13 Control: Human and Nonhuman Robots

This chapter by George Ritzer makes Forster's vision of an automated world seem not too far off in the future. It is taken from his book The McDonaldization of Society, in which he examines how corporate management of the fast-food industry use technologies to promote their own values. Two of their most important, and interrelated, goals are efficiency and predictability. Because they do not want to rely on their employees to accept and promote these goals, fast-food management has sought to deploy technologies that either control or bypass the need to trust employees. The resulting machines, technologies, and techniques not only direct the minutia of how people work but radically alter who can perform the work and, perhaps more importantly, who would want to do it—thereby giving management even more control. Ritzer goes on to argue that these same techniques are used not only in the fast-food industry but in many other fields, including education, health care, and even farming. And not just employees are subject to such control. Those who design the technologies and techniques carefully craft the way that customers, students, patients, and even livestock experience certain situations. Ritzer's chapter leaves us with at least two important questions. First, what values are being realized when nearly every machine or technique is designed to further the interests of specific groups of people (often at the expense of other groups)? And second, what will happen as we develop technologies with new and more powerful abilities to control people?