Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation

In this feisty manifesto, Casilli (Against the Hypothesis of the End of Privacy), a sociology professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, accuses the tech industry of using automation to exploit a growing digital workforce. Contending that robots won’t actually replace human workers, he notes that in Japan, South Korea, and other countries with heavily automated workplaces, unemployment is low because humans are essential for designing and maintaining automated machines. The real threat is the degradation of human labor, he posits, describing how, for instance, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service pays freelancers less than $5 per hour to “teach” automated systems by performing stultifying “microtasks” (e.g., “select all the images of hot dogs”). According to Casilli, fixing the problem will require turning freelance digital work into salaried employment, citing as a model a 2022 court ruling in Brazil that ordered the data annotation company Ixia to reclassify its “crowdworkers” as employees. Casilli’s sobering perspective makes clear that the dangers posed by AI are more mundane, if no less insidious, than commonly imagined, and the recommendation to implement a “universal digital income”—in which profits reaped by tech companies from monetizing user data are taxed and redistributed to the public—is bold and original. A troubling snapshot of the future of work, this unnerves. (Jan.)