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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Academic Article
SSRND&S Affiliates Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz examine the effectiveness of the law as a check on worker surveillance, given recent technological innovations. This law review article focuses on popular trend... Read on SSRNMarch 2016 -
Academic Article
Feminist Media StudiesIn this commentary, D&S fellow Karen Levy's considers the gendered dimensions of shifting cultures of work in response to the growing demands of the technologized/mediated workplace. She also explores the impact of new digi... Read on Feminist Media StudiesFebruary 2016 -
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 -
event
Data & SocietyOn September 9, 2015, the Data & Society Research Institute hosted Platformation, a one-day summit that brought together a diverse group of stakeholders for a multi-disciplinary discussion on platform-based labor. Participa... Read moreNovember 2015 -
op-ed
Pacific StandardD&S researcher Alex Rosenblat published an essay on remote management in Pacific Standard’s The Future of Work and Workers series: Rather than having managers who listen to them and deliver feedback, drivers are managed th... Read on Pacific StandardSeptember 2015 -
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 -
op-ed
Motherboard"Uber’s access to real-time information about where passengers and drivers are has helped make it one of the most efficient and useful apps produced by Silicon Valley in recent years. But if you open the app assuming you’ll get... Read on MotherboardJuly 2015 -
op-ed
Slate"Increasingly, what underlies the debate over the so-called sharing economy is a nascent, bigger battle about how society wants machines coordinating and governing human activity. These apps don't match and route people by hand... Read on SlateJuly 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 -
Resource
Data & SocietyThis primer explores historical employment discrimination, and investigates the growing use of public data, algorithms, surveillance, and outcome-oriented scoring systems within work environments. Read moreOctober 2014