My latest book, Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, is now available for pre-order. This work represents the culmination of years of research, enhanced with the latest data, into the human labor that powers our AI-driven world. Through extensive fieldwork across the globe, I’ve documented how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor. From platform workers like Uber drivers to “micro workers” performing data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and even our own interactions with technology, human input remains crucial to the functioning of AI systems.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to the colleagues who have honored me with their generous words of praise for the book they previewed.
“Casilli’s account stands out as one of the most perceptive and critical accounts of AI that has come out in recent times.” – Gabriella Coleman, Harvard University
“This book arrives just in time: in a moment in which the collective has focused its greatest dreams, or deepest anxieties, depending on where you sit, on the imminent reordering of society under the regime of ChatGPT and other AI-based automation of all sorts. . . .” – Sarah T. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles, author of “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” from the foreword
“Casilli takes readers on a provocative journey where human work is not disappearing but evolving in unexpected ways. With a blend of analysis and a subtly wry sense of humor, he debunks the myth of AI-driven job replacement, exposing how human labor is reconfigured and concealed within digital platforms.” – R. Trebor Scholz, New School
“Grounded in the stories of delivery drivers, taskers, and microworkers condemned to piecework, and leavened by a sophisticated understanding of the political economy of automation.” – Frank Pasquale, Cornell University