Paper: Ghost Work, How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass
Summary:
The book highlights one of the major players of the artificial intelligence realm that is the “people.” By people, we often think about the customers. However, ghost workers are people in the system who work behind the scenes. These are on-demand workers who are working to keep the system running without any hiccups. The work is unique for these people. Any company who needs a certain task that requires humans to complete, they can request for such services. The task can be anything from flagging adult content, verifying human credentials, labeling images to create training data. On-demand workers are individuals who are not considered full-time or hourly wage workers. They are paid according to the task at hand. Hence, they need to be vigilant to take up tasks as soon as they appear and not lose the job to others who are looking. Tasks can be classified as a micro and macro task. Micro-tasks are small tasks that take less amount of time, but lots of humans to complete the task. Macro-task, on the other hand, are larger projects like developing webpages or building apps. Some common platforms of on-demand works are Amazon Mechanical Turks, Universal Human Relevance System, Lead genius, and Amara.
Reflection
The topic was fascinating and gave a unique perspective on “gig-workers.” I was aware of Amazon Mechanical Turks and that humans were an integral part of the automation process. However, this gave a more in-depth idea of what role humans play in this. It was intriguing to know how such individuals support themselves and their families. However, the lack of regulated law makes it difficult to accurately estimate how much such people earn and how exactly do they support their lives.
One important thing to note here is for all of the companies about most of the workers were in the age-group 18-37, and most had a college degree. This means that younger people find it comfortable to use modern technology to depend on such a unique method of earning money. The workers are generally not paid well enough, and they often need to be extremely skilled to make this their sole livelihood.
The book-chapters made it very clear that in various ways, such employees are an integral part of the technical system, and they are, at times, better performers than regular employees. Does this mean that companies can shift their work model from hiring more and more full-time employees to move to the on-demand model completely? That is still debatable. I do not think that such a model would be liable when it comes to long term commitments to deliver projects. Although, for full-time employees, job security might be the reason they are comfortable. However, having no financial guarantee, in the long run, is bound to be detrimental for a person. In my opinion, the need to perform “flawlessly” would cause people to reach their breaking point eventually. I firmly believe that such roles make people live an unhealthy work-life balance as they would continuously search for tasks to get more gigs.
Questions
- Can use more “gig workers” prove to be efficient/profitable for companies?
- Other than personal reasons, what makes people take up such jobs? Can someone aspire for such roles, or necessity drives them?
- Would older people be able to do such tasks? If yes, how can we measure the efficiency and compare the productivity against the average workforce age of 18-37?
I agree with your note about the younger people. The are used to use social networks platforms like Facebook and Twitter and also spend lots of time on games, so there are very comfortable with modern technologies and that make it easier for them to participate in such works.