About
Aaron Benanav is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of history, sociology, and economic and social theory, whose research focuses on global unemployment, underemployment, and informality; automation and the future of work; global histories of social and economic development; the history of economic and social statistics; and alternative institutional arrangements for organizing economic life.
Benanav is the author of Automation and the Future of Work (Verso, 2020), which challenges technologically deterministic accounts of labor-market change and emphasizes instead the structural and institutional conditions that shape employment outcomes. The book has been translated into twelve languages, with the most recent Portuguese edition including a new preface on artificial intelligence and the future of work.
In 2025, Benanav published two long-form essays in New Left Review titled “Beyond Capitalism,” which examine the limits of growth- and efficiency-centered approaches to development and explore alternative ways of organizing investment and production around a wider range of economic, social, and ecological priorities. This work forms the basis of an ongoing book project on multi-dimensional approaches to economic development and how societies surface and collectively select among competing futures.
In addition to academic publications, Benanav is a frequent public commentator on issues related to work, technology, and economic development. He has been interviewed widely in international media and regularly appears on podcasts and public forums discussing automation, artificial intelligence, unemployment, economic stagnation, and the future of the economy. His writing has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, New Statesman, Boston Review, Dissent, Jacobin, and New Left Review.
In the Department of Global Development in CALS, Benanav teaches undergraduate courses on the Ethics of Technology and the Ethics of Global Development, as well as Theories of Society and Development, and graduate courses on Social Theory and Development Theory. He also co-organizes the Seminar in Critical Development Studies.
From 2023 to 2026, Benanav serves as a core member of a University of Chicago Neubauer Collegium research project on “Economic Planning and Democratic Politics: History, Theory, and Practice.” In 2024–25, he was a residential fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg. He also serves on the editorial board of New Left Review and is a senior editor of International Labor and Working-Class History.
Before joining Cornell University, Benanav was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University. He previously held a postdoctoral position at Humboldt University in Berlin and was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his BA in History from the University of Chicago.
Select Publications
- “Workers and Obsolescence” (co-edited with Lori Flores, with a co-written introduction to the issue), International Labor and Working Class History, 102, Fall 2022.
- “A Dissipating Glut?” New Left Review, 140/141, March/June 2023, pp. 53-81.
- “The revolution will not be brought to you by ChatGPT,” New Statesman, April 19, 2023.
- “Making a Living: The History of What We Call Work,” Nation, October 18, 2021, pp. 40-48.
- “Can Technology Create Shared Prosperity?” Boston Review, May 20, 2021, pp. 55-59.
- “How to Make a Pencil,” Logic Magazine 12, December 2020, pp. 195-214.
- Automation and the Future of Work (Verso Books, 2020).
- “Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950-2000,” Social Science History, 43, 4 (September 2019), pp. 679-703.
- “The Origins of Informality: The ILO at the Limit of the Concept of Unemployment,” Journal of Global History 14, 1 (February 2019), pp. 107-125.
Awards & Honors
- 2024-25: Residential Fellowship, New Institute
- 2023-26: UChicago Neubauer Three-Year Grant Award, “Economic Planning and Democratic
Politics: History, Theory, and Practice” - 2021-22: German Research Foundation SCRIPTS Grant, “A Global History of Unemployment”
- 2021: German Research Foundation SCRIPTS Grant, “The Essential Worker”
- 2017: University of Chicago Feminist Forum Professor Award
- 2016-20: University of Chicago Society of Fellows Harper-Schmidt Fellowship
Media Highlights
- “Before Bernie Sanders, Richard Nixon championed the 4-day workweek” (expert comment), Washington Post, March 18, 2024.
- “Superfluous people vs AI: what the jobs revolution might look like” (work cited), Financial Times, March 14, 2024.
- “A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback,” Vox, March 11, 2024.
- “Is Capitalism Terminally Ill?” Jacobin, October 2, 2023.
- “AI could ‘turn good jobs into bad jobs’—3 labor historians on what the future of work might hold,” CNBC, August 28, 2023.
- “You Trained the Chatbot to Do Your Job. Why Didn’t You Get Paid?” (expert comment), Wired, May 9, 2023.
- “Interview: Aaron Benanav” Common Wealth, June 8, 2023.
- “İşimizi çalan robotlar değil, kapitalizm,” Textum Dergi, April 2023.
- “Automation Isn’t the Cause of Unemployment — Capitalism Just Can’t Generate Enough Jobs,” Jacobin, February 2023.
- “AI Isn’t to Blame for Layoffs at Microsoft” (expert comment), Time, January 19, 2023.
- “빅테크 기업의 시장 통제로 불평등 악화···국가가 노동자 보호해야,” Kyunghyang Sinmun, November 17, 2022.
- “Il malessere dei lavoratori non è colpa dei robot,” Corriere della Sera, November 6, 2022, p. 13.
Recent Presentations
- “Automation and the Future of Work,” Fabric Yphanet, Thessaloniki, Greece, 5/10/24.
- “Against the Clock: Aaron Benanav in conversation with Lain Iwakura and Jeronimo Voss” (talk at an art exhibit), Basel, Switzerland, 4/12/24.
- “Work, Workers, and the Future of Technology,” The Climate of Critical Theory: Economies and Ecologies Today, Humanities Center, University of Rochester, 3/29/24.
- “La Automatización y el Futuro del Trabajo,” Curso: La Fantasía de la Automatización, Nociones Comunes, Madrid, Spain, 3/7/24.
- “Workers and Obsolescence: Histories of Technology, Labor, and Workplace Struggle” (panel chair), American Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 1/6/24.
- “Will ChatGPT Eliminate More Jobs than It Creates? How Would We Know?” Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work Conference, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, University of Massachusetts Boston, 11/4/23.
- “The Community Ideal and the Multi-Criterial Economy in the History of Political Thought,” Political Economy Department, University of Sydney, 10/24/23.
- “Business Ethics, Automation, and the Future of Work,” Ethos Festival, Rome, 10/7/23.
- “Automation, Algorithms, and the Future of Work” (invited roundtable), American Sociological Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 8/21/23.
- “100 Years Later: The Frankfurt School and the Now” (opening plenary), Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, 7/14/23.
- “Guild Socialism and the Polycentric Society in the History of Utopian Thought,” Council of European Studies Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, 6/28/23.
- “Automation and the Future of Work” (book talk), Economics Department, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan, 6/17/23.
- “The Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence: Automation and the Future of Work,” Festival Economia, Trento, Italy, 5/28/23.
- “Automation – Digital Anthropology” (invited panelist), Groupe d’Études Géopolitiques, UNESCO Management of Social Transformations Programme, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 5/25/23.
- “Automation and the Future of Work: Expectations vs. Reality,” Computational Social Science Seminar, MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Media Lab, 5/3/23.
- “Technology and Popular Power” (panel discussant), Law and Political Economy Conference, Harvard Law School, 3/31/23.
- “Post-Scarcity Economics: An Introduction,” Political Economy Research Center, Goldsmiths University of London, 3/23/23.
Interests
Automation, artificial intelligence, and the future of work
Unemployment, underemployment, and informality
Histories of social and economic development
