Technological Unemployment and Its Educational Discontents

This chapter introduces a post-digital perspective to relationships between technological unemployment and its educational discontents. It examines a possible future where digital technologies will destroy more jobs than they will create in three steps. First, an extensive literature overview identifies why people from various historical periods and working in various fields have perceived technological unemployment as a threat. Second, it distils six main areas of educational discontent in current literature: discontent with neoliberalization, discontent with automation, discontent with dehumanization, discontent with acceleration, discontent with content of work and discontent with educationalization. Concluding that educational discontent with technological unemployment identified in our work seems to have surprisingly little to do with either technology or with employment, it returns to the post-digital perspective to explain this result. Finally, it examines educational discontent of technological unemployment as an agent of change, and concludes that the notion of educational discontent with technological unemployment has the potential to help formulate new post-digital critical rage pedagogy.