Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century

While Contagious Unemployment portrays mass layoffs as a spreading disease, the works in this gallery, also from the Unemployment chapter of Kline’s installation cycle, focus on the human consequences. What happens to the people who provide the goods and services that are replaced by automation? If people are products—human capital—does society throw them away like used-up office supplies when they are no longer needed?

For these works, Kline put out a casting call for accountants, lawyers, office administrators, and other desk workers—professionals whose jobs are predicted to be largely eliminated by artificial intelligence (AI) over the next two decades. He sought individuals who were out of work at the time, bringing a sense of urgency and realism to this potential future. The participants were hired to pose for photographic 3D scans and then be rendered as sculpture through a combination of full- color 3D printing and CNC routing—a computer-controlled cutting process. While the unemployed workers were being scanned, the artist engaged them in extensive conversations about the nature of labor and compensation, which informed the video Universal Early Retirement (spots #1 and #2) (2016), on view nearby. For these works, Kline intentionally chose advanced fabrication techniques that are analogous to the technologies currently impacting the workplace. Today, this future is no longer speculative. The early stages of a new kind of automation—seemingly poised to threaten a number of labor sectors—are now visible, as recent breakthroughs in AI have brought natural-language chatbots like ChatGPT and text-to-image generators like DALL-E to the public at large.