The technological work of standing in
(2022) Proxies, stand-ins & warm-ups- Abstract
- The narrative of the Western modernity is a story about technological progress where technology gradually has replaced humans in the world of work. Yet, the relationship between technology and humans is more complex than that. This is illustrated by Jeff Bezos’ idea of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” where humans are hired as stand-ins when automatized systems fail. Much has been said about what it is that AI does – or will do – to society and culture. How AI is done is, however, often obscured by the imaginaries of automatization and autonomous systems. Yet, there are indications that it takes an army of clickworkers to make machines seem smart. The platform work of the gig economy in general shows similar characteristics:... (More)
- The narrative of the Western modernity is a story about technological progress where technology gradually has replaced humans in the world of work. Yet, the relationship between technology and humans is more complex than that. This is illustrated by Jeff Bezos’ idea of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” where humans are hired as stand-ins when automatized systems fail. Much has been said about what it is that AI does – or will do – to society and culture. How AI is done is, however, often obscured by the imaginaries of automatization and autonomous systems. Yet, there are indications that it takes an army of clickworkers to make machines seem smart. The platform work of the gig economy in general shows similar characteristics: digitalization does not mean that technology provides us with all we need; it provides us with apps that mediate work tasks to low paid food couriers on bikes, uber drivers or baby sitters. An observation to make here is that these gig workers do not have a human as a boss; algorithms (integrated into the platform infrastructure) work as stands-ins for the manager.
(Less) - Abstract (Swedish)
- The narrative of the Western modernity is a story about technological progress where technology gradually has replaced humans in the world of work. Yet, the relationship between technology and humans is more complex than that. This is illustrated by Jeff Bezos’ idea of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” where humans are hired as stand-ins when automatized systems fail. Much has been said about what it is that AI does – or will do – to society and culture. How AI is done is, however, often obscured by the imaginaries of automatization and autonomous systems. Yet, there are indications that it takes an army of clickworkers to make machines seem smart. The platform work of the gig economy in general shows similar characteristics:... (More)
- The narrative of the Western modernity is a story about technological progress where technology gradually has replaced humans in the world of work. Yet, the relationship between technology and humans is more complex than that. This is illustrated by Jeff Bezos’ idea of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” where humans are hired as stand-ins when automatized systems fail. Much has been said about what it is that AI does – or will do – to society and culture. How AI is done is, however, often obscured by the imaginaries of automatization and autonomous systems. Yet, there are indications that it takes an army of clickworkers to make machines seem smart. The platform work of the gig economy in general shows similar characteristics: digitalization does not mean that technology provides us with all we need; it provides us with apps that mediate work tasks to low paid food couriers on bikes, uber drivers or baby sitters. An observation to make here is that these gig workers do not have a human as a boss; algorithms (integrated into the platform infrastructure) work as stands-ins for the manager.
These examples of human stand-ins for technology – and vice versa – illustrate the multifaceted relationship between manual work and technology in a digital era. Our argument (which is not unique) is however that this not a new phenomenon; the history is full of examples of humans standing in for new information and communication technologies: women working as computers within the information sector, school boys hired as messengers as a solution to the last mile problem of the electric telegraph, female workers connecting phone calls at switchboards, and so on. These workers were usually acting backstage and hidden from sight, to make technologies appear automatic. The work force hired to tag data and train machine learning algorithms today serve a similar function. In this paper we trace the history of such stand-ins and how historical practises live on in digital settings.
(Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/f1146367-b6e2-4807-9f96-27d014ad2912
- author
- Andersson, Magnus LU and Jarlbrink, Johan
- organization
- publishing date
- 2022-04-27
- type
- Contribution to conference
- publication status
- published
- subject
- conference name
- Proxies, stand-ins & warm-ups
- conference location
- Lund/London
- conference dates
- 2022-04-27 - 2022-04-27
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- f1146367-b6e2-4807-9f96-27d014ad2912
- date added to LUP
- 2022-04-27 21:30:21
- date last changed
- 2022-04-28 08:35:06
@misc{f1146367-b6e2-4807-9f96-27d014ad2912,
abstract = {{The narrative of the Western modernity is a story about technological progress where technology gradually has replaced humans in the world of work. Yet, the relationship between technology and humans is more complex than that. This is illustrated by Jeff Bezos’ idea of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” where humans are hired as stand-ins when automatized systems fail. Much has been said about what it is that AI does – or will do – to society and culture. How AI is done is, however, often obscured by the imaginaries of automatization and autonomous systems. Yet, there are indications that it takes an army of clickworkers to make machines seem smart. The platform work of the gig economy in general shows similar characteristics: digitalization does not mean that technology provides us with all we need; it provides us with apps that mediate work tasks to low paid food couriers on bikes, uber drivers or baby sitters. An observation to make here is that these gig workers do not have a human as a boss; algorithms (integrated into the platform infrastructure) work as stands-ins for the manager. <br/>}},
author = {{Andersson, Magnus and Jarlbrink, Johan}},
language = {{eng}},
month = {{04}},
title = {{The technological work of standing in}},
year = {{2022}},
}