Where did the learning go? Artificial Intelligence, ‘use sovereignty’ and ‘Pixarfication’ in factories of the future

This chapter takes a critical view of the anthropocentrism of workplace learning and argues that changes in the workplace, some already underway and others which are prefigurative, are producing profound changes in the meaning of learning. Workplace learning is becoming unrecognisable through even broad epistemologies of human learning. These changes include shifting the locus of learning from humans to products through ‘use sovereignty’, the ‘Pixarfication’ of manufacturing and services, the rediscovery of competence theories of learning and their current alignment with machine learning and the impact of AI on fragmenting learning into a ‘skills cloud’. The future is one in which, whilst the workplace appears to be teaming with learning entities, human learning disappears, further fragmenting class-based organisation in the workplace. This process of depedagogisation and the move to an ‘inhuman’ form of learning represents continuity, rather than change, in capitalism. The implications of changes in learning for resistance in ‘factories of the future’ are critically interrogated.