Phd Researcher
Loughborough, England, United Kingdom
Will emerging automation technologies eventually transform civilisation, creating exotic new forms of community life in which work is no longer the main organising principle of human society? How much can displacement of human work by automata help us live our best lives, and how do we avoid doing it wrong?During my doctoral research, I tried to understand these pressing questions about our future by looking into bizarre and little-known corners of our past: recovering the forgotten history of the Etzlerists, an extraordinary group of techno-utopians who in the 1840s tried in earnest to build the first fully-mechanised, workless human city in the remote jungles of Venezuela.During my journey of discovery through this stranger-than-fiction social movement, the innovative use of mechanical and digital automata for transformative social good (past, present and future) became for me an enduring fascination.