Labour in the middle layer
Helen Beetham,
imperfect offerings,
Jul 21, 2023
"It's becoming clear," writes Helen Beetham, "just how much human work maintains the illusion of intelligence," and she provides a number of examples where this is the case. The article is worth reading just for these examples from Bloomberg and Fortune on human labeling, TechCrunch on Mechanical Turk workers outsourcing tasks, and Josh Dzeiza's investigation. "Automation is not an inevitable outcome," she writes. "It is a way of restructuring and disciplining future labour." Well - true and false. Both statements are literally true. But the restructuring of labour in this way does lead to (almost inevitable) automation. The labour involved is more like construction work that service work - the labour creates an artifact that endures after the labour is complete. And gradually, more and more of this construction work will be automated as well.
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