SEGNAPOSTO
COPERTINA
UTOPIE
Unboxing AI
Edited by Elinor Wahal
with the Preface of
Antonio Casilli
Unboxing AI
Edited by Elinor Wahal
with the Preface of Antonio Casilli
© 202 Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli
Viale Pasubio 5, 20154 Milano (MI)
www.fondazionefeltrinelli.it
ISBN
Prima edizione digitale luglio 2021
Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Nessuna parte di questo volume può essere riprodotta, memorizzata
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da Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
This volume represents the editorial output of the conferences “Unboxing AI” organized by Fondazione Feltrinelli in collaboration with ENDL (European Network on Digital Labor), Independent
Social Research Foundation and Nexa Center for Internet & Society (Politecnico di Torino).
The Text
Over the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has steadily surged in
popularity, with AI solutions being increasingly adopted in a wide
range of industries. AI’s rapid technological advancements have also
prompted the enthusiasm of many consumers: for instance, during
2019 the unit sales of voice assistants like Google home and Amazon
Alexa increased by 70% compared to the previous year.
Concomitantly, there is a growing fear over smart technologies’
negative impact on societies, with mainstream media routinely
discussing security risks, job displacement, and algorithmic
discrimination. This contrast has sparked scholars’ interest in the
economic conditions, the political tensions, and even the
philosophical assumptions underlying intelligent technologies.
From Amazon fulfillment centers to cyber-automation and data
colonialism, this volume sheds light on the bodies at work in AI,
providing a variety of approaches to the study of AI and its social,
economic, and ethical implications.
V
Table of Contents
Preface
Antonio Casilli
Chapter 1
Understanding Artificial Intelligence
Elinor Wahal
References
Chapter 2
Moderating the world in a global pandemic
In conversation with Professor Sarah Roberts
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Transcribed by: Hong Yu Liu (University of Cambridge)
1. The linkage between commercial content moderation
and artificial intelligence
2. Different types of commercial content moderation
3. The impact of COVID-19 on commercial content moderation
4. The contribution of her book to the scholarship
of information and labour studies
Conclusions
1
5
11
13
14
15
16
17
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PART 1 - MATERIALITY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Chapter 3
Boxing AI at Amazon Fulfillment Centers
Alessandro Delfanti (University of Toronto)
and Julian Posada (University of Toronto)
1. Machinic Dispossession
2. Amazon Patents
3. Conclusions
References
Chapter 4
Digital Materialism and Cyber-automation
Baruch Gottlieb (University of Arts, Berlin)
and Maxime Cornet (Institut Polytechnique de Paris)
1. Digital materialism and AI
2. Socially Necessary Discipline and Civil Freedom
3. AI, Automation and Labor
4. Conclusions
References
Chapter 5
Digital Surplus: Three Challenges for Digital Labor Theory
Andrea Miconi (IULM) and Marco Marrone (University of Bologna)
1. The rise of free labour
2. Big data at its hype
3. Will everything be platformized?
References
Chapter 6
AI from the perspective of Data Colonialism:
How data is (and isn’t) the new oil
Nick Couldry (The London School of Economics
and Political Science), Ulises A. Mejias (State University
of New York), & Gabriel Pereira (Aarhus University)
1. Returning to colonialism to understand data
2. What is gained from understanding data colonialism?
3. Data Relations and the Xs of Data Colonialism
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34
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39
40
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44
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48
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4. How to decolonize data: The coming resistance
References
57
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PART 2 - AI AND THE HUMAN BODY
Chapter 7
Mediating the human body in AI creation.
Communication, the body, and AI
Leopoldina Fortunati (University of Udine)
and Cristina Voto (University of Torino / Universidad
Nacional de Tres de Febrero)
1. Mediating the human body
2. From body mediation to robotization: outcomes and consequences
3. Conclusion
References
Chapter 8
Seeing like a platform: caring democracies in the digital age
Vicky Kluzik (Goethe University Frankfurt)
1. New assemblages in the city? Situating platformisation
2. Care as a commodity?
3. Platformisation of work and life: the platformisation of care
4. Conclusion
References
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PART 3 - AI AND THE PRESENT OF WORK
Chapter 9
Sociality entangled. Freelance creative labour and digital networking
Lou Bradner (Sapienza University of Rome)
Introduction
1. Background: Social capital on digital platforms
2. The curated intimacy of digital networking
3. The idealistic rejection of social media
4. Discussion
References
83
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86
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89
91
Chapter 10
Digital Patronage
Idil Galip (University of Edinburgh)
1. Patronage
2. Meme creators as social entrepreneurs
3. Digital patronage platforms
4. Digital labour and patronage relationships
References
93
94
95
96
98
99
Chapter 11
Industrial Robotics and Changing Occupational Structures across Europe 101
Saverio Minardi (University of Trento),
Paolo Barbieri (University of Trento)
& Giorgio Cutuli (University of Trento)
1. Technology and occupational structure
102
2. Technology and institutions
103
3. Method
104
4. Results
105
References
107
Chapter 12
Data Workers in India: A Case for Labour Standards
in the Governance of Data and Artificial Intelligence
Kai-Hsin Hung (HEC Montreal)
1. Demystifying the Spectacle of Innovation
2. The Demand for High-Quality Training Data: Its Global
Value Chain and Production
3. A Profile of Human Data Workers
4. Working Realities in Data Processing in Rural India
5. Labour Rights and Governance Across the Global Data Value Chain
References
Chapter 13
Automation and Artificial Intelligence at work:
the growth in precariousness
Janine Berg (ILO), Clément Le Ludec (Institut Polytechnique de Paris)
1. The expansion of employment’s peripheries
2. From fissurization of work to virtual outsourcing
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120
124
125
126
3. Covid-19 and the great working from home experiment
4. Technology at work and job quality
5. Regulatory pathways
Conclusion
References
127
128
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132
Acknowledgments
135
The Authors
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Unboxing AI
Preface
Antonio Casilli
Since the beginning of the 21st century, artificial intelligence has become a “black box ideology”. The meaning of this expression is twofold. On the one hand, it designates an ideology of black box science
which promotes approaches such as deep learning and data intensive
models that adversely affect the transparency and accountability of
techno-political systems. On the other, it means that the ideology itself is a black box, insofar as its actual policy content and social consequences are largely unknown to its proponents.
When designing the Unboxing AI conference, our intention was to
change this state of affairs. Not by inviting our participants to think
outside of the box — as tech gurus and media commentators like to
say — but to unpack this cultural and technological construct that we
call automation, to list its components, to describe its inner workings. Although most of the current research exclusively focuses on
the consequences of AI on society and economy (job displacement, increased discrimination through algorithmic bias, security risks), there
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is growing interest in the economic conditions, the political tensions,
and even the philosophical assumptions underlying intelligent technologies.
Insights into these assumptions come from Dominio e sottomissione [Domination and submission], the last book of Italian philosopher
Remo Bodei. This 400-page strong tour de force through human technology and animal nature, globalization and colonialism, labour and
slavery posits a fundamental question about the Logos. The Greek notion designates both the philosophical Reason and the spiritual power
of the Word—the same that famously “was made flesh” in the Christian myth of incarnation and in other religions’ theophanies. What if
— Bodei asks — the Logos didn’t become flesh but rather machine to
dwell among us?
Today, this question hangs over much of the public discourse about
artificial intelligence. In the media, in the boardroom, and regrettably
even in the academe, the starting point of every other conversation
about algorithmic and data intensive technologies seems to be the assumption that contemporary machines are about to deliver on their
promise of transcendental salvation. They leverage the Logos and
give it back to us under the guise of smart objects, virtual assistants,
self-driving cars.
Sometimes, this naive belief morphs into a political program. Probably best articulated by computer science pioneer Edward Feigenbaum,
when he described artificial intelligence as the “manifest destiny, the
goal, the destination” both of our scientific research and of our societies.
“I hold no professional belief more strongly than this. (…) I learned
the term ‘manifest destiny’ when I studied American History as a
young student. In the early 19th century, when the small population of
the young United States extended only to the Appalachian Mountains
of the east, great visionaries like Thomas Jefferson imagined a USA
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Preface
that encompassed all territories to the far ocean at the continent’s
western edge. That vision, motivating generations of settlers and policy makers, was called the Manifest Destiny.”
Expansionism and providentialism go hand in hand. The USA setting
is emblematic, but it is not exclusively there that such belief has been
expressing itself. From China to India to Europe, it lays the blueprint
of major geopolitical ventures that favor specific groups of persons at
the detriment of others. Whether it reveals itself as AI “evangelism”,
as data “colonialism” or as digital platform “imperialism”, it proceeds
by erasing the actual bodies and lives of persons that stand in its way.
In Feigenbaum’s metaphor, the settlers did manage to homestead the
electronic frontier. But what happened to the natives? Sure, renowned
visionaries like Thomas Jefferson dreamt of expanding their plantations from Monticello to San Francisco. But, to paraphrase a popular
musical, “we know who’s really doing the planting”.
This explains why in this ebook, which contains on the proceedings of the conference Unboxing AI, Elinor Wahal has chosen to put a
definite emphasis on the bodies at work in AI. Not only to document
the presence of women and men behind the gleaming screens and the
flying drones that constitute the facade of automation, but above all
to provide evidence that intelligent technologies are deeply embedded
into social structures and material conditions of existence.
Thus, contributors to this ebook adopt a radically immanent stance
that consists in scraping the surface of AI as a “spiritual Word that was
made machine” to listen to the human voices embodied in the flesh of
tech workers working for big companies or startups, of blue collars
operating warehouses or delivery apps, of social media influencers or
data annotators, of parents juggling between house chores and telework. By anchoring artificial intelligence to human occupations and
their vicissitudes in a time of health and economic crisis this joint
INDL and Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli initiative aims to put
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the human back in the heart of today’s industrial and technological
systems.
4
Chapter 7
Mediating the human body in AI
creation. Communication, the body,
and AI
Leopoldina Fortunati (University of Udine) and
Cristina Voto (University of Torino / Universidad
Nacional de Tres de Febrero)
1. Mediating the human body
The beginning of this text can be situated in 2001, when a conference organized in Milan by a network of universities from Europe, the
United States, and Canada resulted in a publication titled Mediating
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the Human Body: Technology, Communication, and Fashion (2003). The
focus of that foundational event was the research for an interdisciplinary approach that is necessary in order to face the complex and
emerging phenomenon of the mediation of the human body throughout technology. Today, two decades after that conference, a technological approach towards the human body has continued to mark our
daily life, and three main fields of interaction can be recognized: 1)
medicine, 2) fashion, and 3) Information and Communications Technology (ICT), especially mobile technologies, with a general increasing attention to robotics.
1.1 Medicine, technology, and the human body
Medicine has always had the privilege to advance in the sacred reign
of the human body, because in the face of science and its promise of
survival, there is neither the resistance nor the courage to defend the
naturalness of the body. As a result, over the last twenty years, medicine has developed the tendency to constantly appeal to technology to
mediate its relationship with the human body.
A starting point for this first typology of human body mediation can
be found in the way in which technology has turned diagnostic tools
into physical robots or software systems, as in the case of IBM Watson
Health, a division of the company aimed at facilitating medical and
clinical research through the use of advanced information technology.
These technologies are in step with the questions that emerge from the
social-health context. Today, for instance, another system called Diagnostic Robotics has been designed to fight Coronavirus (COVID-19): it
is a medical triage and clinical prediction platform that uses Artificial
Intelligence to make healthcare systems more affordable and widely
available. Apart from that, medicine has also activated robots at the
therapeutic level: robots are being used in hospitals for welcoming or
providing information to people and for assisting healthcare work62
Mediating the human body in AI creation
ers. Among these therapeutic technologies, robots have been used to
improve the mood of hospitalized children and in therapy for people
with autism, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. Another field of application
is rehabilitation with the implementation of prostheses, where exoskeletons that can be created with computer-aided design and a 3-D
printer are utilized. This hybridization between the human body and
technology reactivates the issue of cyborgs (Haraway 1991), that mixture between flesh and plastic, metals, and ceramics, while posing the
following question: to what extent is it possible to call such a mixture
a human body as such? Finally, another test benchmark for mediating
the human body toward technology is robot-assisted surgery, as in the
case of the da Vinci Surgical System, which is designed to facilitate
surgery in several fields like Gynecology, Neurology, Urology, and Orthopedics with a minimally invasive approach controlled by a console.
1.2 Fashion, technology, and the human body
The approach to the human body through technology has always
meant to cope with aesthetics and fashion: these two aspects cover
and manage the widest area of the human body that mediates fundamental socio-cultural dimensions of our being in the world, such as the
presentation of the self, sense of beauty, etc. Technologies, moreover,
connect with fashion, contradicting the picture of the black box that
is frequently offered through appearance: mobile phones and computers are designed in order to match the taste and aesthetic needs of
the customer. Over the last twenty years, robotics has implemented
its entanglement between technologies and fashion in two separate
processes that need to converge in order to fertilize each other: first
of all, robotics has experimented on materials, and second, fashion
has experimented on the aesthetic appearance of robotics due to the
entrance of robotics into customers’ houses and the need for these
robots to be pleasant. For instance, Givenchy Robotics, a department
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of the French luxury fashion and perfume house, created fashionable
robots to stay inside the house with elegant appearances, something
that introduces a new question for understanding the encounter between fashion and robotics: do robots need to be dressed? Looking at
what the robotics market has to offer, the answer seems to be yes, as
suggested by the design of the three robots DORO (DOmestic Robot),
CORO (COndominium Robot), and ORO (Outdoor Robot), a group of
elegant domestic robots that help the elderly and were produced by
Robot-ERA, an international network for implementing easy-to-use
and acceptable robotic service systems. The entry of the robot into our
houses decreed the similarity between human and artificial agency.
1.3 Mobile technology and the human body
Mobile and information and communication technologies (ICT) may
be the most redundant type of technology that stays directly on the
human body, a novelty that brings many consequences with respect to
other remote technologies such as computers, TVs, or radios. The loss
of distance blurred the perception of alterity between human bodies
and mobile technologies, making the mediation deeper. Among these
technologies, the first object to be grabbed upon awakening and the
last to be set down before sleeping is the mobile phone, something
that always accompanies individuals. At the same time, it makes new
connections between the productive and the reproductive sphere, as
a consequence of the entry of work into people’s homes. The human
body hybridizes itself and its perceptions with all of the following
communication and portable technologies: laptops, iPods, smartwatches, and Google Glass. Thanks to these devices, the human body
expands its communication agency. The first outcome of this pervasive presence has been the mechanization of immaterial labour in the
domestic sphere. This strategic area has been completely reshaped:
thanks to mobile technologies, communication, education, entertain64
Mediating the human body in AI creation
ment, emotion, and sociality have been automated and redesigned by
platforms and software such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, forums of discussion, Meet, Zoom, Badoo, Meetic, Tinder, etc. This panorama seems to result in the implementation of uniform, undifferentiated, and homogeneous social behavior which, in the worst case, can
be more easily influenced, manipulated, and controlled. Furthermore,
the development of social automation in many fields such as emotion,
taste, dating, and conversation has produced a double and parallel
mechanism for which technologies are shaping and being reshaped
by people’s practices of use. However, with some insight, it is possible
to recognize that these mechanisms have also served to bring about
the acceptance of social robots by humankind, a process that consists
of two main motivations: the first is to reduce the power gained by
women at the communicative level through technology, and the second is the general need of the capitalist system to create a different
labour source.
2. From body mediation to robotization: outcomes and
consequences
The diffusion of ICTs in the domestic sphere has taken place in a particular, historical moment; it is occurring during a reshaping of gender
power relationships in the family and in the public sphere. Despite the
ebb of feminist movements, in the 90s, women were involved in many
social processes: the reshaping of gender power relationships within
the family to be more in their favor than in the past; the strengthening of their mastery and control over communication; the appropriation of communication in the public sphere; and also, the reshaping of
power relationships between generations inside the family (Fortunati
1998). In this particular moment, through the computer and the mobile phone, women’s strength in communication was downsized. This
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is one of the cases in technology in which women’s strength in communication was used against women.
The advancement and circulation of these technologies has brought
about two different scenarios: initially, women were less numerous
than men in both accessing, owning, and using ICTs. Male users took
control over communication and strengthened their control over information. However, subsequently, women have appropriated smartphones in particular.
The focus on the socio-cultural consequences of this diffusion also
opens up a series of problems concerning the need by the capitalist
system to create a different labour power with the following characteristics: mobility, which means that it is no longer sufficient for workers
to sell their work capacity (the capacity to move is the relevant point);
automatization and intimate interaction with machines; separation
from others, which makes the labour power more individualized and
less politicized thanks to more delocalized networks of relationships;
and the flexibility and capability to cope with alienation.
In the meantime, the human body has also inspired another specific
technology: robotics. Different from automata, robots do not aim to
refine the imitation of their inspiring entities but rather aim to imitate
human gestures and actions to replace the material capacity for work.
Furthermore, in the reproduction sphere, social robots aim to imitate
humans’ immaterial capacity of care. Today more than ever, robots
have begunto perform a large range of tasks and specially to communicate and talk back, as it is already possible to experiment with robots
in factories, chatbots in services, and artificial agents in people’s houses. There is a convergence between robotics and ICTs: today, mobile
phones are incubators of robotic interfaces, such as Siri and S-Voice.
This new horizon allows scholars like Sugiyama (2013) to talk of mobile
phones as quasi-robot, while Vincent, Taipale, Sapio, Lugano, and Fortunati (2015) argue that mobile phones are personalized social robots.
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Additionally, in socio-healthcare systems, we witness the slow colonization of robotics, facing a reduction in the amount of domestic
and care work by women with the relative decrease of the birth rate,
the increase in divorces and separations, the increase in people living
alone, etc. In the last decades, it is in the reproductive sector where the
most important cycles of struggle and behaviors of resistance against
capitalism have taken place, and from there, they have diffused into
factories and workplaces. Thus, the diffusion of robotization, in terms
of critiques of political economy, means the attempt to increase the
value production in the social and individual reproductive sphere, increase social discipline, and correspondingly, decrease the autonomy,
control, and knowledge of how to do things of the labour force.
The contemporary dynamics of the robot market have been marked
by COVID-19 in terms of a block of industrial robot sales in 2020, and
in the short run, a major contraction must be expected. In the medium
term, there will be a digitalization booster that will create growth opportunities for the robotics industry. In the long run, observers claim
that prospects will remain excellent for this sector. It is certain is that
this pandemic has forced societies to increase their mechanization.
3. Conclusion
The question we must pose in the face of these processes of information, automation, and robotization of societies is, once more, about the
model of the society we want to live in. With the current diffusion of
machines, do artificial agencies have to replace or to support human
work? The first idea is the logic applied in the industrial sector, and the
second has dominated in the reproduction sphere so far. However, is a
world where we can leave all the work to machines a desirable world?
Is a world in which our relationship with reality will be increasingly
mediated by machines a desirable world? Finally, is a world in which
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intelligent machines place the human body in the minority and make
humans feel incapable a desirable world?
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Cristina Voto