Although he only briefly touches on it, the specter of automation replacing workers is present in Bruno Latour's ‘‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few
Mundane Artifacts’.’ While he focuses more on how behaviors are implemented, I would have liked to hear more about the impact that has on workers, given that this was published after automation had changed the automotive industry (Robert Williams, the first human killed by a robot occurred about a decade prior to this article at a Ford plant) but before the much wider changes in automation we see now.
Latour's focus on how much we obey an object that has been anthropomorphized (with a notable example given in the mechanical traffic police) also interested me as there are times where we do need to "trick" people into not behaving terribly. I think of the signs people put out on residential streets that are shaped like a child about to run into the street; placed in the hopes that the feeling of almost running over a child while going 40mph will deter speeders.
On a side note, the steel bar Latour installed to prevent his seatbeltless child from sitting in the middle of the back and being launched through the windshield sounds like a great way to guarantee your kid gets bashed to death in a side impact collision. Latour explains it away as the kid being too big for seatbelts and too small for a child seat but I believe that even back in ye olden days of 1992 they had large child seats for toddlers/preschoolers.
