The chapters introduce a new trend of work in today’s world called “Ghost Work.” The authors define this work as a hidden human effort that appears to be automized. The authors deny the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon rule over their creators because they awfully lack the ability to deal with the dynamic world without humans in the loop. Ghost work is what provides the backbone of today’s AI algorithms. Companies use ghost work APIs such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to easily assign micro-tasks that AI alone cannot handle. Many people today enter this newly formed workforce as a way of earning income in an extremely flexible schedule that they can control. The downside of ghost work is that it’s often hard to track by the government and no labor support such as life insurance is provided. However, the workers do have the ability to counter any unfair treatment legally as shown by an example by the authors.
Something I was very surprised with while I was reading the chapters was that the workforce consisted primarily of people that have a bachelor’s degree or higher. According to my prior experience with Amazon’s MTurk, most of the work listed asked to fill out a multi-page survey for a penny. I did not think people with such high education would want to do such a repetitive job.
I am also skeptical about the authors’ claim that this is a new trend that may replace the “primary work” trend. According to the chapters, only about 1% of the on-demand workers can make a minimum wage purely from ghost work. This makes it necessary for another source of income as the chapters also mentioned. Many people before ghost work were already working in multiple part-time jobs. Yet, the world did not say that the “work trend” had changed. How would ghost work be different? I agree that the market is growing for ghost work, but I think the risk of committing to ghost work will prevent it to become a major trend.
At the end of the reading, I concluded that ghost work is just a special kind of freelance work that involves supporting artificial intelligence. It also made me wonder since freelancing has already been existing for a long time and ghost work strongly resembles a special type of freelance work, wouldn’t other freelance workers and ghost workers have similar demographics?
The followings are additional questions that arose during the reading:
1. Is the ghost workforce really able to support real-time applications? This would require that ghost work is constantly available at any time and anywhere in the world. Wouldn’t there be downtime at any point?
2. What is the country with the largest population of ghost workers? The chapters only mentioned the United States and India as the primary ghost workforce. What other country do populations provide ghost work?
3. How much work can this replace? It seems that ghost work can only replace works that must be done online. It cannot, for example, have testers evaluate prototype machinery.
