Aiha Nguyen

Aiha Nguyen leads Data & Society’s Labor Futures program, guiding research and engagement that interrogates how technology is disrupting, destabilizing, and transforming many aspects of work and employment. She has expanded the organization’s research on workplace monitoring and algorithmic management, disentangling the consequences of datafication on worker privacy and working conditions. With interests at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies, her research seeks to shift the debate toward community and worker-centered discussions and solutions. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers y The Privacy Trap: Privacy Preserving AI Technologies Mask the New Worker Surveillance and Datafication.

Currently, Aiha is leading a multi-year inquiry into generative AI’s labor impacts, which includes a series of public talks and publications including Last Place in the AI First Economy: How the AI Industry Relies on Worker Exploitation, intended to guide stakeholders in weaving together the various political and economic mechanisms that scaffold the AI economy.

Aiha has advised policy makers and institutions including members of Congress, state governments, municipal regulatory bodies, and the United Nations and European Union Commission. She has been quoted in publications including The Hill, WIRED, The Washington Post, NPR’s Marketplace, y El Guardián.

Aiha brings a practitioner’s perspective to this work, with over a decade of experience in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Previously, she worked at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), where she focused on raising work standards for service workers and addressing issues of food access, safety and security, and local governance. She holds a masters of arts in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.