What is Ghost work?
Under the shadow of emerging AI technology and its applications, millions of workers find tasks on online platforms and earn their paycheck by contributing in “human computation”.
These tasks connect end users and machine as an “API”. The work process is totally invisible to the users, yet their contribution is vital to user experience on all kinds of services that rely on the blooming of artificial intelligence. These workers are completely ignored by the majority of users, and their effort are credited to the algorithms and models. The result is, robots are overrated on their performance and capability. As new software being put into use and the improvement of AI, ghost workers will be assigned to further tasks towards the realization of automation. This is the Paradox of automation’s last mile.
Are they all mindless and unworthy of mention?
I’ve been thinking about the smartness of apps on my phone. Every time I talked about something that can be purchased, soon after that I receive notification of purchase promotion about that product from many apps from all my electronic devices. I know Google, Amazon and Apple probably already projected a prediction on my user activity and preference, however, I’m surprised at their speed of self-confirmation. Is it just my history and the model that determine what to show me next, or there’s something I couldn’t see or imagine?
When we make phone calls only by landline, operators are necessary workforce, and we know their importance. It’s not the most decent occupation, but many people use this job to make ends meet. Today, most people are enjoying the all kinds of service brought to them by fast Internet and computing power, and they are unaware of the people that glue their interaction with the machines.
It’s unfair if we only give credit to the silent, formatted models and neglect the significant contribution of ghost workers’ creativity and flexibility. Just as other collaborate work, effort is effort. Human computation is already an indispensable part of the whole picture. Without their effort, I guess all the expectation on AI will be disappointed in some way.
The jobs (or the combination of tasks) are described as mindless, which means no specific skill is needed to satisfy the goal. As I tried to register on a crowdsourcing website – Figure Eight, it’s not hard to get started with all the helpful “quiz” and tips along your tasks.
Question
- Even with this book and other research that expose Ghost work to public, will these “irrelevant” information draw their attention on this topic?
- What else, similar to Ghost work, silently exist in the shadow of a great invention, research breakthrough, and technology?
- Current law, social status, is it a good status quo? Is there something we can make progress on? Do they demand more “employee” benefit? (Compared to traditional in-office full-time employees)
From class
They are hidden deliberately to hide some shortcoming of the platform. So it’s difficult to decide whether we should expose them.
Are we creating jobs to fire other people?
