The Body's Standing-Reserve: Teaching Your Replacement and the Capture of Human Capability for Robots

Machines are now trained not on information about workers but on capability drawn from workers' acting bodies: the gesture itself, lifted from the hands that made it and set to work in a body that will not tire. This essay asks whether such a taking is licit, and whether it is even a taking at all. Against the objection that workers have always been watched and imitated, I argue through the lens of contextual integrity that the capture of embodied skill routes it into a context that never consented to receive it, and that the licitness of the derived capability is not settled by the licitness of the original glance. I contend that what occurs is not subtraction but conversion, the gesture enframed as standing-reserve, and that its economic effect is the destruction of the one thing the skilled worker could always withhold: his performance. I offer no remedy, only a refusal to call the taking a gift if so collected.