Work Without the Worker, book review: Microtasking, automation and the future of work

“Will we be retired — or unemployed?” the chief of a futurist conference asked in 2007 while envisioning a earth crammed with AIs possessed of superhuman intelligence. Much more current — and additional restrained — researchers this kind of as Kate Darling have argued that our best selection lies in human-equipment partnerships, while with the caveat proposed by Madeleine Claire Elish in her paper Moral Crumple Zones that the human partner will be the one that receives the blame when points go incorrect. 

Having said that, in the large the vast majority of the human-equipment partnerships presently in existence, the human partner is one or additional invisible microtask staff getting paid out small amounts to label pictures, remotely choose about a faltering shipping and delivery drone, or transcribe bits of textual content. 

We have found these workers’ life documented before — for case in point, in Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s 2019 book Ghost Employees, Sarah T. Roberts’ 2019 book Guiding the Monitor, and Kate Crawford’s current ebook on the extractive character of the AI sector, Atlas of AI. In Function With out the Employee: Labour in the Age of System Capitalism, Phil Jones sets these staff in a much larger world context.

SEE: Professionals are not fearful about trying to keep their IT staff content. That’s negative for absolutely everyone

But initially, some quantities. As Jones files, the quantity of microtaskers is substantial and increasing. There are 12 million at China’s Zhubajie, two million at Clickworker, about one million at Appen. In the Uk, according to surveys, as considerably as five% of the performing-age inhabitants utilizes these platforms at the very least the moment a 7 days. This is an party in which scale issues: the additional of the labour power that is shifted to and splintered throughout microtasking platforms with phrases and disorders, the less difficult it is for workers’ legal rights to be eroded in the “economic system of clicks”. 

Short term adjustment, or lasting actuality?

Is the increase of precarious microtasking short-term, when the workforce reskills and reconfigures — as has been the circumstance historically, and as the technological know-how businesses like to predict will come about this time, also? Or is it a lasting actuality as human beings come to be element of the computational infrastructure of “artificial artificial intelligence” — the time period Jeff Bezos likes to use to explain the Mechanical Turk platform? (This type of linguistic absorption of human beings has a background that Jones doesn’t investigate: the earliest “computers” were women carrying out intricate calculations at NASA.) 

Jones argues that today’s disorders are diverse: what we are looking at is employment getting carved up into tasks, a course of action that transforms pros into “wage hunter-gatherers”. Rather of generating new ranges of occupations, this marketplace is generating “marketplace fugitives” who must wait until finally a piece of perform will become offered. The final result is economic inequality additional akin to the nineteenth century than our vision for the twenty first. In Jones’s darkest chapter, staff are paid out pennies to coach the AIs that will ultimately change them entirely. 

Jones finishes on a hopeful observe as microworkers commence to organise, partly pushed by hopes that the article-pandemic earth can be crafted to be fairer. In an epilogue, he explores the “article-shortage” earth. If today’s microwork automates our employment absent, what then? Jones chooses optimism: we will have to visualize a new earth for ourselves. In phrases of that 2007 query, his best hope for us is content retirement. 

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