Waiting for Robots
The Hired Hands of Automation
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- €23.99
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- €23.99
Publisher Description
An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor.
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.
In this bracing and powerful book, Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.
Waiting for Robots urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
