AI must be addressed as a labor issue, and workers should be part of decision-making in AI policy. Moving beyond common AI tropes and assumptions of mass job displacement, we seek a deeper understanding of how AI is reshaping the value of work, workplace conditions, underlying business models and ultimately, power relations.
Labor Futures
We interrogate how technology is disrupting, destabilizing, and transforming many aspects of work and employment.
Team Members
About
Public debates about “the future of work” are often shaped by hype cycles and industry-driven narratives about the inevitability of tech innovation. Yet these narratives can obscure — or outright dismiss — how technologies impact workers, sidelining and disempowering them and further entrenching racial, gender, and economic oppression.
Our work challenges the assumption that workers are merely passive recipients of technology, and that automation is the solution to a wide range of complex social and economic problems. Through rigorous empirical research and targeted engagement with stakeholders and decision-makers, we aim to create opportunities and levers for workers to shape the technologies that impact their everyday lives. We investigate critical labor topics to shift narratives, expand debate, and inform policy and practice.
Over the years, our work has explored the role of digital worker surveillance and algorithmic inequality, how the tech industry and corporate power are reshaping the economic and political landscapes of labor, and how precarious gig platform models erode labor rights and workplace standards. Today, we focus our attention on applied research, and are pursuing new research on rapid developments in AI and its impact on labor. We are also introducing research that complicates conversations about the future of work by examining issues at the intersection of labor, race, and technology.
Recent Work
Mentions and Press
All Work
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Longform
Centre for Media, Technology and DemocracyIn the wake of the 2020 global pandemic, governments and corporations worldwide are adopting unprecedented data-gathering practices to stop the spread of COVID-19 and transition to safer and more economically stable futures. This series examines how public and private actors are using pandemic response technologies to capitalize on this extraordinary moment. Read on Centre for Media, Technology and DemocracyOctober 2020 -
Longform
People + Strategy JournalHR leaders need to understand that increased monitoring of employees can lead to long-term consequences and misuse. Read on People + Strategy JournalJune 2020 -
Longform
Data for ProgressThis memo serves as a primer on the ways in which displacement has impacted workers in the past to draw lessons for a Green New Deal. Read on Data for ProgressDecember 2019 -
Longform
SlateD&S Researcher Madeleine Clare Elish considers the possibility of a full-on replacement of humans by robots. She argues that this scenario is nowhere near as close as we have been led to believe. Though algorithms can do an... Read on SlateFebruary 2016 -
Longform
Pacific StandardD&S fellow Karen Levy published an essay on measurement in Pacific Standard's The Future of Work and Workers series: As data analytics and monitoring technologies come to be used in more and more workplaces, we must be att... Read on Pacific StandardAugust 2015 -
Longform
QuartzData & Society's Intelligence and Autonomy initiative commissioned authors to envision future scenarios for intelligent systems in four domains: medicine, labor, urban design, and warfare. The future scenario around labo... Read on QuartzJuly 2015