Different this time and what can we do to ensure that the coming era of change leads to not just productivity growth, but some degree of shared prosperity. And our focus is on the labor market on how we make the labor market function while for as many workers as possible, but that is where we see this as the opportunity and also the challenge. The lesson if you read the report from just last week one of the things we say is coming and im kind of critical on this with a well functioning labor market is the foundation for tha healthy middle class and the political system and without the foundation of opportunity and prosperity it is difficult for other things to work well. So our focus is on making the work work and that is why it is such an honor to have mary here today from the Indiana University research talking about her book and here is a photograph and here is the actual person. Just to give you a tiny bit of background, the earlier work has been on the sort of communication and use of technology of young people and how they use technology and other means to establish identities and to identify one another and maintain anonymity. She was recruited by two microsoft researchers to work on projects and once the air, got interested in the question of how Artificial Intelligence was often kind of hidden inside of the machine and so you can see kind of a uniformity there and this is the intermediation between machines and people involved in identity is masked or not completely obvious to the participants involved. I read her book and i thought it was quite mind blowing. How many of you have heard about the recent distance one decision in california . I hope that comes up in q a. How many of you have ever received a 1099 or done contract work . Wonderful. How many of you have a friend that has used a ridesharing app . [laughter] so we all have a stake in the conversation arguably so what i want to talk about today is a definition that we came up with the term not to describe particular kinds of work but a set of mixed jobs to describe the reorganization of the dismantlement of fulltime employment. If you want to think of the conditions that are created with the opacity around workers contributions of ondemand wor work, so keep in mind you will never find the reference to ghost workers youll find references to ghost work and that was quite intentional. s of people use that term quite a bit. So whats the mechanism behind the work we are talking about . And what connects this type of fork to ride hailing absent other platforms you might be familiar with . By the early 2000s to realize they can take the mechanism to put out a call through the interface to execute a program to make that executable so they created a mechanism around data labeling and other kinds of tasks that were piecework but we will suggest this is just the beginning. But if anybody has a task they want to demand or have help with that they could be put on a platform to broker the relationship. In the abstract this is what is going on with this mechanism. So are there any projects that can be sourced, scheduled, managed, shd build through the application interface but hold on to that and think how much world of work that could develop if you apply that mechanism to the distribution of request for work and people being able to pick up the task. Thats what i want to suggest when we think of the framing of the future of work. Not automation even last year talking about the future of work like the second machine age and started thinking differently but to come to the floor with a framework so what is it . It is ghost work we need to stop it until it is built into everything that we do. And you are probably familiar with that category that we call the online or offline Platform Services they are using that same mechanism with the interface to put out a request for somebody to pick up the food and deliver it and the platform participates in that exchange by recording when the food is picked up and delivered to execute a payment that portion of the work is automated but the delivery but the value of somebody to deliver the food is the part of the equation we are not considering. More increasingly we are aware of that because we can see them but if i said content moderation nobody would know what i was talking about. So now you know that is a job the people do that is providing another Service Trading for Artificial Intelligence but they are performing an important service. We are focused on business startups with Business Services that are below the surface of anything you will see as a consumer and thats the world of work im talking about today. Its the world of usability testing perhaps to some of you in the room, many of these tasks do drive Artificial Intelligence to structure and most of you know what i mean when i say that but increasingly the number of jobs to say its actually quite hard to nail ai we will keep a person threaded into the Service Request tech space. If you go to a website in a little help window pops up its a mixture of school so thinking about that world with that point of reference there is continuity and then automation will come around. That might look like piecework with textiles to have manufacturing knock out a shirt but for quite some time over a decades yes automation made it possible for piecework to go away for some textiles but in other cases the reality of the paradox of the last mile that if its too sophisticated for the textile machinery to consume through automation than a person was kept around. Also in federal Contract Labor of the women who were made famous who could at the time be brought in to serve those computers that was a reference to the people and not the machines so when the demand for their services eventually disappear they could be let go. So there was less security but wasnt less valuable . So move forward for that work it was full time employment in off time often times they embodied those professions of white men of privilege who had a very specific role to play. Anybody else was expendable. So to continue the lineage by the sixties with the advancement of staffing and Temp Services i point you to the book on the temp economy quite literally brokered on the devaluing of womens labor as a resource now they are collegeeducated they made a great office girl but were also extendable so keeping that threat moving by the time you get to the eighties or two thousands with the off shoring of Office Service work it becomes harder to make the case people are doing something that could so easily be replaced is also being done by workers in the United States its a question of labor arbitrage just as anyone that is in the location generating the request for work. I often lament the settlement of the case against microsoft never resolve the question of what you do in a case of employment that is necessary for a period of time that is project driven if you need somebody with a specific expertise coding, coding, language, but you dont need them for more than 12 months or weeks or days. What ways do we have two value that worker . At the time we didnt have a category for that. So post 2000 in Silicon Valley so what happens effectively the. Com bubble burst but at that moment that we resolved and settled without case law it left questionable what to do with people who are not necessary to hold them for a career in what we came up in the settlement were a set of practices that treat Contract Labor through vendor Management Systems that often dont leave them with the protection beyond the contract of 12 months to say im employed in the benefits come with my employment. So think of the history we have drawn and it is an argument that in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection they assume the valuable work is the work that cannot be automated without much projection of one day could be a target of automation. So its built for Assembly Lines and professions that were to be beyond the touch of automation. That in the lives of Temp Staffing that has driven our Economic Activity globally as a growth of a Service Industr industry, that serves their request or needs more than to build something. And then the shift to information economy that involves a lot of people doing Information Service work yes it involves coding and other valuable skills with a great amount of training but think what it took to code a website in the two thousands if you had to hand code html now its completely done with software forgot that time we paid quite a bit of money to build peoples websites. My first work was 1099. Keep that in mind as you think about what can be automated , the Creative Work in the communication beyond automation that is the open question. What will constantly be on the horizon requiring human touch . So with that this is how we studied because as an anthropologist its hard to figure out where to dig in. We chose for businesses as the case study to identify groups of workers to show the inside of their black box. How did they organize, what does it look like and the company and with Artificial Intelligence there are two streams of work and in terms of framing, i hope you take a way to see this growing world of work is growing into different directions. The increo structure and analyze data. So take the radiologist that is not just one and done. You can do a great job to get Image Recognition with radiology but it seems like it will get rid of the radiologist now you just expand the market for people using radiology especially if you create mechanisms outside of the urban centers where people have never been able to get access now you create a market where other diagnostics will require an amount of expertise by a medical professional. Its not a doctor or a radiologist but a medical student or a new profession on the horizon. So that world of work to manage the information that we are collecting that will build Artificial Intelligence to take over the need for a human han hand, but then the second stream which is just as critical, human Information Services where we expect someone can answer my call 24 7 per gram of love it if none of us have that expectatio expectation. I would love to feel that but the reality is the number of Small Businesses want to offer a prompt with the medication and those kinds of cases they are not fulltime employment but project driven work. In the case of our study the two streams of work are analyzed companies with image tagging location verification we picked them because we thought they were easy to automate and it turns out they are not and that classification path is another example of that stream of work so we can remove human hands with moderation and that is a found one a fantastic boundary object its hard to get rid of people from the task. Why . Because not anything thats an obvious black or white its very difficult to automate. And if you have humans deliberating over hate speec speech, we debate that it such a clear example of how do you classify of intimate exchange . Content moderators are part of the solution to facilitate and identify whats going on in that moment. If you dont participate with social media there is that option. [laughter] so translation and captioning video. So this is a business this is a business serving other businesses with Economic Opportunities and activity. We chose the United States and india and you will notice some patterns in the workers based in india there is less obvious pattern in the United States looking for anyone who wants to look at the specific analysis of the data sets we have barely scratched the surface of the patterns and then thousands of interviews im sorry surveys and hundreds of interviews over 19 months fieldwork and then when you were in their life you can see the rhythm of their routines and how they get in and out of these markets. So doing the fieldwork it was an effort to figure out how to look at the largescale data they are producing to get that transactional data so we can see how many clients are requesting and how long they stick around. Do they change what kind of request they have i want to leave you with two findings from what is in the book and for me those are most pressing for the conversation we have. The first is like any open call, any environment where there is no obligation here and now commitment to you but if you would like to come in and do something come on in. Guess what happens. You end up with folks who are really in it, going to make this into a fulltime income stream they identified as enough money to make the rest of their economic reality manageable. Because youve got a percentage of people who will see value in saying i will turn to this work. Then you have another 20 saying im going to do this and a set amount of time, they have their reasons and i will get to that in a moment but they are the bench that when those 10 walk away when those kids are sick or need to do something else, you as a consumer will never know that the 10 who is really good at executing a task ever walked out. Because those regulars are there effectively making themselves available to be on demand to the consumer. Lastly and most importantly, this is a lesson that is really important to me in the wake of the california case, youve got a long trail of people experimenting with this labor market. They have a particular capacity or capability they are bringing to the table. Maybe they want to try codeing or practice a language and want to see if it is more interesting, economically more viable than i am doing today or can i mix it into the other things i am doing so if it makes any survey particularly the bureau of labor Statistics Survey really challenging but if you ask somebody in this world what is your first job and your second job they dont have an easy answer to that question but a different mental model for what they are doing and the pareto distribution of participation is creating emerging mental maps. When you have people, ask them what are you doing . They work a Silicon Valley startup or an entrepreneur which means they see themselves as a Small Business owner or they are selfemployed freelancers and dont always understand the difference between the last two statements, they were all on the same platform doing the same task. So how would you find out there work attitudes . How would they have different understandings of what they are doing . That is the core of what we need to talk about . What our people are asking when they participate in these labor markets was what need are they trying to meet that is not met in formal employment . We found several things but three kept coming up in all the interviews and survey work we did, watching them make decisions whether they stayed or left these markets, it was to control their time. Often they had other obligations or commitments, to control the project they worked on to have some sense of agency over what they were doing because they worked in an environment where they found that alienating and lastly they wanted to control the Work Environment and somebody asks what it means to allow people to make choices about who they work with and how it has up sides and downsides but in this case, seeing this is not a matter of flexibility. I recommend everybody stop talking about this environment of flexibility. It is about control. That says to me as an anthropologist there is an absence of capacity to control, diminishing of agencies to move into formal employment that meets other needs they have. In these cases people are effectively wrapping work around their lives instead of their lives around work. It is not nice to have especially women because they have other obligations that are demanding their time. When someone like carmela says this work allows her to live her ideal life she is not talking about translation and captioning work she is doing. That is not her ideal life. It is having enough income to support her desire to do dance choreography. It is important not to tell her she is wrong and get a comfortable job in her area which is service work which is the boom we have most Work Opportunities in the formal sector. It is working at retail. She didnt want to do that. She had an opportunity to do that and left it. It was more money and she left it because she found this more manageable. Where do we go from here . That is the rest of the conversation. A further chapter on that in the book. I want to tee up the pressing concerns when i am talking with labor organizers about what we have to contend with because the downside of a world of Contract Labor and independent worker environment is there is no center of gravity, no anchor for collective bargaining that has been the linchpin to advancing workers rights but also things like wages so i will put out there now if anybody is wondering if the market is going to fall, the wage situation for contract workers we need to remind ourselves the market never did. It was always intervention, society saying we want to work to look like this. We want to have these kinds of securities and benefits. We havent done that yet for contract work at all in the United States. It is an important point. Embarrassing to talk about this. The Key Takeaways we want to organize workers and help them to shift the debate around what their needs are, recognizing these labor markets there are never going to be on a single site. They are not going to have a single employer of record. They are not working with a unified professional identity that is so key, how do you organize if you dont see common cause . Person next to you doing this work because they are experimentalists.