Working towards our own obsolescence

https://www.neme.org/projects/working-towards-our-own-obsolescence

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) was founded in 1919 out of the conviction that social justice was crucial to enduring peace. A hundred years later, the organisation is often accused of being unable to keep pace with both old forms and new forms of labour abuses.

The issues that require urgent intervention today are shifting and evolving very fast. The digital revolution has given rise to new models of collaboration and knowledge production but also to new forms of exploitation, precariousness and dependency that have been likened to feudalism. ^{1 Evgeny Morozov, Towards High-Tech Feudalism: How the Digital Economy Enslaves Us, November 2017. Evgeny Morozov, Tech titans are busy privatising our data, April 2016.}

We were promised that technology would free us from menial, fragmented, tedious tasks. That is, in part at least, happening already. Digital technology has also opened the door to new types of work that lock human workers into a life of repetition. Such are: the content moderators at Facebook and other major companies who dream at night about the mind-numbing clicks they make all day to ignore or censor images and texts that are abhorrent; ^{2 Three months in hell, January 2018.} or the famously tele guided “associates” at Amazon warehouses who wear devices that monitor and direct them to be as efficient as possible until they can one day be entirely replaced by robots; ^{3 Three months in hell, January 2018.} or the young women spending their days data tagging images and audio to train the AI behind self-driving cars and domestic robots, ^{4 AI promises jobs revolution but first it needs old-fashioned manual labour – from China, October 2018.} etc. Or think about you and I as we comply when asked by CAPTCHAs ^{5 A CAPTCHA, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.} to identify storefronts or crossroads to prove that, indeed, we are not robots.

The atomisation of labour into small tasks is also affecting the creative sector. Platforms such as Fiverr are offering casual and precarious work (or “gigs”) to designers, actors, translators, programmers and other freelancers. The pay is low as is the level of power granted to the worker.

Whether we’re talking about data taggers, Turkers, ^{6 The term here is used in relation to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) which is a crowdsourcing website for businesses (known as Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, who browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a rate set by the employer.} or graphic designers, they all become invisible and dehumanised in this process of atomisation and automation of work. New terms have emerged that define the occultation of the crucial role they play in the automatisation rhetoric such as Amazon’s artificial artificial intelligence, where people are mercilessly squeezed into the machine. Others denounce the rise of “pseudo-AI.” ^{7 Olivia Solon. The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work, July 2018.} But I favour the term Potemkin AI for it suggests a carefully constructed architecture of deceit. ^{8 Jathan Sadowski. Potemkin AI, August 2018.}

These invisible human cogs in the facade of algorithmic virtuosity perform tasks that machines are not able to do just yet. They educate them, power the illusion of automation, hide the gaps behind the AI rhetoric and work towards their own human obsolescence.

That’s not to say that algorithms, robots and bots are not perfectly capable of performing acts of wizardry. They are routinely writing sport reports, trading on financial markets, bidding for us on eBay, composing music and successfully appealing parking tickets on our behalf. ^{9 Jathan Sadowski. Samuel Gibbs. Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York, June 2016 .} Machines can do wonders indeed, but they are not as omniscient and efficient as some start-ups claim. For the moment at least, it is often cheaper to get humans to imitate robots, rather than the opposite.

The automation of life has colonised even the private sphere. The blurring between industrial and manual labour can be observed inside our home, with household devices and online services that turn us into mere terminals. We are on call 24/7, forever prompted to respond to multiple signals, to quantify our friendships, feelings, purchases, tastes, itineraries, curiosities, even our bodily chemical reactions. We get convenience. The corporations behind this new, always on demand culture, get data that can be gathered, processed and monetised. Often, in ways we can not comprehend nor suspect.

The ILO was the first truly tripartite labour organisation, giving equal voice to governments, workers and employers in its executive bodies. Nowadays, however, one can not be blamed for thinking that the sole actor sitting at the discussion table to discuss work organisation is the algorithm.

The problem of work in the age of AI is not only that it is seeping into seemingly every facet and hour of human life, it is because it is characterised by precariousness encouraging us to become entrepreneurs of ourselves, or our online presence.

Maybe the solution to the impending gradual phasing out of the human in the labour is not yet another app or any other Silicon Valley-endorsed techno fix. Maybe the solution is to embrace our own biological limits and remember that we do not just depend on machines but on other beings too. Beings that are human and non human animals, and even flora. Maybe we should rethink our micro-entrepreneurship culture and embrace a more interdependent, cooperative and communal way of being in the world.

Régine Debatty

Participating artists

Pippin Barr; Larisa Blazic; Peter Buczkowski; Stéphane Degoutin, Gwenola Wagon, and Pierre Cassou-Noguès; Dasha Ilina; Sanela Jahić; Lisa Ma; Liz Magic Laser; Julien Prévieux; Laurel Ptak.

Notes

1. Evgeny Morozov, Towards High-Tech Feudalism: How the Digital Economy Enslaves Us, November 2017. Evgeny Morozov, Tech titans are busy privatising our data, April 2016. ⇧
2. Three months in hell, January 2018. ⇧
3. Three months in hell, January 2018. ⇧
4. AI promises jobs revolution but first it needs old-fashioned manual labour – from China, October 2018. ⇧
5. A CAPTCHA, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. ⇧
6. The term here is used in relation to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) which is a crowdsourcing website for businesses (known as Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, who browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a rate set by the employer. ⇧
7. Olivia Solon. The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work, July 2018. ⇧
8. Jathan Sadowski. Potemkin AI, August 2018. ⇧
9. Jathan Sadowski. Samuel Gibbs. Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York, June 2016 . ⇧

Credits

Curator: Régine Debatty
Coordinator: Helene Black
Artistic Director: Yiannis Colakides
Curator statement video: Nicos Avraamides
Photographs: Helene Black

Thanks

Main Funder: Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture
Support: Medochemie, AlphaMega