Automation is taking over the world and a vast majority of people are losing their jobs! This might not necessarily be true. As the boom of automation and AI increases, there is a huge, silent effort from humans behind making this possible. Termed ghost workers, they are the people who “help” machines become smarter and make decisions that a machine is not capable of making. The paradox of automation’s last mile refers to humans who train AI, which ultimately goes on to function entirely on its own thereby making the human redundant. The phase in which human input is required to assist AI to become smarter is where a hidden world of ghost workers work day and night for meager pay. This human labor is often intentionally hidden from the outside world.
I agree with the author in that the current smart AI systems which are required to respond within seconds often require inputs from humans to help solve issues that are too complicated for their AI “mind”. Human discretion is almost always required to gauge sentiments correctly, identify patterns or adapt to the latest slang. These are things that the computers would not be able to decipher on their own and would require human intervention to solve real-time problems.
The consumers, however, remain until today, unaware of the fact that a human is actually involved in the transaction, behind-the-scenes. Worse, the conditions of work and pay are not widely known as well. This came as a shock to me. The current conditions could potentially lead to the isolation of ghost workers. Treating ghost workers as nothing more than a means to get a job done strips the job of any protection whatsoever and also dehumanizes the workers in the requester’s eyes. Therefore, I resonate with the author’s thoughts about bringing this to light and feel that a call for transparency is the need of the hour.
While the author is talking about the negative impacts of this form of ghost working, he also highlights why the workers prefer to do this job and why they return to the platform to search for jobs every single day. It is because of the anonymity that this platform provides by removing from the individual any attributes that might otherwise hinder their ability to seek jobs outside. Remote access is another aspect of ghost working that attracts people to engage in this work. A surprising fact I learnt from the extract is that the quality of the ghost workers often surpasses that of full-time employees (who get paid a lot more and also get benefits). Fear of losing subsequent tasks via the platform motivates these workers to raise the bars and deliver extremely high-quality work.
The nature of jobs posted is seasonal and depends on the requirements of the requesters. As mentioned in the extract, a few days bloom with requests while the rest of the days pass without a single request. Is there anything that can be done to streamline work so that the ghost workers are guaranteed work? Is there a way to provide alternate employment to the ghost workers that guarantees regular employment? This would be immensely helpful since the vast majority of ghost workers (if not all) depend on income from these sources to meet their living expenses.
Can task starvation be avoided by innovations?
While this platform indeed provides anonymity to the workers, why are the ghost workers not paid a fair amount? What can be done to ensure that a fair amount is distributed to the workers?
