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The cover of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

Who are the hidden people doing the work that makes apps and artificial intelligence look automatic, and what would it take to treat them fairly?

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At a glance

Author
Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

Why read it

  • You will see that much of what looks like AI is people working behind the screen
  • You will be able to spot hidden labor in the apps and services you use every day
  • You will know what to look for in a platform that treats its workers well

Who it is for

  • An app user curious who moderates and sorts their feeds
  • A founder building a platform that relies on gig workers
  • A reader thinking about the future of work

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Ghosts in the Machine
  3. How Does Ghost Work Work?
  4. Robots Might Be Coming, but They Aren’t Here Yet
  5. Ghost Work and the Future of Employment
  6. Part I
  7. The Paradox of Automation’s Last Mile
  8. Humans in the Loop
  9. The Beginning of Ghost Work
  10. Using APIs to Hire People
  11. Ghost Work, Machine Learning, and the Rise of AI
  12. The Range of Ghost Work: From Micro-Tasks to Macro-Tasks
  13. Weaponized Ignorance
  14. From Piecework to Outsourcing:
  15. A Brief History of Automation’s Last Mile
  16. Part II
  17. Demanding Work
  18. Algorithmic Cruelty and the Hidden Costs of Ghost Work
  19. Indifferent Design and Its Unintended Consequences
  20. The Cost of Doing Business
  21. Ghost Work’s Hidden Pain Scale
  22. No Boss Is Perfect. Neither Is Code.
  23. Working Hard for (More Than) the Money
  24. Sizing Up the Options
  25. When Career Ladders Lost Their Rungs
  26. When Work Looks More Like a Book Club
  27. Fitting Work into Life Instead of Life into a Job
  28. It’s Not All Sunshine and Roses
  29. Part III
  30. Talking Back to Robots
  31. The Kindness of Strangers and the Power of Collaboration
  32. Introduction
  33. Collaborating to Reduce Transaction Costs
  34. Getting the Work Done
  35. Re-creating the Social Side of Work
  36. The Effects of Coordination
  37. Watercooler 2.0
  38. The Double Bottom Line
  39. Software, at Your Service!
  40. Double Bottom Line by Design
  41. The Range of Ghost Work Operating with a Double Bottom Line
  42. When Good Intentions and Better Design Are Not Enough
  43. Tragedy of the Commons
  44. Conclusion
  45. The Task at Hand
  46. Ghost Work Under Construction
  47. Learning from Ghost Work’s Past
  48. What We Can Do Next to Update Jobs for the Future of Work
  49. Technical Fixes for Social Change
  50. Social Fixes That Demand Technical Expertise
  51. Methods Appendix
  52. Connect with HMH on Social Media

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