While we hear plenty of gloomy predictions about how the adoption of AI technologies will take away millions of jobs in the future, it’s already gutting labor rights and alienating workers right now.
Alexandra Mateescu and Aiha Nguyen are two of the researchers behind a new report on this matter, “Last Place in the AI-First Economy: How the AI Industry Relies on Worker Disempowerment.” The report shows that workers are facing an increasingly hostile environment as AI not only risks taking away jobs directly, but also corresponds with an erosion in worker’s rights and protections.
Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher at the Labor Futures initiative at the Data and Society Research Institute, publishing work that focuses on issues like digital worker surveillance, algorithmic inequality, and harmful practices from the tech industry.
Aiha Nguyen is Alexandra’s colleague at the Labor Futures initiative and director of the program, piloting research on the relationship between technology and labor.
This episode is brought to you by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a Convergence Headwaters member. Their podcast, Direct Democracy Diaries, is available now wherever you get podcasts.
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Episode Guests
Alexandra is a researcher at the Labor Futures initiative at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she has produced in-depth qualitative research and public resources on issues around digital worker surveillance and algorithmic inequality, and how the tech industry and corporate power are reshaping the economic and political landscapes of labor, while eroding labor rights and workplace standards. Her past projects have explored domestic and care labor within the gig platform economy, automation in service industries and agriculture, worker data rights and resistance against data commodification, the intersections of state surveillance, disability, and criminalization within the US welfare systems, and impacts of AI for creative workers in the fashion industry. She is currently working on a multi-year collaborative project investigating workers’ relationships to AI across industries.
Aiha Nguyen is the Director of the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society Research Institute where she guides research and engagement at the intersection of technology and labor. Aiha have conducted research on workplace monitoring and algorithmic management including the resulting privacy concerns of workers and changing labor conditions. She has authored several studies including “The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance,” and coauthored “The Privacy Trap” and “Last Place in the AI First Economy: How the AI Industry Relies on Worker Disempowerment.” Most recently, Aiha is leading a multi-year inquiry into generative AI’s labor impacts which includes a series of public talks and publications including a primer and a framing document that weaves together the social, political and economic mechanisms that scaffold the AI economy.