’s Politics Book I

Abstract

Engaging Aristotle’s broader corpus, this paper offers an exegesis of his counterfactual statement in the Politics regarding self-weaving shuttles and self-playing lyres. It argues that Aristotle imagines and offers his own theory of automation – if by automation we understand the conditions, limits, and consequences of substituting human work with artificial tools capable of acting themselves to complete the relevant task. Because such automated tools are impossible in Aristotle’s time, his political thought is never positively released from its foundational dependence on living tools and the extremity of natural slavery. By analysing what it means for these workers to be considered tools, the perceptual requirements of the work they are to perform – as understood through the disjunctive conditions under which automated tools could replace them – and the consequences to masters and master-craftsmen of employing such tools, Aristotle’s disparagement of slave and craft subordinate work is thus also re-emphasized.