Phoebe Moore - Augmented Exploitation

Augmented Exploitation

Wildcat: Workers Movements and Global Capitalism

Series Editors:

Immanuel Ness (City University of New York)

Peter Cole (Western Illinois University)

Raquel Varela (Instituto de Histria Contempornea [IHC] of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon New University)

Tim Pringle (SOAS, University of London)

Also available:

The Cost of Free Shipping:

Amazon in the Global Economy

Edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese

Choke Points:

Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain

Edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness

Dying for an iPhone:

Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of Chinas Workers

Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai

Just Work?

Migrant Workers Struggles Today

Edited by Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo

Wobblies of the World:

A Global History of the IWW

Edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer

Organizing Insurgency:

Workers Movements in the Global South

Immanuel Ness

Southern Insurgency:

The Coming of the Global Working Class

Immanuel Ness

Amakomiti:

Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Trevor Ngwane

Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives

Edited by Robert Ovetz

The Spirit of Marikana:

The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa

Luke Sinwell with Siphiwe Mbatha

Solidarity:

Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights

Steve Striffler

Working the Phones:

Control and Resistance in Call Centres

Jamie Woodcock

Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

Edited by Phoebe V. Moore
and Jamie Woodcock

First published 2021 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Phoebe V. Moore and Jamie Woodcock 2021

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4350 1 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4349 5 Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4353 2 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 0 7453 4352 5 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 0 7453 4351 8 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Workers movements are a common and recurring feature in contemporary capitalism. The same militancy that inspired the mass labour movements of the twentieth century continues to define worker struggles that proliferate throughout the world today.

For more than a century, labour unions have mobilised to represent the political-economic interests of workers by uncovering the abuses of capitalism, establishing wage standards, improving oppressive working conditions, and bargaining with employers and the state. Since the 1970s, organised labour has declined in size and influence as the global power and influence of capital has expanded dramatically. The world over, existing unions are in a condition of fracture and turbulence in response to neoliberalism, financialisation, and the reappearance of rapacious forms of imperialism. New and modernised unions are adapting to conditions and creating a class-conscious workers movement rooted in militancy and solidarity. Ironically, while the power of organised labour contracts, working-class militancy and resistance persists and is growing in the Global South.

Wildcat publishes ambitious and innovative works on the history and political economy of workers movements and is a forum for debate on pivotal movements and labour struggles. The series applies a broad definition of the labour movement to include workers in and out of unions, and seeks works that examine proletarianisation and class formation; mass production; gender, affective and reproductive labour; imperialism and workers; syndicalism and independent unions, and labour and Leftist social and political movements.

Jamie Woodcock and Phoebe V. Moore would like to thank the organisers of the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) 2019 in Vienna for accepting our stream on artificial intelligence and work. The contributors to this book presented in the stream, and we would like to acknowledge all of their efforts and contributions. A big thanks to David Shulman at Pluto for supporting the book idea, as well as to Robert Webb for guiding it through production. Each of the authors of the book were a pleasure to work with, particularly through the challenges of collecting final versions and changes through the Covid-19 pandemic.

When writing about work it is important to remember that there are already many people who keenly feel the effects of new technology in both recognised and unseen work. We therefore dedicate this book to all those workers finding new ways to make, fake, or break technology at work.

Phoebe V. Moore: I would like to acknowledge my mother Aureol for her steadfast support, and my father, Tom, for the same, over many years from PhD until now. My four brothers likewise, are continuously in my thoughts. I would also like to acknowledge Jamie Woodcock for being a very good co-organiser and co-editor.

Jamie Woodcock: I would like to thank my partner Lydia for her support throughout this project. I would also like to thank Phoebe V. Moore, both for coming up with the idea of an edited collection and for being a great collaborator and editor to work with.

Technology has shaped and reshaped work in various ways throughout history. Digital technology is continuing to create widespread change across different kinds of work, a process that is set to intensify with the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. So far, there has been documented use of AI in the hiring, managing and firing of workers. Less understood are the effects of this on the labour process, workers and managers more broadly. Although platform work uses AI extensively to plan, manage and control workers, there is limited empirical research on how these processes operate in practice.

There are two main problems with how AI and automation are discussed today. The first is a sense that they are somehow new and unprecedented interventions into the labour process. Historically, the machine is an attempt to automate part of the labour process, increasing the amount produced by a worker. It has a significantly longer history than self-driving cars or automated warehouse pickers. This leads us to the second problem: there is often a binary understanding of automation, either something will be automated or not. This leads to a focus on the machine how effective is the new self-driving vehicle, for example rather than looking at how automation is actually affecting work and workers. Rather than an either/ or, automation is used much more as an