Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming--one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. 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, on-demand piecework: flagging X rated content, proofreading, transcribing audio, confirming identities, captioning video, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this ghost economy, and that number is growing. 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 workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity--rather than misery--for those who do it.

About the Author :
Will Damron has won several Earphones Awards and been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. He has had acting roles off-Broadway and on stage and screen throughout the country. Mary L. Gray is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. She maintains a faculty position in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and the Media School, at Indiana University. Mary's research looks at how technology access, material conditions, and everyday uses of technologies transform people's lives. Her books include In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth, Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies, a Choice Academic Title for 2016, and Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, which explored how young people in the rural United States use the Internet to craft their identities, local belonging, and connections to broader queer communities. Mary is one of the world's experts in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research methods at the intersections of computer and social sciences. She sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society. Mary also writes for and has been covered by popular press venues, including the Harvard Business Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Nature, the Economist, and Forbes Magazine. She served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and was the Program Chair for the Association's 113th Annual Meeting. Mary currently sits on the Executive Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) and Stanford University's One-Hundred-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) Standing Committee, commissioned to reflect on the future of AI and recommend directions for its policy implications. Siddharth Suri is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research AI and was a founding member of Microsoft Research New York City. Prior to that, he was a member of the Human and Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research.