In the future, humans will no longer work, pundits, investors, and tech entrepreneurs like to tell us, as they predict for us a world where more and more jobs will be taken over by algorithms and machines. “It may be hard to believe,” Wired’s Kevin Kelly wrote in 2012, “but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will … be replaced by automation.” Human labor will be eclipsed, so the story goes, by robots. It’ll be better that way, they promise. Cleaner. Purer. Shinier.

More likely, I’d argue, the realities of human labor will be erased only for the privileged few; we’ll continue on the path we’re already on – not one of automation, but one of ignoring the vast inequalities, exploitation, and environmental destruction that are already bound up in the production of our food, our clothes, our homes, our stories, and oh yes, our computer technologies.

Computer technologies have, like other machines, pre-supposed a diminished need for the physicality of the human being – or rather, in the case of computers, these machines have denied the importance of the body in exchange for privileging “the mind” and by extension, computing technologies have also attempted to deny embodiment, identity. Indeed, Alan Turing’s famous “test” – “can a machine think?” – is based on an imitation game among three people where an interrogator in a separate room has to decide, based on a series of questions, who is a man and who is a woman. The update to the game, per Turing, involves a computer taking the role of the man. To be a thinking machine, the machine must fool the interrogator into thinking it is man not a woman, not a computer. (A computer was the name used to describe the women – both military and civilian – who performed computations during World War II.)

From the outset, automation and AI are shot-through with issues of gender, performance, identity, and labor. And yet there’s so little interrogation of how thinking machines might be gendered, or how a push for an “artificial intelligence” is predicated on this very flawed notion of a body-less intelligence, or of what this might mean for the future of automation and the future of work.

Nevertheless, the technology industry insists, the future will be shiny and chrome.

There’s a promise in Mad Max: Fury Road too that the War Boys will “ride eternal, shiny, and chrome.” They spray their mouths with silver paint, enraged and prayerful as they charge, death-driven, into their final confrontations.

Bodies in the future depicted in the new Mad Max movie are the sites of trauma, disease, violence, resistance. Bodies are, of course, the sites of these very things today, as they always have been. But we brush this reality aside, preferring I suppose, to see the world in terms of the perfectly enlightened individual – an imaginary intelligence, disembodied online – one that we never care to admit is actually modeled on whiteness and maleness, part of ruling class from the global North. (Australia, the land and its situatedness – in terms of geography and Empire – are one of the things that make the Mad Max movies so uniquely profound.)

There is no escaping human labor in the future we see in Mad Max. The Earth has been destroyed thanks to global climate change; it has, as one of the Vulvalini observes, “gone sour.” Other than the silver paint sprayed onto the teeth of the death-driven War Boys, there is limited metal. What exists is rusted; there is no chrome. There is no silicon. There is no automation.

There is the automotive, of course. There are machines – simple machines. The water is pumped out of the ground of The Citadel – “Aqua Cola” Imortan Joe has branded it – by humans (by War Boy “pups”) and by simple machines. Gears. Chains. Fulcrums.

And here is the point of resistance in the film. “We are not things” is the message Joe’s wives leave scrawled on the walls of their prison. (They have been kept, as precious “things” are, in a safe.) “We are not things” is the lesson Nux teaches us. The former War Boy does not spray his face to become “shiny and chrome” as he steers the War Rig to destruction – taking out, by extension, Imortan Joe’s whole war party. He is a subject, not an object.

We are not things.

We are things, of course, as Marxist theory (etc) would remind us, thanks to industrialization and capitalism and patriarchy and empire. That’s what happens when we sell ourselves – our labor – in order to build things and make things for others (for others to profit off of) -- when our labor is stolen. Both our production and our reproduction, in this world, are extractive processes; we are exploited and mined – like things.

To embrace a future that is “shiny and chrome” does not mean necessarily that we attain agency. Assigning robots and algorithms those tasks does not erase degradation, objectification. We must look at the models of production and reproduction and see how these systems necessarily posit us as objects, with or without our spraying ourselves with a congratulatory and encouraging silver hue.

To escape and to have agency. To find a place where we can plant and grow life. To cultivate with ethics nor exploitation. To recognize that there are no heroes – male or female. To recognize that we are all wounded. To build forward with a culture of care and not of fear.

Indeed, unless we look more closely at why we’ve built a technology industry on war, secrecy, lies, masculinity, and Empire – “Who killed the world?” – then our future can only be bleak.