“The 1968 Joe L. Carter Detroit blues song “Please Mr. Foreman” has in it the lines that inspired the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the American automobile industry: “I don’t mind working, I do mind dying.”

Back then, the lines referred to the danger of working on the assembly line—with accidents and long shifts at the Chrysler and General Motors factories. But those lines still resonate when one watches Anna Witt’s latest film, Unboxing the Future (2019), only this time dying means becoming redundant, being replaced by a machine. “