Human Labor vs. the Machines

In the beginning, there was a lot of work to do.

In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the great god Anunnaki and the lesser god Igigi drew lots to decide who would undertake the arduous work of digging the Euphrates River. It was Ijiji who pulled out the short stick. For 3,600 years, they have been working hard, calling out to God for relief, but have never received an answer. Nusku encouraged his fellow Igigi to revolt, setting fire to their tools and surrounding the house of Elil, the Anunnaki leader and foreman. Nuscu and Igigi told Eliel that their pain had been ignored for too long and that something had to change. Ariel told this information to his fellow Anunnaki, who decided to kill Nusku and Igigi.

But Ea, the god of wisdom, came up with a different solution: Create humans to take on Igigi’s labor. Oia summoned the womb goddess Belet Ili and created humanity from clay, sacred saliva, and the heart of the rebellious Nusku. After the task was completed, she said: “[We] Slaughtered a god along with his wisdom. I relieved you of your toil, and I imposed your burden upon humanity. “It is said that by sacrificing Nuscu, “the ghost appears.” Therefore, Nuscu’s heart beats in everyone’s heart so that he will never be forgotten – so that one day, humans too may rebel.

This story played out in my mind as I walked through “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the inaugural exhibition at the recently renovated New Museum. Spanning four floors and featuring 273 works, the exhibition feels like a continuation of an epic labor story that began more than 4,000 years ago. If creating a new workforce once required sacrificing the worker god to give workers human life, the works in this exhibition show artists working to explain how workers are constantly being sacrificed to give life to our new worker machines.

This narrative is most clearly articulated in the section of “The New Humanity” titled “Mechanical Ballet,” a reference to the work of Bauhausler Oscar Schlemmer ballet machinery (1923) and three person ballet (1922). The dancers in both ballets wear stiff, geometrically inspired costumes that cover their bodies and restrict their movements. These dances emerged in Germany at a time when artists were struggling with the scars of World War I and an increasing industrial economy. Artists were sent to war and then into factories to paint visions of human life reduced to machinery.

Below the “Ballet Mechanique” hall stands a sculpture created by John Heartfield and George Grosz in 1920 The vulgar hearts of the middle class have gone wild (mechanical Tatlin sculpture). The piece centers on a tailor’s dummy, representing a group of people who were, perhaps of their own volition, transformed from objects of war into instruments of commodity production. A revolver and military paraphernalia were thrust into the dummy’s chest, a pair of plaster dentures served as a fig leaf for the anomaly, one leg was replaced by a stick, and a shiny light bulb replaced the head, covering the entire hybrid. The work’s profusion of prosthetics reflects a nascent vision of hybrids – half human, half machine – no doubt inspired by the influx of amputees returning from the front lines.

Drama is a work that is crucial to the context of this era RUR (Rosen Universal Robot) Written by Czech playwright Karel Capek. As the wall text of “Ballet Mechanique” explains. Čapek was the first to come up with the Czech name “robot” Robertawhich translates as “forced labor.” In Chapek’s play, the android is designed by scientist Rossum, who makes the most efficient version of the worker possible so that it should be cheap to produce and maintain, highly intelligent, but lacking in soul. But when the robots’ emotions become more complex, they rebel, wiping out most of humanity. Instead of serving their gods, they killed them. We can interpret the differences between Mesopotamian creation myths and Capek dramas as historical processes in which class consciousness comes into play.

However, another question was raised Ruhr And 1920s art more broadly: When workers sacrificed their humanity to make factories more efficient, did humans become something else (i.e., robots), or did these efforts contribute to the creation of another being entirely (i.e., autonomous robots)? Should we think of the robots in Capek’s play as metaphors for the working class, or do they really represent a different form of life?

Let’s fast forward a hundred years or so and see how these questions developed as capitalism gave rise to new modes of production, which in turn shaped new subjectivities.

In one of the latest works on display at New Humanity, German artist Hito Steyerl explores the hidden labor of artificial intelligence in a 2025 video work Mechanical Kurdishtells the story of Kurdish workers participating in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workforce.

Amazon named the program after a chess automaton that debuted at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace in 1770. Dressed like a typical “Turk,” the so-called machine toured Europe and North America for 80 years before it was discovered that it was actually operated by a master hidden in a compartment beneath the chessboard. According to Amazon.com, MTurk is a “crowdsourcing marketplace” that allows companies to access a distributed global workforce to complete “microtasks.” MTurk is often used for image labeling tasks required for training AI. In Steyerl’s film, she interviews Kurdish workers in the Domiz refugee camp in northern Iraq who undertake these microtasks. They expressed an ambivalent but largely positive attitude toward the program.

“It’s an income. Even if it’s not a good income, it’s still important,” one woman said, lamenting that most micro-works have dried up.

The video shows the unpaved streets of Domiz, and Steyerl’s subjects describe tagged objects in images and videos from around the world. They guessed where these places might be – such as Switzerland, China and the United States – and the AI ​​images morphed to provide a facsimile of each location. They thought they’d been helping design autonomous drones and tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycles), but they weren’t sure. This contradictory rhetoric contrasts with the serious consequences of artificial intelligence when Steyerl interviews an Iraqi journalist who was hit by a drone attack and two colleagues who tragically died. Steyerl, however, returns to the refugees’ hopes for artificial intelligence. As a man flies a toy drone surrounded by children, his voice echoes: “The future, the future, the future, it’s all the same – another world.”

Steyerl, who neither serves nor rebels against the gods, paints a haunting picture of what appears to be the last task of automation: the more ghosts needed to power machines extracted from human cognitive labor. The subject then fled to its secret laboratory, leaving the Domiz refugees to continue their survival mission by other means.

If artists in the post-war period were grappling with how capitalism was brutally changing what it means to be human, we now seem to be in a very different era, where artists are trying to understand who we are as artificial intelligence and automation appear to make workers increasingly obsolete. The workforce that has not yet been automated is fragmented, meaningless, and almost ready to be taken over by artificial intelligence. I mean, who calls themselves a worker anymore?

Take Kristin Walsh Engine No. 15 (2025). A sleek aluminum sculpture whose shape is reminiscent of a component of a machine that might be found in a car or factory, but is a completely closed system. The little matchstick lay flat on its surface, then popped up and jiggled on its surface before falling back down again, looking tired. In the wall text, Walsh describes the competition as “actors on a stage, painstakingly set up and essentially without any function.” Like David Graeber’s sculptural renditions Bullshit job.

The repercussions of these games are human face mask (2014) is a haunting video work by Pierre Huyghe, set against the backdrop of Fukushima following the devastation caused by the tsunami and the collapse of a nuclear reactor. In a partially collapsed restaurant, a young woman with long black hair wearing a gray skirt and a white mask is biding her time. It’s raining. The restaurant’s kitchen was infested with maggots, and the damp tatami mats and forest landscape-patterned wallpaper were eaten away by moisture. The monkey is sitting and swinging its legs. In another scene, it knocks the glass off a table. It goes into the kitchen looking for food. It spins around in the middle of the dining area until it gets dizzy and collapses. Huyghe procured the monkey from Tokyo, where he was trained to work as a waiter in a restaurant. Is this the future? Abandoned by the work that shaped us, abandoned by gods and robots, will we become ghostly relics of our skills on the ruined edges of the world?

But look at how I talk about this future: things that are coming. Becoming an irrelevant subject in the production of capital is an increasingly common position – especially for those displaced by war or whose national economies have been dramatically restructured by neoliberal reforms. Domizi’s situation isn’t dire because it’s a preview of what the future might look like for everyone. The scary thing is that this displacement provides exactly the type of population microworks needs today. Technological optimists might view this form of labor as a necessary and largely painless product needed to create creatures capable of our own human labor, much as the Anunnaki once did for the Igigi. But let’s not shy away from the obvious question: Who do you think wrote that old story? In my opinion, this is another history written by the victors.