An Artificial Revolution by Ivana Bartoletti

Author:Ivana Bartoletti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: artificial intelligence;artificial intelligence politics;future of work;privacy;the age of surveillance capitalism;invisible women;everyday sexism;human compatible;shoshana zuboff;feminist AI
Publisher: The Indigo Press
Published: 2020-05-07T13:13:35+00:00

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Reshaping Labour

The accepted attitude in recent years has been that if you are critical of AI and concerned about what is happening to the labour market, you are, without question, anti-technology, anti-modernity, anti-innovation and anti-progress. But if AI is actually going to replace human tasks, we need to have an honest and open debate about it, one that does not shy away from uncomfortable avenues of thought.

Firstly, some human tasks are better off being performed by machines. Why would we want to engage in mindlessly repetitive activities when these could be performed by machines instead? Or in dangerous, life-threatening ones? The question should be about governance, how we can plan the future ahead, and, ultimately, how we can drive the direction of AI development in a structured way.

Secondly, we are concerned – and rightly so – about jobs disappearing, because, for millions, the only alternative to a job is destitution. To understand the impact of AI on labour, we need to look into two main areas: firstly, how AI is reshaping the concept of labour; and secondly, how different the era we are in is from previous automation revolutions.

AI is creating new forms of modern unpaid labour, of which people need to be made more widely informed. In sharing all our information on social media platforms, we labour for them. This is not just a semantic curiosity. It is a fact. This is what we do when we go through all the trouble of posting pictures and crafting articulate, intricate messages about our thoughts and ideas on social media.

We give social media companies all they need to train and improve their algorithms, and we do this for free. Their business model is to make us work without pay. We upload photos so they can train their facial-recognition software. We react and comment on our friends’ posts so they can produce the best prediction software to hack into our personalities. We spend money online so our consumer habits can be identified, encoded and extrapolated, allowing advertisers to target us with products to spend more money on. This is a new form of unpaid labour, and we seem to be unaware of it. We do it because their systems are good; they satisfy us; they entertain us.

Let’s take the example of companies operating in the healthcare sector. Access to data means that the potential for research improves dramatically. However, we should be asking what the public healthcare of a nation gets in return for making all its data available? If a pharmaceutical company uses the data to produce a groundbreaking new drug that has the potential to save millions of lives, the company is going to sell it to the same healthcare system (and many others too) for distribution. But how will they pay back the organization that gave them the raw material that enabled them to produce the drug in the first place?

I would question the fact that national healthcare systems are not getting anything in return – nor are individuals. This is worrying for us all, and health is not the only territory where this is taking place.

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