It’s people all the way down: the question of labor
Response to — Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk by Lilly Irani
The Cost and Value of Digital Intelligence
Yuval Noah Harari in his Penguin Lecture about his book ‘The Challenge of the 21st Century’ (citation required) talked about the rise of the irrelevant population that would replaced by artificial intelligence. He sys that the biggest challenge we face is not subjugation but irrelevance. But according to Lilly Irani’s article about the Mechanical Turk, the sea of workers who make work-in-progress AI technology seamless, are invisible rather than irrelevant, which raises questions about the fairness of labour and replaces the wonder of technology with the skepticism (Hendren, 2017) of the externalities it causes to human life.
Exchange vs. Transaction
The distinction between a transaction and an exchange in the contextual of remote digital work is the line of visibility. Every stakeholder from end users to employers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists conveniently shift this line of visibility to weave a narrative of the magic of Artificial Intelligence.
Massively mediated micro labor (Irani, 2015) on Platforms like Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower are developing protocols to a relationship of the delegation from an algorithm to a human, without the intervention of a body that can regulate the nuances of this newly sprung surge of Gig work. Furthermore, the Future of employment (Gray, 2019) warrants questions of authorizing work and salary structure and brings in the need of agreements between Nations to note this work exchange. The minimal presence or rather concerning the absence of regulations to safeguard the contribution of the Turkers, is the fuel currently running the innovation economy, but according to Lilly Irani’s article may also be corroding the engine. As Mechanical Turk enables, tasks relegated to being unskilled are sold at a cost that includes the hours spent by the ones who perform these tasks. The in the use-value of any algorithm-driven product we use, it is worth questioning if this labour is accounted for. At Amazon’s scale of operation, developers who seek human computers to complete half-baked tasks are unable and unwilling to establish exchanges towards a workforce that allowing innovation.
What does Innovation mean?
“What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
— Marx, 1887, p. 127)
Mechanical Turk is creating a culture of innovation that is allowing a success through failure approach to work, where the employer-employee contract is void and reduced to a transaction, where these employers are highly disconnected from the context gig workers, and the necessity that brought them to do this task-based work.
The worker’s dashboard of MTurk shows the negligible amounts for each assigned task and how the interface is designed to attract workers at the promise of quick money.
Who is the Human, What is the tool?
Jeff Bezos called human computation “artificial artificial intelligence” (citation required) in this value chain of digital services rendered, what Marx states about humans being tool-making animals tests its extent. Platforms like Mechanical Turk are enables humans making tools out of other humans in a deeply hierarchical system of the delegation with close to no accountability or acknowledgment of dignity of labor. How then to we calculate the use-value of humans as tools?
Castes of Digital Work
The hierarchy and geographical diffusion of digital work has created a network of invisible actors with unequal wage, not unlike the socio-economic consequences of a caste system. There have often been attempts to cleanly differentiated the natural world form the man-made world (citation required). While, that demarcation is limiting in understand human life, it is equally important to see that human and artificial intelligence is intertwined with each other delicately and as designers, understanding this impending tangle must define the way we design intuitive interactions. While are transitioning from manual to automated, the question of labour still remains a pertinent one to solve. In reflecting on the paper assignment about the Virtual Assistant we designed, this category of workers is the most crucial direct stakeholder. Often the design decisions that we make under assumptions that computers are capable of mimicking human intuition affect the income and wage structure of this invisible workforce (invisible is far worse than irrelevant).
References:
Marx, Karl (1887) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital
Hendren, Sara [CMU Design]. (2017, Mar 13). Design for the Future with Sara Hendren. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGccg2qv_zk&feature=emb_logo
Gray, Mary L. [MIT Technology Review]. (2017, Mar 13). Ghost Work and the Future of Employment. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGccg2qv_zk&feature=emb_logo
Irani, Lilly. (2015). Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk. South Atlantic Quarterly. 114. 225–234. 10.1215/00382876–2831665.
