In the first volume of The Automatic Society, Bernard Stiegler considers the social and philosophical implications of the predicted imminent increase in the proportion of labour undertaken by automata. For Stiegler, the social stakes of this development concern the definition of work and the link between work and remuneration; the political challenge is accordingly to foster the adoption of emergent technical forms in such a way as to provide a beneficial solution to these social questions. The politics of automation at work here has a further dimension, however, which Stiegler does not elaborate, but which this essay seeks to specify: namely, a reconceptualization of effective political agency as distributed across the co-constitutive relation between the form of life we call human and its contemporary technical prostheses.