1
00:00:09,400 --> 00:00:12,200
Hi everybody. Welcome to data and Society.

2
00:00:12,200 --> 00:00:13,789
My name is Sareeta Amrute

3
00:00:13,789 --> 00:00:15,700
I'm the director of research here.

4
00:00:16,500 --> 00:00:19,138
It's my sincere pleasure and honor

5
00:00:19,138 --> 00:00:21,731
to welcome you to data and Society 
for this discussion

6
00:00:21,731 --> 00:00:26,172
inspired by Mary Gray 
and Siddharth Suri's recently released book

7
00:00:26,172 --> 00:00:32,000
Ghost Work: How To Stop Silicon Valley 
From Building a New Global Underclass.

8
00:00:32,200 --> 00:00:36,275
Mary Gray is senior researcher 
at Microsoft research

9
00:00:36,275 --> 00:00:41,007
and fellow at Harvard University's 
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

10
00:00:41,007 --> 00:00:46,870
Mary also maintains a faculty position in the school of informatics Computing and Engineering

11
00:00:46,870 --> 00:00:51,542
with affiliations in anthropology, gender studies

12
00:00:51,542 --> 00:00:53,713
and the media school at Indiana University

13
00:00:53,713 --> 00:00:57,674
her research looks at how technology access

14
00:00:57,674 --> 00:01:00,070
material conditions and everyday uses of media

15
00:01:00,070 --> 00:01:03,290
transform people's lives 
and today she'll be talking to us

16
00:01:03,290 --> 00:01:04,280
about her latest book

17
00:01:04,280 --> 00:01:07,150
written with Siddharth Suri
who is based in Seattle.

18
00:01:07,700 --> 00:01:08,600
Take it away Mary.

19
00:01:14,700 --> 00:01:16,537
Thank you.

20
00:01:16,537 --> 00:01:18,190
Thank you everyone for coming out

21
00:01:18,190 --> 00:01:21,697
and I see some familiar faces 
and I just really want

22
00:01:21,697 --> 00:01:24,280
to voice my appreciation 
for all the support I've had

23
00:01:24,280 --> 00:01:25,820
over the years doing this work

24
00:01:25,820 --> 00:01:28,717
first and foremost
to my co-author Siddhart Suri

25
00:01:28,717 --> 00:01:30,958
but to all the workers
who have given their time

26
00:01:30,958 --> 00:01:34,590
and let us into their lives
to learn about their experiences.

27
00:01:34,630 --> 00:01:38,280
This work wouldn't be possible without 
the time that they've given to us.

28
00:01:38,400 --> 00:01:39,564
So with that

29
00:01:40,398 --> 00:01:45,299
I wanted to start by giving you a sense
of where this work came from

30
00:01:45,299 --> 00:01:48,149
and for me, I was thinking 
about my own research questions

31
00:01:48,149 --> 00:01:51,000
before coming to Microsoft Research.

32
00:01:51,300 --> 00:01:54,450
Most of them circled
around the question

33
00:01:54,450 --> 00:01:57,600
of how do we become more or less seen?

34
00:01:57,900 --> 00:02:02,025
How are we known and valued as people 
and what role do Technologies play in that

35
00:02:03,335 --> 00:02:08,150
and much of the heralding of the internet 
was that we're going to become more visible.

36
00:02:08,150 --> 00:02:12,000
We're going to be able 
to speak our truth, hear all voices

37
00:02:12,200 --> 00:02:15,450
and much of my grounding in anthropology 
and critical media studies

38
00:02:15,450 --> 00:02:18,180
brings me to the question of how so?

39
00:02:18,180 --> 00:02:19,383
when is that not true?

40
00:02:19,383 --> 00:02:23,900
and what are the conditions under which 
people make that more or less true?

41
00:02:24,200 --> 00:02:27,650
So I come to this project 
with that background.

42
00:02:27,700 --> 00:02:29,800
And in many ways

43
00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:35,050
What I'm hoping to do is incite you to care 
about this world of work

44
00:02:35,050 --> 00:02:38,085
that is more or less seen, known and valued

45
00:02:38,085 --> 00:02:40,860
depending on where you are 
in this universe.

46
00:02:41,400 --> 00:02:44,851
It really started with coming 
to Microsoft research

47
00:02:44,851 --> 00:02:48,603
and asking a basic question about 
how artificial intelligence is made.

48
00:02:49,100 --> 00:02:50,680
I had no idea

49
00:02:50,680 --> 00:02:54,044
and so when I started asking 
computer scientists and Engineers in my lab

50
00:02:54,044 --> 00:02:57,887
what goes into developing algorithms 
and the models that are built

51
00:02:57,887 --> 00:03:01,200
to be able to advance artificial intelligence.

52
00:03:01,520 --> 00:03:10,600
It turns out that there are a lot of people involved in that work outside of the coders and the engineers and computer scientists that are theorizing these these technological innovations.

53
00:03:10,900 --> 00:03:11,900
It's a lot of

54
00:03:12,200 --> 00:03:44,800
People who are effectively cleaning and managing data the training data the become the models for building algorithms out and there isn't a case of any artificial intelligence that exists that doesn't depend at some point in someone touching that data curating that data and taking something that's otherwise kind of structuralist nonsense and putting it into some structured sense that a computational process could then model and learn from so at the goal of this book.

55
00:03:44,800 --> 00:03:46,600
There's nothing else you take from this book.

56
00:03:46,700 --> 00:04:11,900
It's to understand that artificial intelligence always has human hands in it that we are benefiting from a lot of people contributing to advancing these Technologies, even in cases where we might fully automate one process along the way particularly as its impact or its application to a domain it wasn't expected to enter say language like text.

57
00:04:12,100 --> 00:04:13,800
Inflation that's done in real time.

58
00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:21,600
If you're a speaker of multiple languages in your code switching odds are pretty good that the AI isn't going to be able to keep up with you.

59
00:04:22,200 --> 00:04:29,500
So look at those cases where you then have to bring people back into the mix to be able to develop a model that would be able to capture.

60
00:04:29,500 --> 00:04:31,500
What kind of exchange is happening.

61
00:04:31,600 --> 00:04:44,800
That's really the beginning of this book is to understand who are the people who are doing all of this work and it turns out that when you ask computer scientists and Engineers often their responses are I don't really know.

62
00:04:45,700 --> 00:05:12,000
I've never really met these people the beauty of this technology is that I don't have to meet them the the and I say that now with all seriousness the sense is that this is a technological innovation often called human computation or crowdsourcing the technique of being able to thread a person into a moment of judgment where you need a person to be able to evaluate or decide something that a computational process can't quite figure.

63
00:05:12,100 --> 00:05:22,100
Route bring that person into that moment that judgment and then threading them into a computational process and automated process so that you can carry on with an output.

64
00:05:22,300 --> 00:05:28,400
So we're somewhat familiar with some of the applications there are little bit visible to you today.

65
00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:30,300
This is an iceberg.

66
00:05:30,300 --> 00:05:33,300
Most of you are familiar perhaps with your Uber driver.

67
00:05:33,300 --> 00:05:36,200
You've met them maybe you've chatted with them.

68
00:05:36,400 --> 00:06:03,800
You might be familiar with other platform services on demand services that effectively are using the same technology of human computation to match a person who's able to deliver a service through a mix of application programming interfaces that calls that person to the job whatever it might be whether it's to pick you up at the airport or to pick up some food and bring it to your door or if it's a Content moderator and I think what's fascinating is two years ago.

69
00:06:03,800 --> 00:06:11,800
If I'd said the phrase content moderator or content moderation, I would have just gotten blank looks how many of you know what content moderation is.

70
00:06:12,100 --> 00:06:16,800
A it turns out they're doing an incredibly important job.

71
00:06:16,900 --> 00:06:33,400
They are people who effectively curate look at pieces of text and images that are beyond the capacity of any computational process to analyze and evaluate and say that's pornography or that spam versus someone sharing information.

72
00:06:33,700 --> 00:06:43,500
So it turns out that we're not that far along and being able to evaluate text and images to figure out is that content that should or should not be there.

73
00:06:43,700 --> 00:06:54,400
You could say anything that's hard for a human to evaluate and decide is that misinformation or just a fact that I'm not familiar with yet.

74
00:06:54,600 --> 00:06:59,800
The odds are very good a computational process isn't even close to being able to figure that out.

75
00:07:00,100 --> 00:07:08,900
If it's hard for a person to figure out it's going to be intractably a technically hard / process for for computation to model.

76
00:07:09,300 --> 00:07:11,900
You have to have really certain this.

77
00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:18,300
Or that yes or no to build code with accuracy to be able to automate something.

78
00:07:18,600 --> 00:08:11,800
So again take away how how much this world that's completely dependent on having people at a moment of judgment enter the scene like content moderation and then look below that surface and that surface below that iceberg that is this spiraling growing expansive world of services that effectively are building to keep a person in a computational loop because it turns out it's much more efficient and effective to be able to match a person to a task like captioning and translation or a task that might be image tagging for a new set of images that you're trying to evaluate whether it's for training AI or that you want to do a marketing project in all of those cases all of these businesses that are probably unfamiliar to you that are on this on this slide are quickly.

79
00:08:12,000 --> 00:08:26,000
Making the best of a business model that brings contract driven task-oriented work to people mostly doing work in their homes, or if they're in a setting they're covered by what are called vendor Management systems.

80
00:08:26,200 --> 00:08:32,299
And again, they're people that you will never meet as an end consumer but that you benefit from every day.

81
00:08:33,200 --> 00:08:52,100
So when I'm asking engineers and computer scientists about this work of human computation and the role of people in the loop, it turns out that most of these businesses are effectively doing what these Engineers are doing, which is bringing people in as quickly as they can and then moving on to the next project.

82
00:08:52,100 --> 00:08:58,300
They're not asking who are these people under what conditions might be be working in most cases?

83
00:08:58,300 --> 00:09:02,600
They're working on contract for that specific task itself.

84
00:09:02,700 --> 00:09:07,700
So the moment of Engagement might not last more than a few minutes at best.

85
00:09:07,900 --> 00:09:11,100
So it's a pretty kaleidoscopic world.

86
00:09:11,300 --> 00:09:11,700
So

87
00:09:12,100 --> 00:09:13,300
At Microsoft research.

88
00:09:13,400 --> 00:09:27,500
I feel incredibly lucky to be around people who do reflect on this question of what are they building for the rest of the world and in many cases when I meet a group of people who are saying I don't really know who are the workers who are here.

89
00:09:27,800 --> 00:09:38,800
There's at least a subset of those folks who will say, I don't exactly know but you know, the technology really keeps me at a distance and then there was a third set that would answer fairly regularly.

90
00:09:39,200 --> 00:09:49,100
I don't know and I don't know if I want to know and as you can imagine for any anthropologists in the room, that's just that's you really want to pursue that question.

91
00:09:49,400 --> 00:10:02,300
What makes somebody uncomfortable about knowing who is on the other side of a screen what makes it seem an attractively socially uncomfortable question to find out about their work conditions.

92
00:10:02,600 --> 00:10:11,800
So when I met said SRI, he was really one of the first people who genuinely coming out of computer science wanted to not only know what we really

93
00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:21,400
Work conditions people might be engaging but what their lives were like and so we started on this this journey and I don't use that word lightly.

94
00:10:21,400 --> 00:10:39,000
It took us five years to develop a methodology for being able to bring the value of qualitative critical work that engages people in their everyday lives and figure out where you could integrate measurement and computational analyses to build out a picture of this world of work.

95
00:10:39,500 --> 00:10:57,600
So often will get this question of well, how big is this Market underneath that question is often people who feel like why should we bother carrying this is worth is going to be automated any day if you buy the beginning premise of this book and I hope you do this work isn't going away.

96
00:10:57,700 --> 00:11:05,900
The tasks will change but in fact we're building towards a world of a service industry Information Services knowledge work.

97
00:11:06,000 --> 00:11:07,500
That isn't a niche job.

98
00:11:07,600 --> 00:11:10,800
This is the dismantlement of full-time employment.

99
00:11:11,500 --> 00:11:21,700
The dismantlement of full-time employment for anyone who does creative work so we might not be able to see how large that market is arguably.

100
00:11:21,700 --> 00:11:23,400
We've never done a head count.

101
00:11:23,500 --> 00:11:37,900
There is no effective way to do a worker census of an environment that is by Design distributed Global and often doesn't have a category of work that people would recognize and resonate with where they could say.

102
00:11:38,100 --> 00:11:40,700
Yeah, that's me. I do that work.

103
00:11:40,800 --> 00:12:07,600
So this is both a world in which our old categories of what job do you do is being blown apart and it's a world in which we don't have any mechanisms for tracking and holding accountable the supply chain that's going into this world of work, but let's take some guesses here and some of this is drawing on on economics and the secondary literature about the possible size of this market right now.

104
00:12:07,600 --> 00:12:11,100
We know that there's about an estimate of

105
00:12:11,200 --> 00:12:13,600
About five percent of the u.s.

106
00:12:13,600 --> 00:12:20,900
Population alone. According to Pew that's doing some form of online work so that there are at least in part.

107
00:12:20,900 --> 00:12:35,300
The work is sourced scheduled managed shipped and build through an application programming interface an API and the internet five percent that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing and their entire job online.

108
00:12:35,300 --> 00:12:40,100
It means that a form of income that's important to them is coming from one of these jobs.

109
00:12:40,300 --> 00:12:48,900
Now, this is really striking if you can take into consideration, we've only had the possibility of making an income from this form of work for about a decade.

110
00:12:49,400 --> 00:12:51,000
So to have five percent of the u.s.

111
00:12:51,000 --> 00:13:08,700
Population already doing this work start thinking through the size of this Market the growth of this market and if that's not quite enough think about how large the global market for the businesses generating value will be by next year.

112
00:13:09,100 --> 00:13:11,100
It's a twenty five billion dollars.

113
00:13:11,300 --> 00:13:18,700
The street already and that's not a small number if you think about how it compares to other industries that are fairly mundane.

114
00:13:19,100 --> 00:13:52,500
So that iceberg that I showed you all of those businesses that are spinning up on below the surface of our visibility as consumers is building an incredible amount of economic value that up to this point doesn't seem to be moving to the other side of the screen to the workers themselves who are doing the work another projection here of thinking about the implications of dismantling employment is to imagine this is not the displacement or the full automation of occupations and work.

115
00:13:52,600 --> 00:14:02,800
It's the semi automation of work and being able to task a fi it that is the target of most of these industries and the technologies that companies are building.

116
00:14:03,100 --> 00:14:11,100
Everybody would like to figure out how to break down things like scheduling managing any sorts of appointments any of your work.

117
00:14:11,300 --> 00:14:28,900
Low figure out how to break that down and turn it into a task that you can hand off to someone else so that you can up whatever it is that is your main point of view or value right that this is again the object of most of the industry on building out the Technologies at the rate.

118
00:14:28,900 --> 00:14:33,100
We're going we're looking at 38% of jobs within the u.s.

119
00:14:33,100 --> 00:14:37,100
Moving to being semi-automated by the 2030s.

120
00:14:37,400 --> 00:14:51,800
Now that might sound like a shocking number but let's just make it mundane that means taking most of office work knowledge work Information Services and turning it into contract work that's already happened in a lot of places.

121
00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:54,700
So it's not as though this is so futuristic.

122
00:14:54,800 --> 00:14:59,900
And in many ways this the goal of this book is to say it is not too late to

123
00:15:00,100 --> 00:15:05,200
Mine what this world looks like we're really just at the beginning but know that it's moving quickly.

124
00:15:06,500 --> 00:15:12,000
So the kinds of work that this entails again because it's because you can't see it.

125
00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:13,700
It's often really hard to describe.

126
00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:19,300
It's everything from editing copy editing content curation.

127
00:15:19,300 --> 00:15:38,500
The should be if anybody participates in these kinds of jobs, you might see yourselves in these these tasks taking surveys marketing design any sort of graphic design any sort of data entry and labeling which is a pretty labor-intensive cognitively hard job.

128
00:15:38,500 --> 00:15:49,400
If you're constantly looking at again data that's coming in that scraped from somewhere with not a lot of context and you're trying to figure out what would you call this material?

129
00:15:49,600 --> 00:15:53,400
Is this analyzing somebody's attitude about a product.

130
00:15:53,400 --> 00:15:56,600
How would you how would you assess that attitude?

131
00:15:56,600 --> 00:16:03,300
It's actually pretty challenging work and it goes very quickly kind of task by task.

132
00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:05,700
We were studying very specific.

133
00:16:06,300 --> 00:16:26,500
He's I'm going to just go through a bit of the methodology that we used but we were looking at companies that generate sales leads so you can scrape the web and get an idea of who your contact person might be if you sell air conditioners, but you're going to do much better doing your sales of you know, who you should call in that office turns out generating sales lead.

134
00:16:26,500 --> 00:16:45,500
That's a particular kind of on-demand ghost work being able to take what is otherwise just a web scrape of people's contact information and curating that list and figuring out who should I contact and then handing it over to a business that wants the best contacts that's a very specific vertical within this industry.

135
00:16:45,900 --> 00:16:51,800
And then translation Ted has one of the largest projects open translation projects.

136
00:16:52,200 --> 00:17:06,098
That was the beginning of a volunteer community invested in making videos available for hard of hearing communities and for linguistic diversity, and it was the the heart and soul.

137
00:17:06,300 --> 00:17:21,800
Amara.org which is one of the companies that we one of the organizations that we studied and then the other kinds of tasks that again are becoming more familiar to some of you content moderate moderation classification tasks that are meant to optimize your search query experience.

138
00:17:22,000 --> 00:17:25,598
So if you're typing in something and this will happen happen every election year.

139
00:17:25,800 --> 00:17:29,600
If you have a new candidate up for election odds are pretty good.

140
00:17:29,600 --> 00:17:44,300
If you've never seen that candidate before they had to do some work to make sure that when people were searching that term searching that name that it matched to the proper biography or persons official presence online.

141
00:17:44,700 --> 00:17:50,600
So it's it's kind of this renewal of a need for making sure the information is relevant.

142
00:17:50,600 --> 00:18:06,100
I love the example of how many of you remember a moment during the past elections when Romney made a reference to binders full of women right to be able to figure out should that be a trending topic because if you just think about that phrase that's a nonsensical phrase.

143
00:18:06,900 --> 00:18:15,600
Aside from who said it and so realize that took a lot of content moderators working very quickly to be able to identify.

144
00:18:15,600 --> 00:18:17,400
Oh the context for that.

145
00:18:17,500 --> 00:18:21,000
Oh, it's an election cycle a candidate debate.

146
00:18:21,100 --> 00:18:25,300
Yes, trending makes sense that's happening below the surface.

147
00:18:25,300 --> 00:18:37,000
You'll never see it happen and it's not something that can be automated anytime soon as would be my argument and then lastly thinking about these mundane uses of location verification.

148
00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:39,600
How many of you had a favorite restaurant that went out of business.

149
00:18:39,600 --> 00:18:53,100
Last month odds are If It Moves somewhere the location needed be re verified and updated within search queries that's still very much the handwork of people below the API.

150
00:18:53,700 --> 00:18:55,700
So there's a lineage here.

151
00:18:55,700 --> 00:19:03,100
This is not so new and and we take great pains to point out that the tendency to treat contingent work.

152
00:19:03,100 --> 00:19:05,800
That seems like it's going to go away anytime.

153
00:19:06,200 --> 00:19:13,700
Therefore not that valuable and something we don't need to care about in terms of our employment relationships.

154
00:19:14,000 --> 00:19:47,600
That's old news. So if you think about the experience of the Industrial Age and peace work and the work that was literally something that couldn't be accomplished by the newly quickly moving Loom, but that could be taken to mostly Family Farms and in the United States context and be able to share that material that raw material and the material that's been created say a shirt and to have the button or the flourish of bows that could then be attached by a person.

155
00:19:47,800 --> 00:19:53,400
That's the kind of work that the entire time the Hope was eventually that will be automated away.

156
00:19:53,700 --> 00:20:05,700
And yes, eventually the machines were able to attach the flourish the button the bows that didn't mean that the work entirely displaced other kinds of work that needed to be put on the table.

157
00:20:06,300 --> 00:20:11,000
This could go on for generations and did in manufacturing arguably.

158
00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:22,600
The only reason automation can knock it out of the park is precisely because you can build the factory around the automated mechanical processes and get people entirely out of the building.

159
00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:38,300
But in any case where you're working with people and effectively when you're trying to serve their interests and anticipate their needs you're in an entirely different world of required tasks on a person's time and cognitive ability.

160
00:20:38,900 --> 00:20:57,000
So if you think about the next generation of lineage here and the computers behind being able to put people in space or to be able to do some amazing technical achievements, we've always had these moments where the Assumption was.

161
00:20:57,100 --> 00:21:01,100
There's something wrote and on Creative about this work.

162
00:21:01,200 --> 00:21:06,000
It can be done by an often is done by the same suspects generation.

163
00:21:06,200 --> 00:21:16,300
Generation, but their work is not seen as integral to what is really valued and worth retaining or underwriting through full-time employment.

164
00:21:16,400 --> 00:21:28,500
So for much of the women who are involved in the Cold War projects through NASA and through other Aeronautics institutions, they were on contract.

165
00:21:29,200 --> 00:21:30,700
They didn't have full-time jobs.

166
00:21:31,200 --> 00:21:44,000
They could be they could be released at any point and particularly before it was illegal to fire women because they were pregnant women could be dismissed as soon as they married because odds were good.

167
00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:45,200
They would get pregnant.

168
00:21:45,500 --> 00:22:05,400
So thinking about this lineage is important to imagine who is often invited to take on these contract positions precisely because into the 60s there imagine to be the perfect temporary Workforce both able to do the work as in Kelly girls and selling Kelly girls as the

169
00:22:06,100 --> 00:22:19,100
Opportunity for business professionals to have someone take care of their needs and then quickly exit to bring in fresh Minds fresh bodies for the work that needs to be done around the office.

170
00:22:19,500 --> 00:22:57,800
So you might see a pattern developing here in this lineage of who is seen as replaceable or less valuable and therefore ripe for contract work as we move into the 90s late 90s to early 80s to late 90s and the internet and connected communication devices allow the workflow of office work that otherwise seemed the domain of professionals from accounting to human resources to any sort of financial services.

171
00:22:58,100 --> 00:23:06,000
It becomes quite easy to take that work and move it to other continents where you have enough linguistic capacity to be able to

172
00:23:06,100 --> 00:23:12,500
Take advantage of Labor Arbitrage a cheaper Workforce and still be able to get the work done.

173
00:23:13,300 --> 00:23:25,200
So what I'm hoping you see in this lineage is precisely the set of assumptions that say who's not so valuable here, who is the person that should hold this temporary job?

174
00:23:25,400 --> 00:23:47,400
Because we don't necessarily need to care about them too much and what are all of the ways in which contingent work particularly the United States sets in motion a framing of contract work as disposable less important contingency becomes a value proposition to the business not to the worker so

175
00:23:48,700 --> 00:23:54,400
The way in which we went about studying this and I can go into this in the the QA.

176
00:23:54,900 --> 00:24:01,600
It's really hard to figure out how to find people behind a distributed system who are working globally in their homes.

177
00:24:01,900 --> 00:24:17,800
I'll be the first to confess that I'm someone who really likes to find the people that people assume or otherwise really hard to find because it turns out if you just ask people hey, where are those people they'll prickly quickly identify themselves and say, oh I do this work.

178
00:24:17,800 --> 00:24:19,900
This was a whole other level of Challenge.

179
00:24:20,200 --> 00:24:34,500
And so the way we went about it was to find four institutions organizations that were producing this kind of Labor and then to figure out ways in which we could meet the workers who were participating in these labor markets.

180
00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:47,200
We work agnostically with the assumption that this is contract work unless it's otherwise called something else and we worked with the terms of the of the people who are engaging in these projects.

181
00:24:47,500 --> 00:24:48,400
So we studied

182
00:24:48,600 --> 00:25:01,900
So Mechanical Turk, which set the Baseline for how most of task-based work is framed and treated and the sidestepping of any legal Frameworks or classification that go with it.

183
00:25:02,400 --> 00:25:25,600
And then we also looked at the universal human relevant system, which is the internal platform that Microsoft has please note every large tech company has an internal platform that you can't see that's larger than Amazon Mechanical Turk that has far more work than you could ever tracked because when it comes to the accounting of this Workforce, it's effectively the equivalent of paper.

184
00:25:26,300 --> 00:25:30,000
It's it's not considered labor Capital.

185
00:25:30,200 --> 00:25:36,800
It's just an asset being bought and sold through a procurement Farm or through a procurement office.

186
00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:48,400
So I say that coldly because importantly that's part of the legal framework in Arrangements that exist between businesses hiring outside of

187
00:25:48,500 --> 00:25:55,200
Their companies to be able to have full time labor on tap through other firms that are the employer of record.

188
00:25:56,200 --> 00:26:03,600
So it's a really important lineage to understand how it pipes into the back of several of these companies the other two companies.

189
00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:08,900
We looked at organizations that we looked at lead genius is a social entrepreneurship.

190
00:26:09,500 --> 00:26:26,400
It was a startup founded in Silicon Valley that generate sales leads and they have a global Workforce with a lot of recognition that trying to do the work that they want to have done in the United States is not something they could legally do without being classified as formal employers.

191
00:26:26,700 --> 00:26:36,600
So they've moved a lot almost all of their Workforce outside of the United States and then a fourth organization that we studied Amara Amara on demand.

192
00:26:37,100 --> 00:26:44,000
I'm fascinated by a more on demand and the one of the co-founders and organizers of it.

193
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:47,200
Dean Johnson is going to join us for a conversation later.

194
00:26:47,400 --> 00:26:48,300
But what fascinates me

195
00:26:48,500 --> 00:27:05,700
Now tomorrow is that it started out as a volunteer community again doing captioning and translation of video, which is technically a very hard problem to solve to be able to look at video in any robust way and interpret what are the actions that are happening in that video.

196
00:27:05,700 --> 00:27:21,700
That's Way Beyond computation right now and this community of volunteers effectively became a magnet for companies that in organizations that wanted to be able to translate and caption their videos in other languages.

197
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:25,800
So company started approaching them saying can we just pay you to do this fast?

198
00:27:26,300 --> 00:27:39,300
So we created a labor market that from it's very beginning was organized by the volunteer energy and the attention to the workers doing the work for this community.

199
00:27:39,600 --> 00:27:47,700
And I think it's a wonderful example of what we could be doing differently in terms of organizing these worlds of work around workers themselves.

200
00:27:48,600 --> 00:28:05,100
In looking at these four companies it became an opportunity to start from there and to put out surveys on each of those platforms to be able to reach workers themselves and ask them about themselves and at the end of those surveys to be able to ask them.

201
00:28:05,100 --> 00:28:17,100
Would you be willing to meet in person for an interview and the map that you're looking at for work that is in theory work that can go anywhere that's available to anyone.

202
00:28:17,100 --> 00:28:18,700
You should see some patterns.

203
00:28:19,400 --> 00:28:43,700
There's something that maps onto the infrastructure of Outsourcing of places where there are not many job opportunities that are comparable to service work at retail stores or in other settings where the Pape the payment is about the same as what you might be able to get in these online markets so note the pattern because that should tell us there's something structuring again.

204
00:28:43,700 --> 00:28:46,100
Who does this work where they do this work?

205
00:28:46,200 --> 00:28:48,100
What are the other opportunities that it?

206
00:28:48,400 --> 00:28:51,500
Forecloses or suggest or not available?

207
00:28:53,300 --> 00:28:57,800
On top of those once we had enough people interested to do the interviews.

208
00:28:57,800 --> 00:29:03,600
It just turned into old-fashioned anthropology in a lot of ways of go to where the people are meet.

209
00:29:03,600 --> 00:29:12,400
People see who would be willing to allow us into their lives for a long enough period of time to be able to understand the ebb and flow of their engagement with this work.

210
00:29:12,700 --> 00:29:34,700
So it becomes really important for example to be able to be in India and see what happens when the monsoon season hits and how people then whether no pun intended the work that they have to do which is effectively being online and having to be hyper-vigilant to pick up tasks that are then delayed by whatever might be getting in the way of their internet access, for example

211
00:29:36,300 --> 00:29:50,800
The the layer and I you know hats off to Sid for figuring out the ways that he would be able to measure this world because I have to confess I wasn't I didn't really care that much about measuring I cared about if there's anybody experiencing this world that's enough for me.

212
00:29:51,300 --> 00:29:59,700
And thankfully he helped me see there's a lot of value in being able to understand the distribution of this work the the

213
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,800
Patterns and so what I want to share with you is really the outcome of merging these two approaches.

214
00:30:06,200 --> 00:30:27,200
What we found was in this is to me that one of the most striking findings in the book is that there's a real Pareto distribution of participation and when I say that like so many other power laws that are out there it turns out there's a concentrated few that are picking up and doing most of the work in these markets.

215
00:30:27,200 --> 00:30:35,300
So a good depending on the platform a good ten to Fifteen twenty percent at most are picking up most of the tasks to be had.

216
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:40,500
And then there's this Core group of people that we call regulars that first group.

217
00:30:40,500 --> 00:30:51,900
We call them always on and they literally are they've turned this into an income stream that maintains their livelihoods and they might have other income streams and often they were working on multiple platforms.

218
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:56,200
They've turned it into full-time work for themselves the second group.

219
00:30:56,300 --> 00:31:02,200
There's about 30, you know, 30 percent at most but closer to 20 are what we call regulars.

220
00:31:02,400 --> 00:31:03,700
They're stepping into this.

221
00:31:03,700 --> 00:31:08,100
They've sunk the costs of figuring out how to make these platforms payoff.

222
00:31:08,300 --> 00:31:22,600
They've learned what they need to learn and importantly they've connected with peers much like the always-on have they've connected with discussion forums other people who help them manage and figure out how to reduce their costs getting this work done.

223
00:31:23,200 --> 00:31:35,900
They are the bench the Deep bench that is always able to step up into this labor market and pick up a task and do it and it is what allows anybody who's always on to step away and

224
00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:39,300
Not have the entire Market just fall apart.

225
00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:58,500
There's no way the argument we have here is there's no way to turn this into fully on time always on work to turn it into full-time work precisely works against what it is that people who have entered this world have said is important to them about entering this labor market.

226
00:31:58,500 --> 00:32:06,600
I'm going to come to this in a moment, but lastly and most importantly there's a good 70% of people who walk into this we call them experimentalists.

227
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:10,400
Try it and they're like peace out don't want to do this.

228
00:32:10,800 --> 00:32:12,900
They have a read of a range of reasons.

229
00:32:12,900 --> 00:32:14,600
They decide they don't want to do it.

230
00:32:14,700 --> 00:32:24,300
All of them are still providing value both for the companies that are able to claim that they have 500,000 workers on On Demand.

231
00:32:25,200 --> 00:32:45,100
So think about any time you've used Lyft or Uber being able to see enough of those little cars that tells you okay, I'll bother that's the value all the experimentalists are bringing to this market and picking up one task or two tasks at is precisely being available that they are offering being willing and available.

232
00:32:45,600 --> 00:32:52,700
That's the most valuable thing that they're doing and I think it raises this question of and yes, isn't that valuable?

233
00:32:53,300 --> 00:32:55,300
Why isn't that considered valuable?

234
00:32:55,800 --> 00:33:01,500
They're bringing an incredible amount of value certainly to the businesses.

235
00:33:01,700 --> 00:33:03,300
They whether all of the costs.

236
00:33:03,400 --> 00:33:13,100
These are most cases the people who could not figure out how to tap into a communication Network to make this manageable often felt isolated and alienated.

237
00:33:13,800 --> 00:33:24,800
So collaboration is key in this environment the thing that allowed people to find their footing to be able to make enough money to make this worthwhile.

238
00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:31,900
And again, the trade-off being being able to do it on particular terms was tapping into a network.

239
00:33:31,900 --> 00:33:38,800
This is from an experiment that Sid Surrey and whenever co-authors manian developed to be able to identify.

240
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:42,500
What were the communities that people were engaged in discussion forums.

241
00:33:42,500 --> 00:33:47,300
The different colors are the different discussion forums for this is just for Amazon Mechanical Turk.

242
00:33:47,900 --> 00:34:00,100
So an incredibly robust Rich nuanced complicated environment of interaction and all of the small dots are this the solitary workers.

243
00:34:00,700 --> 00:34:17,800
So the vast majority of people who haven't connected with somebody are there still providing value, but you've got this tight cluster and groups who are organizing around specific communities who again really scaffold with each other and make this manageable work.

244
00:34:19,400 --> 00:34:27,400
I wanted to share this quote from one of the workers talking about how important it becomes to be able to connect with other people doing this work.

245
00:34:27,500 --> 00:34:36,000
I think the Deep irony here is that the platform Builders assumed this is great work because you can do it alone and you don't have to interact with anybody.

246
00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:46,199
You don't need any help what they hadn't anticipated perhaps because they didn't have enough anthropologists and sociologists in the room was that people might still be invested and having social connections.

247
00:34:46,600 --> 00:34:51,000
The social connections are actually incredibly valuable to getting work done.

248
00:34:51,100 --> 00:35:05,900
It's just immeasurably valuable and that's that's that's part of this environment is figuring out how to recognize the value of that connection the motivators that came up most often in this might sound trite.

249
00:35:05,900 --> 00:35:17,500
It actually maps on entirely to the literature we have already about how people talk about their work what they value from work particularly when they decide to be self-employed or to try and freelance.

250
00:35:17,700 --> 00:35:18,100
It's about

251
00:35:18,300 --> 00:35:25,300
Trolling your time and I'd like everybody to stop using the word flexibility if you please because this isn't about flexibility.

252
00:35:25,300 --> 00:36:01,900
It's about having other constraints on your time and needing to control your schedule often having to do with Family Care Elder Care Child Care other work responsibilities and other interests having interest in other education other other Hobbies other Joys and in most cases people making doing that calculus of how can I make this kind of work sustained me so that I can make my life run the way I want it to run that's aspirational to be sure but it's certainly part of what motivates people to keep at this

253
00:36:03,100 --> 00:36:17,900
The second thing they're after is to be able to control what they work on and I'd imagine many people in this room share that they do just about anything to be able to Define what their project is rather than have somebody else tell them what to do and the third is controlling your work environment.

254
00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:37,000
And if you're pushed to the margins controlling your work environment is not a nice to have so people with disabilities queer identifying people women who felt marginalized by the formal employment opportunities in their area all talked about this work being away of relief from those other constraints.

255
00:36:38,800 --> 00:36:48,200
So when Carmela is talking about effectively being able to turn the this work because she can then pick up her computer and do it from anywhere.

256
00:36:48,500 --> 00:36:56,000
I want to take very seriously and not dismiss her claiming that this is the kind of work that lets her live her ideal life.

257
00:36:56,600 --> 00:37:10,400
It's how do we recognize take that at face value and still remained critical of a system that might still take advantage of her desire to do this work without somehow thinking that Camilla is the problem here.

258
00:37:12,100 --> 00:37:15,900
So I want to move into thinking about where do we go from here?

259
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:28,500
What have we learned from the way these workers not only survive this work, but make it meaningful that we could then use to redefine this world of work because I'll continue to say this is early days.

260
00:37:28,500 --> 00:37:34,800
We have an opportunity to really Design This purposefully with people at the center of our equation.

261
00:37:35,100 --> 00:37:37,600
So I want to focus on two things if you

262
00:37:37,700 --> 00:37:41,200
The book there's a the entire conclusion is just here's what we could do.

263
00:37:41,300 --> 00:37:55,400
It's my bucket list that comes from the bucket list of the workers we engaged but the one I want to focus on for this conversation is to think about what it means to redefine the social safety net and job classification.

264
00:37:56,100 --> 00:38:02,000
I'm just going to say it I would like to completely blow up employment classification as we know it.

265
00:38:02,900 --> 00:38:23,000
I do not think the defining full-time work as a place where you get benefits and part-time work as a place where you have to fight to get a full-time job as an appropriate way of addressing this labor market and particularly if we consider that globally there are so few people in the world who have ever had access to full-time employment that provided any benefits.

266
00:38:23,500 --> 00:38:37,400
So let's start organizing our classification and treatment of employment with all of the contingent work we've seen in this lineage and imagining that we will be those workers in the future and if that is the case

267
00:38:37,700 --> 00:38:42,500
The best thing we could do is say there are some Basics here that we're building a Commons.

268
00:38:42,500 --> 00:38:49,600
We have a labor Commons that every Company benefits from being able to draw from they can dip in and out of this pool.

269
00:38:49,800 --> 00:38:52,600
So, how are we going to support that pool?

270
00:38:52,600 --> 00:38:54,400
How are we going to make it sustainable?

271
00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:57,300
So that the value proposition isn't here.

272
00:38:57,700 --> 00:39:11,900
Let's just exhaust this pool and drain it because that's a tragedy we know of the tragedy of the commons apply the same logic imagine if health care for all isn't just a nice thing to do because a charitable it's like that makes business sense.

273
00:39:11,900 --> 00:39:13,500
You need a healthy Workforce.

274
00:39:13,800 --> 00:39:19,600
You need people to be able to step in and out of it to be able to make it sustainable continuing ed.

275
00:39:19,600 --> 00:39:26,800
There wasn't a person that we interviewed who didn't talk about how often they were going to online resources to be able to continue exploring.

276
00:39:26,800 --> 00:39:34,000
What were the kinds of materials they needed to follow up on and choose to read be able to do their neck next project.

277
00:39:34,400 --> 00:39:36,500
We all benefit from being able to do that.

278
00:39:36,700 --> 00:39:37,500
Everybody had a

279
00:39:37,600 --> 00:39:55,900
Baseline of a liberal arts education the should be the big news is a liberal arts education and learning how to learn is the bass bass line for every worker in this market because it's creative work all of us had to learn how to learn as that Baseline and then build from there.

280
00:39:56,100 --> 00:39:58,100
This is not specialized work.

281
00:39:58,300 --> 00:40:00,900
This is using your brain all the time.

282
00:40:01,500 --> 00:40:12,800
So the basic education that comes with critical thinking is key and then being able to make everything else available available becomes critical and then thinking about co-working spaces.

283
00:40:12,800 --> 00:40:31,900
I just want to leave you with this Vision when I saw all of the home office setups of everybody we interviewed and at the end of the day thought of the health and safety administration and what our workplace around health and safety was set up to do it was to prevent Public Health crises.

284
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:37,500
We have a Public Health crisis and people setting up their home offices and not having resources to do it.

285
00:40:37,600 --> 00:40:39,000
A way that's healthy.

286
00:40:39,400 --> 00:40:46,200
So I know that sounds small, but every municipality could have co-working space that is thinking public health.

287
00:40:46,800 --> 00:40:48,800
That's an intervention at the public health level.

288
00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:54,700
Everybody should be able to get to a space where they can get relief for their back for their neck again sounds trite.

289
00:40:54,700 --> 00:40:57,500
But if you're doing office knowledge work, it's critical.

290
00:40:58,300 --> 00:41:01,300
And then lastly I want to dwell on this notion of a retainer.

291
00:41:01,700 --> 00:41:06,100
So there's a lot of conversation about Universal basic income as a solution here.

292
00:41:06,900 --> 00:41:29,700
What frustrates me most is the framing of that of that suggestion is that these are the poor souls who can't outrun the robots that doesn't really account for how much what we really need is to retain the cognitive and creative capacity of people to be available to businesses to each other for service work.

293
00:41:29,900 --> 00:41:37,400
So people should be on a retainer for sure give everybody who's a working-age adults a retainer that says here's your base.

294
00:41:37,600 --> 00:41:41,900
Line so that you don't have to think about paid leave or unemployment.

295
00:41:41,900 --> 00:42:05,200
But that literally you have what sustains you to be able to step away when you need to step away have children take care of someone and at the same time know that you are going to have the financial means to get back into that comments right very different attitude than Universal basic income the idea that somehow the poor are going to rise against us.

296
00:42:05,300 --> 00:42:10,100
And therefore we need to give them some some small amount of money completely misses.

297
00:42:10,100 --> 00:42:11,800
Where is this economy headed?

298
00:42:11,900 --> 00:42:13,400
It's a service economy.

299
00:42:13,700 --> 00:42:20,200
It's an information service and Care economy where we're caring for each other and so to be able to do that.

300
00:42:20,200 --> 00:42:21,600
We really have to imagine.

301
00:42:21,600 --> 00:42:28,500
How would we give everybody the basic support financially to do that to be able to come and go in that work?

302
00:42:29,400 --> 00:42:38,600
So the last thing we have to do is on us if you use any of these Services now is the time and today is a great day to do it.

303
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:41,400
There's a strike by Lyft and Uber drivers.

304
00:42:41,700 --> 00:42:59,300
If you're a consumer of any ride hailing app be thinking about critically if you're somebody who consumes with care if you think about where you buy your clothes or buy your food, there's nothing small about that movement consumer advocacy and boycotting have been incredibly powerful.

305
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:27,200
They led to the Bangladesh Accord which was the beginning of holding companies accountable for the long supply chain involved in getting the shirts on our backs and in thinking about agriculture and places where knowing the supply chain became critical to making sure the quality of food, but the quality of people's work conditions growing that food was something everybody could know and then make your choices and that will never be enough.

306
00:43:27,300 --> 00:43:29,000
This is not a land of

307
00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:34,600
Businesses be kind to workers or let consumers be self-interested consumers.

308
00:43:34,900 --> 00:43:41,600
It's about setting up the possibility for the right regulation and classification for employment of the future.

309
00:43:42,800 --> 00:43:48,000
So the key takeaway other than a I always requires people.

310
00:43:48,000 --> 00:43:49,100
So we're not getting rid of them.

311
00:43:49,100 --> 00:43:52,100
Anytime soon is that this is a Commons.

312
00:43:52,500 --> 00:44:01,700
This is a labor Commons that relies on people coming in and out and what will it take for us to be able to support and value labor?

313
00:44:01,800 --> 00:44:03,300
No matter where it happens.

314
00:44:03,300 --> 00:44:10,900
No matter how many hours somebody puts in because in fact the value of these markets it's aggregating up what we do.

315
00:44:11,500 --> 00:44:17,900
It is literally the aggregation of everybody's input and from there what it's providing.

316
00:44:17,900 --> 00:44:22,000
So think Uber--it's all of those drivers being available to you.

317
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:24,900
It's not just the one driver who took you to the airport.

318
00:44:25,300 --> 00:44:28,900
So to be able to value all of the aggregation of that labor.

319
00:44:29,100 --> 00:44:38,000
And say what will it take to say each of the people participating in that are equally important to our livelihoods to our lives.

320
00:44:38,900 --> 00:44:44,780
And with that I want to thank my collaborators because there's nothing like a book about this kind of work

321
00:44:44,780 --> 00:44:50,700
to make you hopefully always aware of how much-- everything that went into.

322
00:44:50,700 --> 00:44:56,772
This book came from an incredibly rich team of people 
bringing a range of expertise,

323
00:44:56,802 --> 00:45:00,575
from Greg Minton, who made 
the beautiful maps

324
00:45:00,575 --> 00:45:06,352
to all the research assistants who were 
involved in doing the fact checking

325
00:45:06,352 --> 00:45:10,809
to the key research assistants that we had 
in India to be able to maintain

326
00:45:10,809 --> 00:45:14,159
the contacts with the people we had met through fieldwork

327
00:45:14,159 --> 00:45:19,158
so there wasn't a person on this team
who didn't do something integral that

328
00:45:19,160 --> 00:45:23,236
if they weren't here I don't know that this
book would be here either, so with that,

329
00:45:23,236 --> 00:45:24,136
thank you

330
00:45:24,142 --> 00:45:31,672
[Applause]

331
00:45:37,888 --> 00:45:39,888
Thank you Mary that was amazing

332
00:46:11,001 --> 00:46:12,001
I'd like to invite Dean Jansen to 
join us at the front of the room

333
00:46:57,501 --> 00:46:58,501
Dean is the executive director and chief
executive officer of the Participatory
Culture Foundation

334
00:48:30,500 --> 00:48:32,300
Had very high margins.

335
00:48:33,300 --> 00:48:39,300
And so again just a question of how do you define sustainability sustainability for whom and for what?

336
00:48:41,300 --> 00:48:54,900
I think if you're asking more maybe about kind of the lower margin end of things we're talking about some companies that are the biggest and most powerful and profitable in the history of the planet.

337
00:48:55,900 --> 00:49:04,200
And so I think it's a question Less in our eyes at least of is it sustainable more a question of how can we make it sustainable?

338
00:49:06,700 --> 00:49:12,600
I'll just name mturk as one of those companies since since Dean was too polite to say it.

339
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:14,300
Another question.

340
00:49:14,300 --> 00:49:20,200
I wanted to ask about is really playing off of what Mary was talking about the end at the end of her talk.

341
00:49:20,600 --> 00:49:22,000
We can think about consumer.

342
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:35,700
Advocacy we can think also about regulation in your mind from where you sit what are the possibilities and limits on what a business Enterprise can do to value and protect micro labor.

343
00:49:37,300 --> 00:49:39,500
hmm another great question

344
00:49:42,200 --> 00:49:44,500
I think well, let's see.

345
00:49:44,500 --> 00:50:12,400
So as far as the limitations go, I think there are a lot of things that organizations can and should be doing and and and we were kind of joking about the not joking but a couple of weeks ago talking about how low the bar is when the bar is recognize that these are human beings that are doing this work early early on when speaking with Mary one of the things that really struck me was her describing conversation.

346
00:50:12,400 --> 00:50:20,800
She would have as she mentioned with Engineers who really didn't see where all these layers existed with human labor in them.

347
00:50:21,000 --> 00:50:38,400
So to me and many ways the work that Mary and Sid and all the people that have made this this book possible all the people that Mary spoke with shining a light on it and making it visible as like the first step in figuring out.

348
00:50:39,700 --> 00:50:40,600
I think I've just

349
00:50:41,400 --> 00:50:48,600
Skipped your question, but in terms of like zooming out and looking at societally what can we do and how can we accomplish some of these things?

350
00:50:48,800 --> 00:51:03,900
Just that first step of having some recognition of who and where people are is really important but obviously on an individual organizational level there is a ton that can be be done and you give us a few just a few examples from

351
00:51:05,000 --> 00:51:12,200
you're sure yeah, so let's see in terms of

352
00:51:13,600 --> 00:51:29,100
I mean again providing people space to communicate and work with one another one of the things that we we found in Translation was there's this kind of stereotype of the Lonely translator someone who is working in an isolated sort of and in many ways.

353
00:51:29,100 --> 00:51:30,400
That's again.

354
00:51:30,400 --> 00:51:32,000
I don't I'm not a translator.

355
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:43,900
So this is just my learning and understanding of it but but historically people do it has been a more isolated kind of work.

356
00:51:44,500 --> 00:51:59,700
So for us bringing the collaborative the collaborative side of the tools and platform that we're providing and building to continue listening to what sorts of things people need to do their work better and to collaborate more effectively.

357
00:52:00,000 --> 00:52:03,600
That's been something that's been that's kind of the bread and butter of some of what we've been doing.

358
00:52:05,500 --> 00:52:07,500
Thank you being cognizant of time.

359
00:52:07,600 --> 00:52:11,800
I will just ask Mary a few short questions and then open it up to the floor.

360
00:52:12,500 --> 00:52:16,800
So marry one of the key Concepts in your book.

361
00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:20,000
Is this Paradox of automations Last Mile?

362
00:52:20,500 --> 00:52:34,800
Could you pull that out for us a little bit and maybe relate it to the lineage of contract contingent labor that you put up for us which in your book actually very interestingly slut starts with the experience of slavery in the United States.

363
00:52:36,200 --> 00:52:52,300
Yeah, I mean to think about this Paradox in many ways is to Grapple with what has been the use of the Lion's Share of manual labor for example, and an early days with you know, if we think about what defines modernity what defines our modern era.

364
00:52:52,500 --> 00:52:58,600
It's imagining we're going to get our hands out of the soil and be able to put our minds to work.

365
00:52:58,600 --> 00:53:07,600
It's an erudite notion of what does advancement look like what is progress and progress driven by technology?

366
00:53:08,000 --> 00:53:14,100
And so the Paradox is that as we strive to pull ourselves out of manual labor.

367
00:53:14,600 --> 00:53:26,700
I believe we start recognizing that it actually takes quite a bit of creativity and complexity to be able to do any Enterprise to be able to boot to do anything productive.

368
00:53:26,700 --> 00:53:35,200
So starting starting the lineage with slavery in the book is to say that was really our first labor law in the United States it

369
00:53:35,400 --> 00:54:14,200
Find who could be owned who could be used in a way that only treated their bodies as valuable and didn't imagine that any kind of work that we do involves a human capacity not to be too humanist here but a human capacity to be able to bring creativity to be able to bring responding to spontaneity to whatever we're doing so that moment of delaying recognizing the value of the real deep integration and of creativity with everything that we do I believe that is this moment.

370
00:54:14,200 --> 00:54:16,600
It's this Reckoning with a paradox.

371
00:54:16,600 --> 00:54:21,900
We keep introducing of thinking we're just going to we're going to get the thinking and the talking out of it.

372
00:54:22,700 --> 00:54:35,200
It's just going to be something we can automate and then we're just left with things that are really hard, you know, the professional class will be able to do the really hard work it throws to the wind the

373
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:44,500
Dear that taking care of if you've ever taken care of an elderly parent that takes a lot of thinking a lot of creativity.

374
00:54:44,500 --> 00:55:05,500
There's a beautiful book that really for me sets up the discussion of the Paradox and it's some by levying murnane their computer scientists and economists who talked about the new division of labor and they were trying to analyze what is it that a computational process can do that a human and what is it that a human can do that a really distinct?

375
00:55:05,500 --> 00:55:06,600
What is that Division?

376
00:55:07,000 --> 00:55:12,900
And so we're trying to to theorize why it is as we strive to automate things.

377
00:55:12,900 --> 00:55:28,700
We keep discovering a new that the capacity to think creativity creatively is in the thick of it and that as we keep pushing to automate and reaching for having something else do things for us.

378
00:55:28,900 --> 00:55:34,900
We'll keep discovering those bits that are really the heart and soul of what what humans do which is

379
00:55:35,400 --> 00:55:43,400
Since each other's needs anticipate and I joke often be able to apologize when we get it wrong like computation can't do that.

380
00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:47,400
I'm going to just as well. The one last question.

381
00:55:47,400 --> 00:55:50,500
I know there's a lot of people waiting one thing.

382
00:55:50,500 --> 00:55:52,800
I wanted to underline which I loved in your presentation.

383
00:55:52,800 --> 00:56:02,300
And in the book is the way that you use the task of Mechanical Turk itself to set tasks to gain to get research for the book.

384
00:56:02,300 --> 00:56:03,800
I think this is a brilliant methodology.

385
00:56:03,800 --> 00:56:22,000
So I just want to put a big fat line under that and then and then based on that I wanted to ask you if you could pull out for us the significance for you in doing transnational comparative work, especially as it relates to identifying the challenges and opportunities in labor organizing.

386
00:56:23,500 --> 00:56:45,400
Yeah. No, I mean I think from the to be clear starting with India and the United States in some ways was following the labor markets that Amazon Mechanical Turk had created by paying in both cash and rupees they had built this labor market by Design without probably much thought certainly about the kinds of work forces.

387
00:56:45,400 --> 00:57:16,700
It would create and I in drawing that comparison it meant we were constantly able to pull out the places where connection broke down the kinds of nationalisms that would spark around different work groups, for example, so the transnational comparison gives us a chance to see where two people throw boundaries back up and I thought was most striking in India how quickly a kind of panned in the end way of orienting to work across all the platforms also came to the Forefront.

388
00:57:16,700 --> 00:57:23,000
So the number of women and men who would start referring to each other as sister and brother to navigate the gender politics of

389
00:57:23,200 --> 00:57:58,800
King and settings with somebody of a different gender the the amazing use of English as a way of navigating linguistic boundaries and what that can mean the meshing and sidestepping of religious and cast differences those complexities could come out and in some ways being able to see the complexities around class and race that played out in the United States in different ways really came to the fore with that comparison the technique of putting the surveys online.

390
00:57:58,800 --> 00:58:09,200
I think in many ways. I'm really dedicated to us always imagining that anthropology sociology of engaging people's lives means getting in their lives.

391
00:58:09,700 --> 00:58:19,800
I have a I have a difficult time feeling like stopping at a discussion forum and letting that stand in for people's experiences can answer the questions.

392
00:58:19,800 --> 00:58:22,600
I'm interested in I think it has everything to do with the question you're asking

393
00:58:23,100 --> 00:58:27,700
For the most part the question we were asking was what does the rest of your life look like?

394
00:58:27,900 --> 00:58:41,100
And so there was really no way to ask that without moving from those platforms into the their living rooms into the cafes they circulated in and that that became the the methodology.

395
00:58:42,500 --> 00:58:46,600
Thank you who would like to ask a question Dana?

396
00:58:51,200 --> 00:58:52,700
This is Mary's fault. She set me up.

397
00:58:52,700 --> 00:59:23,100
She was like you have to ask a question was like I was all right ready so much of what you're grappling with is a dynamic that we've seen iterate over and over again throughout history and you've pointed to them by talking about the enslaved people and as a form of contract with in labor markets where different versions of capitalism have evolved in response to these different governing structures, and we keep seeing a regulatory move and capitalism evolved.

398
00:59:23,600 --> 00:59:49,600
We are now at a late stage capitalism structure where we're not only seeing the efficiencies that are produced by capitalism as as an operating system, but reinforced as you point out by Technical Systems, but we're doing it in a environment to sort of Riff Off of Cerritos point where we're not actually dealing with bounded nation state structures, and I've noticed you're not screaming to tear down late-stage capitalism and maybe a

399
00:59:49,900 --> 00:59:59,800
I know you but part of it is how do we actually think about the boundary work of nation state structures and the evolutions of late-stage capitalism.

400
01:00:00,000 --> 01:00:04,000
Something that can actually grapple with this so that it doesn't just keep slipping in evolving.

401
01:00:06,900 --> 01:00:14,000
Two things popped in my head the last week or so one is thinking multinationals have figured this out in some ways.

402
01:00:14,000 --> 01:00:34,800
They know how to cash flow and so to take at face value that multinationals generating quite a bit of wealth internationally and circulating it internationally can't figure out how to circulate and distribute the value seems hell.

403
01:00:34,800 --> 01:00:40,600
No. No, they should not govern know it is the say there's clearly a way to exchange money.

404
01:00:40,700 --> 01:00:48,700
Globally. I'll just I'll say it flatly like that and that means in terms of governing the revenue generated the redistribution of it.

405
01:00:48,700 --> 01:00:50,500
That is a global conversation.

406
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:56,700
We know that multinationals are regulated in a specific company or in specific countries start there.

407
01:00:57,600 --> 01:01:05,200
So make the United States make the EU the Battleground for saying new classification.

408
01:01:05,700 --> 01:01:08,400
Everybody gets Basics go from there.

409
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:29,200
I think it's for me very frustrating and realize how many large companies and we're pretty much in a monopolistic, you know World here how many of the large companies that have merged and acquired each other have been able to stay on the sidelines of a conversation around Universal Health Care in the United States that makes no sense.

410
01:01:29,300 --> 01:01:41,600
And it should be on everybody's mind to be advocating to these companies and it can't be about just advocacy but certainly making the case why are you on the sidelines you benefit from being able to see this healthy Workforce?

411
01:01:41,600 --> 01:01:57,000
And in fact one way to think about this as Supply chains and good work codes for Enterprises to say there should be a call for regulation that if you are hiring a vendor you should make sure that vendor provides.

412
01:01:57,100 --> 01:02:01,800
Of care just as you are required or at least benefiting from providing Health Care.

413
01:02:02,000 --> 01:02:44,100
There's a business case there can it happen without regulation know we all need to say this is ridiculous that we don't provide basic Healthcare and I would I would just keep making that case but the second thing that came to mind is that it really is on all of us to stop letting liberal and neoliberal economics to find the value of Labor to call Labor and Marketplace and not see the moralism within that like, I I'm just going to spell this out just plainly we have allowed people in Elite positions both government and private Enterprise to say that our labor is the same kind of capital as a set of Records or a car.

414
01:02:44,700 --> 01:02:48,100
We're not durable goods labor means something else.

415
01:02:48,300 --> 01:02:52,800
So let's stop assuming that the marketplace sets the value of our labor.

416
01:02:53,600 --> 01:02:56,500
My salary is not coming from some magically.

417
01:02:57,100 --> 01:02:59,900
Earned value of me on a Marketplace.

418
01:03:00,000 --> 01:03:01,300
It's coming from Power.

419
01:03:02,200 --> 01:03:11,100
I have a particular kind of power and privilege to command a price and that is that as a set of irrational power moves.

420
01:03:11,100 --> 01:03:13,800
It's not the logic of the market playing out.

421
01:03:13,900 --> 01:03:16,700
So I just I really want us all to start questioning.

422
01:03:16,900 --> 01:03:19,100
There should be no turn to the market.

423
01:03:19,100 --> 01:03:22,200
What is the market paying for this task?

424
01:03:22,600 --> 01:03:32,200
It should be Baseline labor divert deserves support because we need healthy workers to move the world forward.

425
01:03:32,300 --> 01:03:37,600
I'm a pragmatist. That's why I'm not that interested in blowing up capitalism writ large.

426
01:03:38,200 --> 01:03:46,600
I don't know you could probably get me there Dana but there are alternative versions of marketplaces like Cooperative marketplaces marketplaces.

427
01:03:46,600 --> 01:03:56,900
We haven't even imagined yet because we haven't let ourselves think that the market can't set the value of us nor should it and that's why that lineage

428
01:03:57,100 --> 01:04:03,500
It was slavery. Why would we have ever imagined that the market or a market should Define the value of humans?

429
01:04:04,200 --> 01:04:12,600
Let's stop that and and and set a Baseline and then go from there perks sure you get perks if you're an extra good worker.

430
01:04:15,300 --> 01:04:15,800
Yeah.

431
01:04:18,300 --> 01:04:20,900
Last question one more of those.

432
01:04:22,800 --> 01:04:24,600
I think I might have a simple question.

433
01:04:24,600 --> 01:04:42,600
But I'm I'm sort of thinking as you've been talking about people's power and how we might choose a baseline that might be a retainer or some sort of work for all do you think that that might be really difficult as more and more people are doing labor unwittingly.

434
01:04:42,700 --> 01:04:51,500
Like for example people like Google uses verification to make sure you're not a robot and we're like great.

435
01:04:51,500 --> 01:04:59,200
That's great. I want to improve on human but you're actually doing work for for that you're doing that task and you don't know that you're doing it.

436
01:04:59,200 --> 01:05:07,800
So do you think that like Hulu or subscription services are going to start making people do work in order to watch a video and because they want to watch it.

437
01:05:07,800 --> 01:05:11,000
They're going to do work like in these microtransactions.

438
01:05:11,000 --> 01:05:18,000
Do you see that maybe killing the labor force to because all the works going to be spread out to everyone that are very willing to like

439
01:05:18,100 --> 01:05:19,900
Watch their content to do it.

440
01:05:22,300 --> 01:05:34,600
Really optimistic reasons that I think that won't happen one is that when because when people become more aware that when you check that, I'm not a robot that you're actually doing work for a company that makes a lot of money and doesn't actually make your service better.

441
01:05:34,700 --> 01:05:53,500
We should all be saying he'll know and and it's not that we're going to walk away from it because we're all enjoying those Services is that we're all going to become publicly aware that that you are having your time taken you are having your time taken without your permission.

442
01:05:53,900 --> 01:05:56,400
That should never be. Okay, right.

443
01:05:56,400 --> 01:06:04,100
So one one answer to your question is we absolutely have to have more public awareness of the sheer robbery of our time.

444
01:06:04,400 --> 01:06:05,600
That's that's happening.

445
01:06:05,900 --> 01:06:08,100
We make pains the second response to your question.

446
01:06:08,100 --> 01:06:12,200
We make pains in the book to distinguish between paid labor and unpaid labor.

447
01:06:12,300 --> 01:06:17,600
And the reason to focus on paid labor is precisely say that is a different relationship.

448
01:06:18,200 --> 01:06:22,100
It is a social or it's not a charity when you get a job from somebody.

449
01:06:22,200 --> 01:06:23,700
You are providing value.

450
01:06:23,700 --> 01:06:33,900
It's a business transaction be cold about it so that we can start living our lives and stop having work Define who we are right?

451
01:06:33,900 --> 01:06:41,400
Like this is Kathy weeks is one of my favorites on this like, why are we not fighting for the end of work rather than for a 40-hour workweek?

452
01:06:41,400 --> 01:06:43,300
Hell no, right.

453
01:06:43,300 --> 01:06:53,000
So let's go there and I think the beginning of it is with an awareness of when we are giving away our and actually I think that's the wrong framing when our time is being taken from us.

454
01:06:53,700 --> 01:07:03,000
Let's stop saying we're giving it away because our time is being taken from us without her permission and we have to we have to say that's not okay.

455
01:07:04,200 --> 01:07:05,300
That's the first part.

456
01:07:07,400 --> 01:07:08,600
Okay last question.

457
01:07:15,400 --> 01:07:17,100
Thank you guys. This is just great.

458
01:07:17,200 --> 01:07:46,200
So I wanted to ask about I'm looking at the cover of the book and intensely wondering who is this person and and it but it brings back the question the topic of the visibility of people doing this work and their their relative invisibility and I wondered if you could talk about that and talk about why or how that visibility might be important to the bigger equation of change that you imagine.

459
01:07:49,700 --> 01:08:02,700
There's not a day that goes by that somebody doesn't tell me about their lift or their Uber driver when I talk about this book and so there's clearly something poignant and and pressing for people when the person that they're worried about.

460
01:08:02,700 --> 01:08:04,000
Is it right in front of them?

461
01:08:04,100 --> 01:08:11,700
I mean and that's a good thing and I think in some ways let's tactically deploy that if you're an organizer, I do think we care.

462
01:08:11,800 --> 01:08:13,500
I mean, I know I'm a roll.

463
01:08:13,700 --> 01:08:18,500
Was Optimist I think when we see someone in pain we want to relieve it.

464
01:08:18,700 --> 01:08:20,200
Usually we save that for people.

465
01:08:20,200 --> 01:08:23,000
We love the most but bar impulses there.

466
01:08:23,399 --> 01:08:40,500
And so I want to believe that by raising visibility by seeing the people who do this work, but it changes what we want for them the you could just be crass and cynical and say this could be you so don't you want to change your circumstances will absolutely be someone in your life.

467
01:08:40,899 --> 01:08:42,600
Do you want to see their life better?

468
01:08:42,899 --> 01:08:44,300
So I think it is for me.

469
01:08:44,300 --> 01:08:49,300
It's funny you raised that that the cover was actually really I was uncomfortable with that cover.

470
01:08:49,500 --> 01:08:51,000
I found it sensationalistic.

471
01:08:51,000 --> 01:08:52,300
I'll just say this. I love my process.

472
01:08:52,300 --> 01:09:00,000
I don't know if they're here right now. Clearly what they wanted was to get this book and people's hands and they wanted something that people might reach for

473
01:09:01,000 --> 01:09:03,300
And it might have that effect.

474
01:09:03,300 --> 01:09:06,300
I hope it does that was their reason for me.

475
01:09:06,300 --> 01:09:10,600
I'm now on this mission to find out who is he, you know, and I'll get back to you.

476
01:09:10,600 --> 01:09:13,600
I'll post something I'll find out who he is.

477
01:09:15,600 --> 01:09:21,700
Yeah, and that is actually a really complicated question because of the end of the day for the people.

478
01:09:21,700 --> 01:09:28,300
I interviewed there folks doing their jobs living their lives and they're not particularly interested in actually for the folks.

479
01:09:28,300 --> 01:09:31,100
I've asked you want to be on any of the TV shows.

480
01:09:31,100 --> 01:09:43,100
I might be on and the first thing they say is no and the second thing they'll say is I don't have time and the third thing they'll say is I don't want to be seen as one of those people who's a victim.

481
01:09:43,800 --> 01:10:00,600
So what I don't really appreciate as most of the coverage out there frames the people who do this work as victims or dupes or unaware of their circumstances the people doing this work are painfully aware of their circumstances.

482
01:10:01,100 --> 01:10:03,100
And we would do Best by listening to them.

483
01:10:03,600 --> 01:10:06,000
I think we could just listen rather than need to see them.

484
01:10:06,200 --> 01:10:11,100
This isn't really about making you see everybody who's had a hand in making your social media palatable.

485
01:10:11,400 --> 01:10:15,800
It's about knowing there are people who are helping you and they are working.

486
01:10:15,900 --> 01:10:17,100
So how do we support them?

487
01:10:19,700 --> 01:10:22,800
Thank you very much by the book so over here.

488
01:10:23,800 --> 01:10:24,700
Thank you Dean.