In his review, contributor Bryan Gardiner praises the monograph, published by University of Chicago Press, placing it among the most insightful works that explore humanity’s nuanced and often tense interactions with robotics and artificial intelligence systems. The book’s inclusion in this roundup signals growing mainstream recognition of critical perspectives that look beyond the technological hype to examine the real social and economic impacts of our increasingly automated world.
<excerpt>
“Forget about losing jobs to automation. Remarkably, the reality is that humans steal the jobs of robots.”
The Voder may have been one of the first crude attempts at speech synthesis, but the disconnect between the way it worked (with a lot of human training and labor) and the way the public and press perceived it (as a more or less autonomous machine with its own voice) foreshadowed a problem we still face today. In Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, Antonio A. Casilli argues that despite claims to the contrary, human input remains a crucial component of all modern automation and artificial-intelligence tools, regardless of their sophistication. The difference is that instead of this role being obvious—as was the case with the Voderettes—it’s now hidden, and usually on purpose.
Antonio A. Casilli
Casilli is a sociology professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris who studies the unseen and unacknowledged “digital labor” that undergirds many of today’s social media platforms, microtask sites, and on-demand services. Rather than viewing automation and AI as destroyers of human jobs, he makes a convincing case that they merely result in the further atomization of work, fracturing it into smaller, more meaningless, more demeaning tasks for many of us. “Forget about losing jobs to automation,” he writes. “Remarkably, the reality is that humans steal the jobs of robots.”
Whether it’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a service for recruiting hundreds of thousands of micro-taskers to perform video-filtering and image-tagging tasks that machines can’t do, or the perpetual human “supervision” and “reinforcement” required for automated learning and AI training, Casilli gives readers plenty of examples of how human labor (much of it coming from Asian, Latin American, and African countries) props up—or, in some cases, pretends to actually be—intelligent systems and products.
Ultimately, Casilli is less concerned that robots will replace white-collar workers, and more worried that thousands of lower-paid or unpaid digital workers will. As he points out, we are already unwittingly being recruited by companies to collectively perform millions of hours of free work every year. Take the aforementioned captchas: Google, which owns and deploys one of the most popular versions of the service (ReCAPTCHA and No CAPTCHA), has been using this digital labor for more than a decade. The results help detect house numbers to improve Google Street View, digitize texts for Google Books, and train its computer vision algorithms to detect locations and reconstruct scenes, enhancing Google Images and improving the performance of Waymo’s self-driving cars. “The irony here is that a service that is supposed to distinguish humans from robots is actually making humans work to produce more robots,” Casilli writes.
While all the hype and hyperbole surrounding today’s AI tools can feel unprecedented, Casilli reminds readers that such rhetoric isn’t really new at all. Robots, automation, and various intelligent systems have been just on the verge of taking over all aspects of our work lives and cultural output for decades now. In the end, artificial intelligence is a technological process that isn’t actually artificial, he says. Peer behind the curtains of smooth and seamless efficiency, and it’s humans all the way down.