Summary:
Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri talks about the invisible human labor powering the seemingly ‘automated’ systems. It talks about the opaque world of employment and how this shadow workforce is what powers the so called intelligent systems and is largely responsible for their seamless working. There are hundreds of millions of invisible people who work online through Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower and other crowd-sourcing platforms for a meager sum. Most of these workers have a Bachelors or a Masters degree, who might or might not be employed full time. They join these platforms hoping to make some additional money along while also hoping to get a sense of community. Most of these workers are from the US and India as it’s easier to get cheap labor in these countries. These crowd sourcing platforms offer labor as a service where the laborers are hired using an API which makes it extremely convenient to filter these crowd source workers according to their ‘qualifications’, evaluate their work, collect their answers and pay them, all in a very short amount of time. A major implication of the API is that the workers are stripped away from their identity and are only identifiable by their unique identifier. Although, this workforce is essential to solve the problem of the “last mile”, the use of APIs create a distance between the parties involved rendering these workers in between as ghost workers.
Reflections:
It was an interesting read because it talks about a major workforce that we hardly get a chance to interact with. As computer scientists, we work with Machine Learning models without appreciating the ‘ghost work’ that goes in to build a “gold standard” dataset. For example, the much used resource, ImageNet, developed by Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, involved 49,000 workers from 167 countries for accurately labeling 3.2 million images. ImageNet has been utilized by computer vision researchers to build state-of-the-art image recognition algorithms but hardly any of the works have acknowledged the amount of work that went into captioning the images. Companies like LeadGenius and Amara are attempting to bring about a change in how these ghost workers are treated. They deviate from the traditional business strategies as they hire workers only after a rigorous interview round and additional tests conducted by senior workers. They offer a paid video orientation session and after a 90-day trial period, the workers might also become eligible for an 8 percent hike in their hourly pay, subject to certain minimum requirements. Amara gives their employees the option to opt out of projects they find repetitive and choose from a variety of projects, unlike other platforms where the content is pre-decided and the workers have no autonomy. These companies should be appreciated for attempting to bridge the gap between mindless ghost work and the kind of that takes into account the creativity and the interests of an individual worker.
Questions:
All this makes me think about the steps we can take to better acknowledge the essential work put in by these crowd-source workers. Does this work come under employed work or volunteerism? How do we categorize this work and should we consider this form of work as formal employment? These are essential questions that need to be discussed.
