Post-post-work
| Date: | 2021 |
| Format: | Definition |
| Index: | writing |
Post-post-work
Utopian and dystopian imaginaries generally substitute the human with technology, particularly when it comes to employment. However, many complicated or expensive tasks continue to depend on human labor, often invisible or casual. Amazon’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the stubborn persistence of the human within automated systems came in the form of the Mechanical Turk, which had the tagline “artificial artificial intelligence.”
Marxist historians have long noted that, far from obsolescing work, automation generates entirely new branches of unproductive work.(Nicolaus 1996, 204) If these new branches included banking, insurance, and advertising early in the 20th century then in the 21st century we might add operators and moderators, low-paid, temporary workers who uphold the fiction of automation precisely where those systems are not working.
Automated moderation systems can’t filter out videos and images featuring gore and violence effectively, for example, so social media companies outsource the work to contractors in Manila. When a man broadcast video of himself murdering his 11-month-old daughter on Facebook in 2017, the company quickly pledged to add 3,000 moderators. Amazon pays thousands of people in Costa Rica, India, Romania, and the United States to work 9-hour shifts listening to the recordings that its Echo smart speakers make in users’ homes to further train Amazon’s speech recognition and language understanding. Rafaela Vasquez was an Uber “Mission Specialist,” an important-sounding title for a low-wage, temporary job that entailed sitting in the front seat of a driverless car for hours on end as it was being tested in the streets of Tempe, Arizona when it struck and killed a pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg.
These examples occur within a context that is ostensibly temporary with the humans merely filling the gaps until the machine can effectively take over. But there is no a ha! moment here, we are not revealing the existence of the small man playing chess from within The Turk. Jeff Bezos made a wry joke of this micro-exploitation at scale from the very beginning: “this is human-as-a-service.”(Bezos 2006) Seeing here that human labor occupies the always-shifting negative space of automation, we can say that jobs are not “stolen by robots” so much as they are dissected and redefined (Manyika et al. 2017) into cheaper, rudimentary tasks that complement automation.(Autor 2015)
References
Autor, David H. 2015. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3): 3–30.
Bezos, Jeff. 2006. “Opening Keynote.” Cambridge, MA.
Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Mehdi Miremadi, Jacques Bughin, Katy George, Paul Willmott, and Martin Dewhurst. 2017. A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity. [San Francisco]: McKinsey Global Institute.
Nicolaus, Martin. 1996. “Proletariat and Middle Class in Marx: Hegelian Choreography and the Capitalist Dialectic.” In Class: Critical Concepts, edited by John Scott, 191–212. London ; New York: Routledge.
Published
- Dockray, Sean. “Post-post-work.” Chimeras: Inventory of synthetic cognition, edited by Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt. Onassis Foundation, 2022.