Last week with the Diplab team, we spent two exciting days at the European Parliament in Brussels, engaging in profound discussions with and about platform workers as part of the 4th edition of the Transnational Forum on Alternatives to Uberization.
Together, we delved into the intricacies of the human labor that fuels artificial intelligence and ensures safe participation to social media. Together, we discussed workers’ expectations, concerns and common struggles to move forward toward a world in which where technology serves all humans equally and responsibly.
Digital labor is at the heart of our evolving economies. To address the specific challenges and developments in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), we are launching a dedicated chapter of INDL for the region.
This conference provides a unique platform to present research related to the MEA region, both ongoing and/or burgeoning. The conference offers opportunities for scholars and practitioners to engage with topics such as platformization, automation, gig economy dynamics, and technology-mediated labor.
INDL-MEA will feature three tracks: one in Arabic, one in English, and one in French, reflecting the linguistic diversity of the region.
Topics
Submissions must be in reference to the MEA region, for instance: in perspective, case studies, or focus.
Submission topics may include but are not limited to
Case studies examining platforms, gig economy workers, and online digital labor in MEA
Exploring algorithmic management practices in work processes, recruiting, and HR in MEA
Issues of digital platform labor on gender and inclusion in the MEA region
Consequences of the shift to digital labor on workers, businesses, economies, and labor markets in MEA
Effects of remote work and digital labor on employee well-being and productivity in MEA
Policy responses to the rise of digital labor and automation in MEA, including regulatory measures and government intervention
Strategies for organizing digital workers and managing geographically distributed workforces in MEA
Intersectional perspectives on digital labor in MEA
Exploring AI and digital labor through a decolonial lens in MEA
Challenges posed by Generative AI to human labor in MEA
Submissions
We invite submissions of anonymized abstracts for papers, case studies, and policy briefs related to these topics. Abstracts, up to 500 words, can be submitted in Arabic, English, or French through our website INDL-MEA.
Important Dates
Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024
Acceptance notification: February 15, 2024
Registration opens: TBA
INDL-MEA conference date: May 28, 2024
Together, let’s foster a thought-provoking dialogue and contribute to shaping the future of digital labor in the Middle East and Africa.
For more information, please see the INDL website.
Estoy muy emocionada y feliz de empezar un ciclo de charlas en Chile, principalmente en Santiago y Talca, con Antonio A. Casilli este mes de enero. Agradezco mucho a la Embajada de Francia en Chile, al Instituto Francés de Chile, y a la Fundación Teatro a Mil por esta oportunidad maravillosa. Gracias también a Juana Torres Cierpe y a Francisca Ortiz Ruiz por su ayuda en contactar con colegas, amigos y estudiantes de Chile.
Empezaremos por una charla titulada “Plataformas digitales, trabajo en línea y automatización tras la crisis sanitaria”, que tendrá lugar el día lunes 16 de enero a las 12:00 hrs en la sede de la CUT (1 oriente # 809, Talca). En esta charla presentaremos nuestras investigaciones sobre el fenómeno del micro-trabajo fuertemente precarizado que se desarrolla en las plataformas digitales. Agradezco mucho a la profesora Claudia Jordana Contreras y a la Escuela de Sociología de la Universidad Católica del Maule por la organización de este evento.
El martes 17 enero 2023, 11:00, hablaré de “Inteligencia artificial, transformaciones laborales y desigualdades: El trabajo de las mujeres en las plataformas digitales de ‘microtareas” en el Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad Católica y con el Quantitative and Computational Social Science Research Group. Gracias a Mauricio Bucca que ha organizado este evento. Estaremos en la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Campus San Joaquín.
El martes 17 por la tarde (a las 17:000 hrs), hablaré de “Ética de la inteligencia artificial y otros desafíos para la investigación sobre redes sociales” como parte de la Escuela de Verano del Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social, Universidad del Desarrollo. Agradezco a Jorge Fábrega Lacoa y sus colegas para la organización.
El viernes 20 de enero 2023, a las 10:00 hrs, Antonio y yo hablaremos juntos de “El trabajo detrás de la inteligencia artificial y la automatización en América Latina” en un taller internacional organizado por la Universidad de Chile – con Pablo Pérez (gracias por la organización!) y Francisca Gutiérrez, sala 129, FASCO, Av. Ignacio Carrera Pinto 1045, Ñuñoa.
Sigue un evento organizado por el Instituto Francés, “La noche de las ideas”:
On 18 September 2020, I present my research on the platform economy and its impact on labour in Covid-19 times at Nantes Digital Week, as part of a special event organized by CGT, a Union.
The mobility restrictions that accompanied the pandemic encouraged use of digital tools to socialize, study and work, suggesting that automation is gaining ground and that technology enables contactless – hence safe – interactions in much of our social life. Yet behind apparent automation, precarious and unprotected human labour is hidden. Workers recruited through digital platforms to make these solutions work, are in fact disproportionately exposed to risks. I illustrate these ideas in three main cases: food delivery workers, that enabled the restaurant industry to stand the crisis even during lockdown; commercial content moderators that are to return to office sooner than others, to protect our safety online; and AI micro-workers who trained tools whose sales have gone up during stay-at-home rules, such as voice assistants, and helped the creation of datasets for much-needed health applications.
Just published a new, collective paper on new kinds of risk that are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, arguing that these risks are unequally distributed. Digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Populations bearing disproportionate risks include the social isolated, older adults, penal system subjects, digitally disadvantaged students, gig workers, and last-mile workers. We map out the intersection between COVID-19 risk factors and digital inequalities on each of these populations in order to examine how the digitally resourced have additional tools to mitigate some of the risks associated with the pandemic. We shed light on how the ongoing pandemic is deepening key axes of social differentiation, which were previously occluded from view.
These newly manifested forms of social differentiation can be conceived along several related dimensions. At their most general and abstract, these risks have to do with the capacity individuals have to control the risk of pathogen exposure. In order to fully manage exposure risk, individuals must control their physical environment to the greatest extent possible in order to prevent contact with potentially compromised physical spaces. In addition, they must control their social interactional environment to the greatest extent possible in order to minimize their contacts with potentially infected individuals. All else equal, those individuals who exercise more control over their exposure risk — on the basis of their control over their physical and social interactional environments — stand a better chance of staying healthy than those individuals who cannot manage exposure risk. Individuals therefore vary in terms of what we call their COVID-19 exposure risk profile (CERPs).
CERPs hinge on pre-existing forms of social differentiation such as socioeconomic status, as individuals with more economic resources at their disposal can better insulate themselves from exposure risk. Alongside socioeconomic status, one of the key forms of social differentiation connected with CERPs is digital (dis)advantage. Ceteris paribus, individuals who can more effectively digitize key parts of their lives enjoy better CERPs than individuals who cannot digitize these life realms. Therefore we believe that digital inequalities are directly and increasingly related to both life-or-death exposure to COVID-19, as well as excess deaths attributable to the larger conditions generated by the pandemic.
The article has been published in First Monday and is available here.
In the same special issue of First Monday, I co-published two reference articles:
The paper sheds light on the role of digital platform labour in the development of today’s artificial intelligence, predicated on data-intensive machine learning algorithms. We uncover the specific ways in which outsourcing of data tasks to myriad ‘micro-workers’, recruited and managed through specialized platforms, powers virtual assistants, self-driving vehicles and connected objects. Using qualitative data from multiple sources, we show that micro-work performs a variety of functions, between three poles that we label, respectively, ‘artificial intelligence preparation’, ‘artificial intelligence verification’ and ‘artificial intelligence impersonation’. Because of the wide scope of application of micro-work, it is a structural component of contemporary artificial intelligence production processes – not an ephemeral form of support that may vanish once the technology reaches maturity stage. Through the lens of micro-work, we prefigure the policy implications of a future in which data technologies do not replace human workforce but imply its marginalization and precariousness.
The three main functions of micro-work in the development of data-intensive, machine-learning based AI solutions.
The paper reports results of the 2017-18 DiPLab project, and is available here in open access.
I was last week at the second Reshaping Work in the Platform Economy in Amsterdam. The interest of this small conference is tht it brings together different actors of the platform economy, from academics and students to policymakers, union leaders, workers, and representatives of platforms to discuss.
In an overview of preliminary results of our project DiPLab, Antonio A. Casilli and I presented our reflection on how micro-work powers artificial intelligence (AI), in three main ways:
Training AI
Validating outcomes of AI
Impersonating AI when it is cheaper or simpler that real AI
No more details for now… it will come out as a working paper very soon!
Data Big and Small 