Ghost Work

How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781328566249
• eBook ISBN: 9781328566287
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Economics

In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work.

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.

There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it.

Index

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

80/20 rule, 101–5, 163, 171

A

Abel, Marjorie, 227 n8

Accord on Fire and Building Safety, 193

account suspensions, 67, 78–79, 85–91, 134, 188

accountability, xxx–xxxi, 72, 142–43, 144, 147, 194

advancement

on-demand work as stepping stone, 109–13

lack of, 95, 97–101

on LeadGenius, 149–50

Affordable Health Care, 189

Akbar, 132

Alcala, Aleli, 153, 154, 155

algorithmic cruelty, 67–93

background of, 67–68

Facebook and, 67–68, 232 n1

hypervigilance vs flexibility, 76–80

inequality of power in, 91–93

isolation vs autonomy, 80–84

payment, lack of, 85–91

transaction costs, requesters, 70–75

transaction costs, workers, 75–76, 174, 182–83, 184–85

algorithms, 67–68

AlphaGo, xx, 220 n14

AlphaGo Zero, xx, 220 n14

alternative work arrangements, 168–69

always-on workers, 104, 105, 126, 150–51, 158–59, 170, 190

Amara

collaboration, 183

competition, 161

demographics, 226 n31

description of, xxix, 27

history of, 225 n29, 241 n12

investment of, 164–65

Karen on, 26–31

skill development, 111, 113

volunteers as workers, 152–55

Amara On Demand (AOD) Team, 27, 30, 153–55

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). See MTurk

Amazon Pay, 14–15

Amazon.com, 1–2

Anand, 129

APIs. See application programming interface (API)

Apollo 13, 52

application programming interface (API)

circumventing, 7...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Ghosts in the Machine
• The Paradox of Automation’s Last Mile
• Humans in the Loop
• From Piecework to Outsourcing: A Brief History of Automation’s Last Mile
• Demanding Work
• Algorithmic Cruelty and the Hidden Costs of Ghost Work
• Working Hard for (More Than) the Money
• Talking Back to Robots
• The Kindness of Strangers and the Power of Collaboration
• Illustrations
• The Double Bottom Line
• The Task at Hand
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Methods Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes