Who is Left to Clean the Robot’s Brush?
I came across a stock-style ad on YouTube. It opens with five enigmatic seconds of five professionally dressed office workers standing shoulder to shoulder in a generic-looking office interior, holding a white sign reading: Are you looking for skilled manpower for industrial solar panel cleaning?, which clearly was post-effected into the footage. They smile with their pearl-white teeth gazing at the camera and then each other. The company, based in Dubai and providing electrical manpower across the UAE, smartly emphasise dependable in their slogan. In its most basic sense, the promise appears as a standard piece of advertising rhetoric. More specifically, if you dig deeper into the sustainability reports and the comparative analyses of photovoltaic modules’ cleaning method in the MENA region, this insistence of being reliable is an anxious, if not clumsy, attempt to tackle the shortcomings of robotic cleaning systems. Nevertheless, there is something weirdly uncanny about a corny, pre-AI-style advertisement providing man-powered services at a time when autonomous and unmanned technologies are set to take over manual labor, in a city famous for weaving sustainable, smart, innovative into its official policy language while structurally relying on hyper-exposed migrant workers rendered invisible in its glamorous future.
Places like Dubai function less as cities than protocol for what a future city will look like. From infrastructural master plans to deep-tech adoption, these actions are no longer what we expect only from speculative fictions. In fact, speculative fiction itself has ceased to operate from an exterior imaginative register. In 2021, sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan and former Google China head, current Sinovation Ventures CEO, Kai-fu Lee, produced what they termed a call-and-response scientific fiction. In AI 2041, Chen contributed ten heartfelt stories of ten individuals from ten global cities (notably excluding Dubai, despite its status as a prototype for such a digital future) whose lives are influenced by various aspects of AI technology. Each story is followed by Lee’s analytic text on the relevant technologies, including autonomous systems, AI healthcare and deep learning applications, mapping their mechanisms and constraints.
This new format of sci-fi writing becomes easier to comprehend when one traces Chen’s own trajectory. From a background in fiction writing, it runs through a motion-capture VR startup which now has spun out a venture-backed data company for embodied intelligence and humanoid robots, capturing human movements and behaviours and structuring it into scalable training datasets. The future under Chen’s pen-tip and cap table is already being rehearsed: only days before this text was written, this year’s Spring Festival Gala, the most viewed national program in China, staged humanoid robots and embodied AI within domestic scenarios as implicit solutions to elder care and service labour. Spectacle as pilot.
Rather than one certain technology that emerges and wipes out the old ways of living, this is a sense of imperative that coheres across these materials: that everything, from the methods these PV panels are cleaned, to the master plans by which these cities design their infrastructures, to the way we imagine and live our everyday lives, is set to be optimised towards quantifiable, manageable objectives that promises to be cheaper, faster, more frictionless – simply better. It names a script in which a specific future is mapped out in advance and bodies are invited, if not required, to tune themselves accordingly. Whatever can be made to function in one setting (a rooftop, a district, a storyline) is immediately certified as a template to be copied onto other roofs, other cities, other lives.
Figures like Chen and Lee, as emissaries of techno-capital, pursue the dissolution of what might be the last shield between our everyday lives and the fictional worlds that science fiction once sustained, the speculative imaginaries that fintech tycoons have already hijacked and appropriated as a future that is bound to happen, along the trajectories that they have already foreseen and designed. (One quick thought: on a scale from 1 to 4, how different are the art industry’s own enthusiastic endorsements at the intersection of art and technology?)
The prevailing message is that you, as an individual, should prepare yourself to capture the opportunities and confront the challenges that future will bring. [1] You’d better fasten up, because that future is going to happen nevertheless, with or without you. The fantasy is of a proof-tested world that runs autonomously, more efficient and economical than ever. Whatever still misbehaves or proves inconvenient can be dealt as an improvable edge case to be logged in and fed into the next upgrade; it becomes easy to imagine that our task is simply to reduce ourselves to self-optimisation in alignment with the script it sets.
At a certain point, however, the script destabilise. In his four-part essay On Paralysis, Evan Calder Williams reframes paralysis beyond its metaphorical and physical condition, as a structural tactic that creates reversible stoppages within tightly linked infrastructural and circulatory systems sustained on the end goal toward the elimination of insufficiency and friction. In other words, the capacity to be paralysed, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, through breakdown, overload, or refusal, is precisely where the fragility of this logic lies. Grids, logistics chains, cleaning schedules, robotic workforces and date factories all rely on the links meant to be continuous, each component feeding the next in frictionless relays, in repetitive movements. One tiny stoppage becomes system-wide terror that holds the power to collapse the flow.
At the scale of this room, what emerges is not an attempt to stage a spectacular post-apocalypse. Rather, it is a dislocation that offers a glimpse into our own realities of redundancy, exhaustion, and hyper-vigilance under an optimised present-future. The works here do not announce collapse but introduce side movements that imagine a possibility of stepping sideways from the narratives that imposed on us, a refusal to participation in a pre-written manual. More precisely, they suggest we still hold the capacity to reveal how tightly coupled systems depend on what they take for granted, and to rebuild the tolerance for the inconvenience of being human. To embrace a sudden city blackout and roam about the line of patched manholes. To stay in a stalled grid without rushing to restore the flow. To pause, re-direct, and shift forms.
Who is going to be that person that cleans the brush of a cleaning robot? To a certain degree, the hidden structure of seamlessly operating systems obscure the truth that we have to pause, re-direct and shift forms. Park Chan-wook’s recent dark comedy No Other Choice has pushed the scenario to its extreme with its protagonist, an redundant paper-making specialist, literally kills off all his competitors in the job market, only to find himself the very last man standing, trapped among the AI-driven machinery, waiting for the next upgrade to arrive.
​
Text for No Other Brush by Cristea Nian Zhao
[1] Kai-Fu Lee, “Introduction: The Real Story of AI,” in AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (New York: Currency, 2021), 14.