Ghost work – work done in the shadows, invisible to the public eye. Work that is usually chalked up to the magic of computers and software and automation and AI, are in fact often done with significant help from an army of invisible workers. Recommendation suggestions, search term tuning, internet moderation, image recognition, all of these things we take for granted as being done by the magic of computers actually use an enormous amount of manual human effort, solely because the moment-to-moment general human creativity and ingenuity is something that is not yet emulated by machines. This book is telling the story of this invisible work – both the individual human stories as well as the 10,000 feet view of this globally distributed, disparate workforce. The goals of ghost work is to bridge the gap in “automation’s last mile”, a mile that is seemingly never bridged because the end goal keeps moving as engineers keep thinking of newer and newer applications for AI. The reading introduces a few of the kinds of people who participate in this machine, their goals, their troubles, their circumstances. It also introduces the big players in the field, from Amazon’s public offering for micro tasks, to Upwork and Amara’s offerings of more creative, effortful tasks.
The is an interesting and insightful look into this plane that is never really seen and almost never thought about because the results are indistinguishable from most other mechanical work done by software. I was particularly struck by how varied and extensive the kinds of work are. The utility of ghost work for labelling and correcting product descriptions is immediately apparent. But live verification of an Uber driver’s ID, where a person’s livelihood might hang on to some person’s 10 seconds of thought thousands of miles away is truly mind boggling. The more I read, the more I agree with how depersonalizing working for something like MTurk or UHRS can be. In those worlds, you are an alphanumeric string, fighting to snap up small tasks from other alphanumeric strings. Without a human support system around you, this can drive anyone crazy going from one mundane task to another. I see some more satisfaction can be derived from the more macro tasks of Upwork, but the fact that tasks for even these kinds of work can be dispatched by API, where the worker would potentially never interact with another actual human, is still deeply depersonalizing. People are not meant to be treated as a resource to be automated away and the typical practices where the persons who commissions the work has no idea of the real people on the other side doing the work irks me greatly.
Things this reminds me of:
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson – The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a sci-fi nanotech book that creates stories with AI to teach things, both school education and life skills, to the user from childhood. The rub is that there is a person behind the book doing the acting and direction for the stories and lessons in the book, it is not completely AI created. Stephenson makes the case that you need a human connection for proper human development and cannot solely depend on AI to do all the work. I’m reminded of this by the story of Ayesha intervening to approve the Uber drivers profile, because the human ingenuity is necessary for this apparently automated process to work correctly.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson – the protagonist (actually named Hiro Protagonist) is a CIC Stringer, basically a ghost worker contributing small pieces of information for money to a large database (think Wikipedia if it was run by the CIA).
Discworld: Moving pictures by Terry Pratchett – The video camera in the Discworld book is actually a hollow box with a crank and demons living inside. If you turn the crank, the demons inside are beaten by the crank mechanism into painting pictures of what they see outside the camera. The faster you turn the crank, the more they are hit and the faster the demons are made to draw. The “magic box” actually produces movies because of the secret invisible effort of a bunch sentient beings rather than due to magic technological inventions. It’s smoke and mirrors. And consider how the creatures are being treated in this scenario, whipped by a mechanical hand. I definitely see some parallels here to the nature of ghost work.
Questions for Discussion:
1. Will we ever bridge automation’s last mile? Or will the goalposts always keep moving?
2. Like in The Diamond Age, will we always continue to need humans because of the need for human ingenuity and adaptability to allow progress? Will we continue to need them for genuine human connection?
3. I’ve heard of human in the loop machine learning, and I always visualized it as a wise human teacher guiding a young AI padawan. Given what we know about ghost work used for training, is HITLML actually a lot more depersonalized, or is that just one kind of HITLML?
4. What kinds of work would need a worker+verifier? And what kind of work needs just the worker?
