Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, is the award-winning author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. She works in the fields of AI, cognitive science, and complex systems.
"Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism."