Could you be competing for a job–even after getting a college degree–with a robot or an AI-powered chatbot? As technologies advance, every few years, debates emerge: will this new kind of automation increase unemployment, or will it generate new kinds of jobs? Will these new jobs be more interesting and high-paying, or will they be boring and poorly paid? To think these questions through, in this course, we will study some key attempts to understand the socio-economic and political determinants as well as the repercussions of automation. We will look at historical examples of automation in the workplace as well as the most recent developments related to machine learning and AI. We will delve into the micro-level dynamics operating between machines and workers involved in concrete production processes. We will also explore the macro-level trends in national and global inequality that social scientists associate with automation. In our investigation of both macro- and micro-levels, we will focus on how the risks and benefits of automation get distributed unevenly along already existing axes of class, race, gender, etc.