We are at a moment when it is vitally important to imagine and articulate what makes us human. The steady drumbeat of news about AI, about ever more competent models achieving unprecedented milestones, raises questions about what the role for humans will be in the not-so-distant future. We have seen similar moments before. For hundreds of years, automation has pushed people into new relations with technology, with work, and with each other. And scholars have long come up with different answers to explain the uniquely human contribution: e.g., mental versus manual labor, creativity versus rote work. But today’s technologists are tackling new terrain: the mechanization of human relationship.

Join us as the 2024–25 Cressman Lecturer Allison Pugh gives a talk titled “Re-imagining the Other/Ourselves: Finding the Human in the Age of AI” on Thursday, April 17, 2025 at 4 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Based on five years of ethnographic research, Pugh offers a humanistic response to the rise of AI, one that probes the profound meaning of human connection, reckons with the challenges of seeing and being seen, and reimagines what we know of ourselves and others in light of the automation challenge.

Allison Pugh is a professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. In her latest book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (2024), Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” the collaborative work of emotional recognition. This includes three key components—empathetic listening, emotion management, and the act of “witnessing,” in which one individual reflects what they have seen and heard. Drawing on years of interview and observational data, Pugh shows how in sectors like education, healthcare, and therapy, this work is increasingly systemized—a process that she argues makes it ripe for eventual mechanization. In the face of teacher shortages and hype around “chatbot therapists,” Pugh makes a case for connective labor’s value to society and the potential consequences for inequality should it become a scarce commodity.

In addition, Pugh is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015), Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (2009), and an edited volume Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy, and the Flexible Self(2016).

Pugh’s talk, part of this year’s “Re-imagine” series, is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed and recorded.