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Short abstract

Automation in Hamburg’s port relies on simulation and data systems that frame humans as “sources of disturbance.” This paper argues automation produces “wasted” human capacity by rendering some skills superfluous while requiring new ones, generating compensatory labour to stabilise its limits.

Long abstract

Each year, around eight million containers pass through the Port of Hamburg, a key node in global supply chain capitalism. Their circulation is coordinated through sociotechnical infrastructures that are still in the process of undergoing digital transformations that promise efficiency and seamlessness. Central to these developments are simulation models and data-driven training environments designed to anticipate and optimise logistical futures. This paper draws on the case of container terminal automation in Hamburg to examine how discourses of efficiency are bound up with particular constructions of the human body as something that “wastes” time and space due to its discursively produced “inferiority” compared to technology. The very project of automation, I argue, arises from, and is rendered intelligible through, a particular construction of human labour as inefficient and excessive. In industry discourse, the human appears as a “source of disturbance”, positioned as friction within data-driven systems. Certain skills are rendered superfluous while others are newly required, producing “wasted” human capacity alongside new dependencies. Drawing on empirical research at the Container Terminal Altenwerder, and through the perspective of “waste”, I show how digitalisation-driven automation reconfigures the labouring body and generates forms of compensatory labour required to stabilise its own limits.